levo

Germany 1919–45

The Holocaust: ghettos, Barbarossa, Wannsee and genocide

  • 3 things to know
  • AS Unit 1

Overview

Ghettos of occupied Poland, conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and jewish councils.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Numbers

Name the main killing centres.

Key term

How did the conquest of Poland change the scale of the Jewish question for the regime?

Numbers

Describe the ghettos of occupied Poland.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How did the conquest of Poland change the scale of the Jewish question for the regime?

    Model answer

    Occupied Poland brought about two million Jews under German rule, far more than had ever lived in Germany, and emigration was no longer a possible answer.

  2. 2

    Describe the ghettos of occupied Poland.

    Model answer

    The Germans forced Polish Jews into sealed districts of the major cities from 1940, the largest at Łódź and Warsaw, where they were cut off from the outside world and used as forced labour.

  3. 3

    Describe conditions in the Warsaw ghetto.

    Model answer

    Some four hundred thousand people were confined behind a wall in a small fraction of the city on rations far below subsistence, and tens of thousands died of hunger and disease before the deportations began.

  4. 4

    What were the Jewish councils?

    Model answer

    The Germans made each ghetto appoint a Jewish council to administer it and carry out German orders, which forced Jewish leaders into impossible choices over labour and, later, over deportation lists.

  5. 5

    Identify the Einsatzgruppen.

    Model answer

    The Einsatzgruppen were special SS and police units that followed the army into the Soviet Union in 1941 to shoot Jews, communist officials and others behind the front line.

  6. 6

    How did the killing change after the invasion of the Soviet Union?

    Model answer

    Mass shooting of whole communities began within weeks of Barbarossa, and from August 1941 women and children were killed as well as men, so that perhaps a million people had been shot before the death camps opened.

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