The Theresienstadt Ghetto was established in the former Austrian bastion fortress of Terezín, which the Nazis transformed from the end of November 1941 into a place of concentration and subsequent deportation of the Jewish population.[2] Formally it was a ghetto, but in reality it was a concentration camp.[2] Part of the complex was also the so-called Small Fortress on the other side of the Ohře river, which had housed a Gestapo prison since 1939.[2]
Origin and establishment
Preparations for Terezín's new function began at the end of November 1941.[2] In the second half of January 1942, the Wannsee Conference took place, at which Reinhard Heydrich presented the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question.[2] On 16 February 1942, Heydrich issued a decree abolishing the municipality of Terezín as an independent town, and its 3,142 inhabitants were forced to move out by 30 June of the same year.[2] This officially made Terezín a Jewish ghetto.[2]
Who was deported to the ghetto
According to the plan, the ghetto was primarily meant to hold people over 65 years of age from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.[2] In reality, however, people of all ages passed through Terezín, including children, not only from the Protectorate but also from Germany, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Hungary.[2] Terezín functioned as a transit camp, from which prisoners were further deported to extermination camps in the east.[2]
Administration and operation
Events in the ghetto were determined by the German command post, which passed its orders on to the so-called Jewish self-administration.[2] Responsibility for selecting prisoners for further transports was thus also transferred to the self-administration.[2] Outwardly, Nazi propaganda, including toward Red Cross commissions, presented Terezín as a town that Hitler had given to the Jews.[2] This impression was reinforced by the simulation of ordinary life, which included the ghetto's own currency, although there was practically nothing one could buy with it.[2] In addition to German soldiers and Protectorate gendarmes, order in the ghetto was also supposed to be maintained by the so-called ghetto guard, a force made up of prisoners.[2] In 1943, probably in connection with the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans, fearing an uprising, reduced it to just a hundred men over the age of 45.[2]
Numbers and scale
From November 1941 to May 1945, a total of 139,654 prisoners were deported to Terezín.[2] Only 17,472 of them lived to see liberation.[2] 86,934 people were transported from Terezín to extermination camps.[2] In the ghetto itself, a total of 33,430 people died by 9 May 1945, and due to a widespread typhus epidemic, further prisoners died even after liberation.[2] Only 701 people managed to escape.[2]
Broader context
The establishment of the ghetto followed on from the persecution of the Jewish population in the Czech lands, which had been taking place since the occupation in March 1939 and even earlier.[1] According to the census of December 1930, 117,551 inhabitants of the Czech lands declared themselves to be of Jewish faith or nationality.[1] After the establishment of the Protectorate in March 1939, around 104,000 people of the Jewish faith lived on its territory, along with a further more than 14,000 people to whom the so-called Nuremberg Laws could be applied.[1] The Nazis initially tried to force these inhabitants to emigrate, and for this purpose the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established in Prague in July 1939 as the only body enabling legal emigration.[1] With the outbreak of the war, however, opportunities for emigration gradually narrowed.[1] The first mass transport of Protectorate Jews was the transport of 16 October 1941 to Łódź, of the thousand deportees in which only 24 survived the war.[1]
Sources
- Vojenský historický ústav Praha — 19 October 2021
- Vojenský historický ústav Praha — 19 October 2021