1941 German-Polish Map of Warsaw, w/ Location of Jewish Ghetto

This is a scarce and haunting c. 1941 German-Polish map of Warsaw, prepared during the World War II (1939 - 1945) Nazi occupation. Although ostensibly produced to trace public transit routes, it highlights the city's Jewish Ghetto, the largest such area in Europe and a key site in the perpetration of the Holocaust.

A Closer Look

The map records Warsaw's neighborhoods, streets, parks, historic and cultural institutions, schools, railways (including suburban railways), and other features. Most of these use Polish names only (presumably due to space constraints), though some parks, major streets, and other major landmarks are named in both languages or German only. Numbered red lines trace the city's streetcar (Strassenbahnen / Tramwaje) and autobus network. Most significantly, the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto ('Jewish residential area,' Jüdisches wohnviertel, or 'Jewish quarter,' Dzielnica źydowska) is shaded in gold-colored overprint, evidently a later addition.

The Warsaw Ghetto

Warsaw faced bombardment from the opening hours of Germany's invasion on September 1, 1939, sustaining Luftwaffe raids nearly continuously. Within a week, the Germans were advancing on the city and captured it on October 1. About 10 percent of the city was already destroyed, including the Royal Palace. Polish politicians, intellectuals, and other potential resistance leaders, including Jews, in Warsaw were arrested and executed en masse by Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads. Many others were sent to concentration camps to work as forced laborers.

Roughly a year after capturing Warsaw, the Germans began to concentrate the city's Jewish population (nearly 400,000 before the war, increased to roughly 500,000 by refugees from elsewhere in Poland) into a 1.3 square mile area that became the Warsaw Ghetto, by far the largest established by the Nazis (the second largest was in Łódź, about one-third the size of the Warsaw Ghetto). The area was home to much of the city's Jewish population before the war. However, thousands were forcibly moved from elsewhere in Warsaw, while thousands of non-Jewish Poles were forcibly expelled from the Ghetto. (The cover mentions the relocation of a warehouse from the area to elsewhere in the 'Aryan' section of Warsaw.) The result was the odd, jagged boundaries of the Ghetto, which were soon reinforced with walls of increasing robustness, topped with barbed wire. Two unconnected parts of the Ghetto (the 'large Ghetto' in the north and 'small Ghetto' to the south) were linked over Chłodna Street (the continuation of Wolska Street here, labeled in German as 'Eisgrubenstrasse / An der Markthalle') at the intersection with Żelazna Street Eisenstrasse.

Packed in extremely cramped conditions with little food, medicine, or other essentials and subject to all manner of indignities at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators, the residents of the Ghetto suffered tremendously, and many thousands died from execution, disease, starvation, exposure to the elements, and other causes. However, most would die in the summer of 1942 in Grossaktion Warschau, the implementation of the 'Final Solution' in the city. This operation saw some 250,000 Polish Jews massed at the railyards just north of the Ghetto, sent in groups to the Treblinka extermination camp some 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, and killed soon after arrival. By the time the last groups of Jews were being assembled to be sent to Treblinka, news of the extermination camps had reached Warsaw, and the Ghetto's inhabitants decided to die fighting rather than in a gas chamber.

When, in January 1943, the Germans attempted another roundup of the remaining Jews (mostly those young enough to work or who were affiliated with the German-sponsored Judenrat administration), they ran into armed resistance and Jewish insurgents took control of the Ghetto. The Germans called in reinforcements, fanatical crack troops of the Waffen-SS, and launched a final assault on the Ghetto in April 1943. With virtually no weapons at their disposal aside from what they captured, several hundred Jewish partisans managed to fight on for nearly a month (April 19 - May 16, 1943) before being fully suppressed or escaping with the help of Polish underground fighters. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the ghetto area was completely levelled by the Germans. A similar fate would befall the rest of the city the following year, when the Germans employed equally brutal tactics during the Warsaw Uprising (August 1 - October 2, 1944). By the end of the war, Warsaw was almost completely destroyed, leaving it one of the most damaged cities anywhere in the world as a result of the conflict.

Publication History and Census

This map contains no date or publication information, but it must have been produced between the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940 and its annihilation in 1943. The notice on the accompanying cover suggests a date of late 1940 or early 1941, after non-Jewish Poles were expelled from the Ghetto. It is likely that this is a modified pre-occupation Polish-language map, with German placenames added to the map and descriptors added to the legend. We have only been able to identify two other examples of this map, held by the Wojewódzka i Miejska Biblioteka Publiczna in Bydgoszczy and the Żydowski Instytut Historyczny in Warsaw.