History of Ghetto
Gate leads outside
the walled town of Theresienstadt
Americans normally think of a "ghetto"
as a section of a large city that is a rundown, dilapidated,
rat-infested slum inhabited by one ethnic group that has been
forced to live there because of discrimination or institutionalized
racism. In former times in Europe, "ghetto" was the
term for a walled section of a city where the Jews were forced,
according to the laws of the city, to live separately from the
Christians. Because of over-crowding and isolation, these ghettos
usually turned into slums. So when the Germans turned the town
of Theresienstadt into a Jewish ghetto in November 1941, this
was not by any means a Nazi innovation. Even before the word
ghetto came into use, and long before the Nazis came upon the
scene, the Jews were eventually segregated into a ghetto in almost
every city where they settled. Usually they were already living
in a separate part of the city, known as the Jewish quarter.
These segregated quarters became ghettos only after walls were
erected, a curfew for the Jews was established, and the Jews
were forced to wear distinctive clothing to instantly identify
themselves to non-Jews.
The word "ghetto" derives from
the name of an area of the city of Venice where the city's foundries
were located. In the Venetian dialect, a foundry was known as
a "geto" which meant a workshop or a factory. The word
"geto" was derived from the verb "gettare"
which means "to cast" as in to cast iron in a foundry.
After the Jews were expelled from Spain
in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, many of them settled in Venice.
In 1516, a city decree forced the Jews of Venice to live on a
small island with only two access points which were sealed off
at sunset. This island had previously been the area of the "gheto
nuovo" or new workshops.
However, even before the word ghetto
came into use, the Jews, particularly in Poland, were confined
to walled sections of the city where they lived. In 1492 the
Jews of Krakow in Poland were put into a walled-off section after
they were accused of setting fires in the city. There were no
walled Jewish ghettos in the Old Reich, as Germany proper was
called, during Hitler's regime. Hitler sent the German Jews to
the Lodz ghetto, located in what had formerly been Poland or
to Theresienstadt, located in what was formerly the country of
After the Nazis invaded Poland and then
occupied the country, they initially put the Polish Jews into
ghettos, using the excuse that had been used for centuries, that
the Jews were responsible for spreading disease. Later, these
ghettos became a convenient way to concentrate the Jews in one
location for eventual transport to the concentration camps for
extermination in Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish
On October 10, 1941, the Germans initially
decided to make Theresienstadt into a ghetto for selected Jews
in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and in the
Greater German Reich, which included Austria and part of western
Poland. The Jews who were to be sent to Theresienstadt included
those over 60 years old, World War I veterans, prominent people
such as artists or musicians, very important persons, the blind,
the deaf, and the inmates of the Jewish mental hospitals and
the Jewish orphanages.
The first Jews, who were brought to Theresienstadt
on November 24, 1941, were 342 men who were housed in the Sudeten
barracks on the west side of the old garrison, from where one
can see the Sudeten mountain range near the border between Germany
and the Czech Republic. This first transport, called the Aufbaukommando,
was brought there to prepare the 10 barracks buildings for the
rest of the Jews who would soon follow. On December 4, 1941 another
transport of 1,000 Jews who were to form the Jewish "self-government"
of the ghetto was sent to Theresienstadt. These two early transports
became known as AK1 and AK2.
A short time after the construction crews
had prepared the barracks, 7,000 Jews from Prague and Brno in
what is now the Czech Republic arrived in the ghetto; men and
women were put into separate barracks and they were not allowed
to mix with the townspeople. On Feb. 16, 1942, the 3,500 townspeople
were given notice that they had to evacuate the town by June
30th. At that time, the whole town was converted into a prison
camp for the Jews.
Even before the transports departed to
Theresienstadt, the Jewish Council of the Elders (Ältestenrat)
was appointed in Prague to do the ghetto administration. The
Nazis gave oral orders to the Council each day and the Jewish
"self-government" informed the prisoners of the order
of the day.
There were three Jewish Elders (Judenältester)
who served in turn as the head of the ghetto "self-government."
The first was Jakob Edelstein, who served as the ghetto Elder
from December 4, 1941 to November 27, 1943. He was arrested for
falsifying camps records and was sent to the Small Fortress across
the river from the ghetto. From there he was transferred to Auschwitz
where he was first put on trial in a Nazi court and was then
executed at the infamous "black wall" on June 20, 1944
after being forced to watch as his wife and son were being shot.
The second Jewish leader of Theresienstadt
was Dr. Paul Eppstein who was taken to the Small Fortress on
September 7, 1944 and immediately shot without the benefit of
a trial because he too disobeyed the orders of the Nazis. The
last Jewish leader of the ghetto was Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein,
who served from Sept. 7, 1944 until the end of the war. The ghetto
guards were 150 Czech policemen; there was also an unarmed Jewish
ghetto guard unit which helped to maintain order in the ghetto.
On the wall near the entry door to the Museum in the Magdeburg
building, there is a plaque which lauds the Jewish leaders in
the ghetto for their resistance against the Nazis, even though
it meant death for two of the Elders.
Plaque on wall of Museum
in honor of Jewish leaders who resisted the Nazis
By the time that the Nazis started deporting
the Jews from Germany, there were less than 200,000 of them left
in the country; all the others had already emigrated to escape
the Nazi persecution. Forty percent of the remaining Jews in
Germany were over 60 years old, as the children and young people
had been the first to leave. After Austria became part of the
Greater German Reich in March 1938, the Jews were forced to emigrate
to any country that would take them, and only 15,000 old people
were allowed to remain. All of these elderly Austrian Jews were
deported to Theresienstadt where their mortality rate was the
highest of all.
The first name that the Nazis gave to
the garrison town, which had been renamed Terezin by the Czechs,
was Theresienbad, which means Spa Theresien, implying that it
was a spa town where people could take mineral baths. Then the
name was changed to Reichsaltersheim, or State Old People's Home.
Some of the unsuspecting elderly Jews in Germany actually paid
for an apartment in the ghetto and signed contracts for housing,
food and medical treatment which was to be provided. They were
very disappointed when they got to Theresienstadt and learned
that it was nothing like the spa town or old folks home that
they were expecting and that they were not going to have luxury
accommodations, even though they had paid. Since they were too
old to work, their rations were less than the amount given to
the workers, and their mortality rate was extremely high.
Theresienstadt is frequently referred
to as the "Paradise Ghetto," although this was never
a name used by the Nazis. For most of its existence, the Theresienstadt
ghetto was called the Jewish Self Administration or Jüdische
Besides the ordinary people who were
sent to the Nazi concentration camps, there were also many well
known and prominent Jews, who were incarcerated along with the
others. In every camp where these prominent people were confined,
they were given privileged treatment and Theresienstadt was no
Important people, such as Rabbi Dr. Leo
Baeck of Berlin, whom the Nazis called "the Pope of the
Jews," were given private apartments in Theresienstadt.
The rest of the Jews were housed in large barrack rooms where
they were crowded together into three rows of triple decker wooden
bunk beds. As the ghetto filled up, the newcomers were forced
to live in attic space without heat, running water or toilets.
Each transport to the camp contained
around 1,000 Jews. Upon arrival, the Jews went through a checkpoint,
which was called die Schleuse, which means the lock as in a lock
on a canal. Here they were searched for items that were forbidden
in the camp. After that, the men and women were assigned to separate
barracks. The barracks were named after towns in Germany, for
example, the Dresden and Magdeburg barracks for the women, the
Hanover barracks for men and Hamburg barracks for women. The
Magdeburg barracks also housed the offices of the Jewish "self-government."
Gate into Dresden barracks
for women which has an inner courtyard
The first transport to be sent to the
east from Theresienstadt consisted of 2,000 Jews who were sent
to Riga on January 9, 1942 from the Bohusovice station. According
to Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert, all 2,000 were taken to
the nearby Rumbuli forest where they were shot. The most horrible
aspect of this is that the Jewish "self-government"
in the camp was initially in charge of selecting the people for
the transports, although they did not know what their fate would
be at that time. Unwittingly, they sent the young able-bodied
Jews to their deaths, thinking that they were sending workers
to labor camps in the east.
A total of 44,693 Jews from Theresienstadt
were sent to Auschwitz, where all but a few of them perished.
On September 8, 1943, a transport of 5,006 Czech Jews was sent
to Auschwitz where they were put into a "family camp"
which was liquidated six months later. There were 22,503 Jews
from Theresienstadt who were transported to unknown destinations
in the east.
In keeping with the stated policy at
the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, Hitler's plan was
to evacuate all the Jews to the east. Eight thousand were sent
from Theresienstadt to Treblinka and 1,000 to Sobibor, two death
camps that were right on the border between German occupied Poland
and the Soviet Union. Another 1,000 were transported from the
Theresienstadt ghetto to a concentration camp near the village
of Maly Trostenets, just outside of Minsk in what is now Belarus,
better known to Americans as White Russia. Two thousand Jews
from the ghetto were sent to Zamosc, 3,000 to Izbica and 3,000
to Lublin, all of which were cities near the eastern border of
Although the Theresienstadt ghetto was
originally supposed to be a home for elderly Jews, the Nazis
began including some of the older inmates in the transports to
the east after the camp population on September 18, 1942 had
reached 58,497, its highest number of prisoners. With such horrendous
overcrowding, the death toll was around 4,000 just for the month
of September in 1942 and most of the dead were elderly people.
Between September 19, 1942 and October 22, 1942, there were 11
transports carrying ghetto inmates from Theresienstadt to other
camps farther east in order to relieve the overcrowding.
In the northwest section of the old garrison
town, there is a building, called the Bauhof by the Nazis, that
was used in the ghetto for craft workshops. It is the yellow
building shown in the photograph below. To the right you can
see part of the old fortifications; the road shown in the photograph
goes through an opening in the fortifications here.
Bauhof where workshops
were located near Litomerice gate
According to the Ghetto Museum, in 1945
a homicidal gas chamber was built in a corridor of the town's
fortifications wall near the Litomerice gate, which is right
by the Bauhof building, shown in the photograph above. (Click
here to see a map
of the ghetto. The Bauhof building is number 14 on the map.)
According to Martin Gilbert, this gas chamber was never "activated."
The homicidal gas chamber is directly
across from the Jäger (Hunter) barracks, an identical building
on the opposite side of the town, which was used as a disinfection
station where the prisoners and their clothing were deloused.
The prisoners were disinfected by being completely submerged
in a tub containing a chemical which would kill the lice on their
bodies. At the same time, their clothing was disinfected by hot
steam, and they would have to put their clothes back on while
they were still wet and then return to their barracks. The oldest
inmates of the ghetto were housed in the Jäger barracks
so they wouldn't get chilled by walking through the cold in wet
clothes. Behind the Jäger barracks is the Südberg or
South Hill where a a soccer field was built for the inmates.
The ghetto inmates became aware of the
Theresienstadt homicidal gas chamber and were planning to blow
it up, but the war ended just in time to save the Theresienstadt
Jews from being gassed right in the ghetto. In October 1944,
the Jews at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) did manage to blow up one
of the homicidal gas chambers and shortly thereafter, Heinrich
Himmler is believed to have ordered the gassing operation to
be stopped. The gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were converted
into air raid shelters, since the Allies had begun bombing the
camp, after taking aerial photos which showed extensive munitions
The photograph below shows the fortifications
on either side of the Litomerice gate on the northwest side of
Theresienstadt. When Theresienstadt was a ghetto for the Jews,
this road was closed off and there was no traffic through the
The Litomerice gate
is an opening between the fortifications walls
There were rumors circulating in all
of the major Nazi concentration camps toward the end of the war
that Hitler had given the order for all the inmates to be killed
before the arrival of the Soviet or American soldiers. This was
believed to be the purpose for building a gas chamber at Theresienstadt
in 1945 at the tail end of the war. At Auschwitz, the inmates
were given the choice to stay in the camp, or to follow the Germans
on a death march to the camps in the west before the Soviet army
arrived. Very few stayed behind, except those who were too old
or too sick to walk, because the prisoners believed that they
would be killed if they stayed.
After April 20, 1945, there were 13,454
of these wretched survivors from Auschwitz and other camps who
poured into Theresienstadt. Some were housed in the Hamburg barracks,
right by the railroad tracks. The others were put into temporary
wooden barracks outside the ghetto, which were taken down soon
after the war. Some of the newcomers had been evacuated from
Buchenwald on April 5th just before the camp was liberated by
American troops on April 11, 1945. Before the Americans arrived,
Hitler himself had given the order to evacuate the Jews from
Buchenwald in an effort to prevent them from exacting revenge
on German citizens after they were freed. Some of them arrived
at Theresienstadt in terrible condition after they had been traveling
by train for two weeks without food. After the liberation of
Buchenwald, some of the prisoners, who had not been evacuated,
commandeered American army jeeps and weapons, then drove to the
nearby town of Weimar where, in an orgy of revenge, they looted
German homes and shot innocent civilians at random; this was
the type of thing that the Nazis were trying to prevent by evacuating
the concentration camps before they were liberated.
According to Holocaust survivor Ben Helfgott,
who was one of the prisoners brought to Theresienstadt in the
last days of the war, the inmates of the Theresienstadt ghetto
went on a rampage as soon as they were released. They looted
homes, beat to death an SS guard from the ghetto, and attacked
the ethnic Germans who were now homeless refugees, fleeing to
Germany, after being driven out of the Czech provinces of Bohemia
Some of the people who arrived from the
evacuated camps were former inmates of Theresienstadt who were
now returning. Others were Jews who had been in the eastern concentration
camps for years. On May 3, 1945, the ghetto was turned over to
the Red Cross by Commandant Karl Rahm.
According to Martin Gilbert in his book
"Holocaust Journey," Rahm told the Red Cross that he
had received orders from Berlin to kill all the inmates in the
ghetto before the Russians arrived, but he had disobeyed the
order. Because of this, Gilbert wrote, Rahm was allowed to leave
the camp unmolested on the day before the Russians arrived on
May 8, 1945. He was later captured and tried in a Special People's
Court in nearby Litomerice; he was held in the Small Fortress
until he was executed in 1947.
This page was last updated on December