Litzmannstadt (Getto Litzmannstadt)

German troops occupied Łódź on 8 September 1939; the city was annexed to the Reich and renamed Litzmannstadt. The Germans set up a ghetto in a neglected district in early February 1940 and sealed it on 30 April 1940, confining roughly 160,000 of the city's Jews there. Yad Vashem describes it as a particularly isolated and strictly guarded ghetto. The Jewish council under Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski organised it as a forced-labour economy working for German needs, in the hope that labour would allow the inhabitants to survive.

In 1941 and 1942 almost 40,000 more Jews were deported into the ghetto: about 20,000 from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Luxembourg, and almost 20,000 from provincial towns in the Warthegau. About 5,000 Roma from Austria were also brought there. Overcrowding, starvation and epidemics were constant; according to Yad Vashem, some 43,500 people, about 21 percent of the ghetto population, died of hunger, cold or disease.

From January 1942 the Germans deported ghetto inmates to the Chełmno (Kulmhof) killing centre, where they were murdered in gas vans. By the end of 1942 almost half of the Jews held in Łódź had been murdered there. In 1944 the ghetto was liquidated: deportations to Chełmno resumed on 23 June, and from 7 August the trains went to Auschwitz-Birkenau (USHMM puts the number sent there in August at about 67,000). The last transport left on 30 August 1944. When the Soviet Army reached Łódź on 19 January 1945, it liberated about 800 Jews.

From Berlin

The first four deportation trains from Berlin went to Litzmannstadt, on 18, 24 and 29 October and 1 November 1941. The deportees were first held in the assembly camp in the Levetzowstraße synagogue. They were then taken to Bahnhof Grunewald, many of them on foot across the city, and put into passenger carriages. The Berlin Gestapo burned its files before the end of the war, so exact numbers are uncertain. Yad Vashem gives about 1,013–1,096, 982–1,146, 906–1,009 and 1,033–1,079 people for the four trains. A German police officer recorded on 13 November 1941 that 4,187 Jews from Berlin had arrived in the ghetto. One ghetto diarist wrote that most of those arriving on the second Berlin transport were old and frail.

Between 4 and 15 May 1942 many of the Jews deported from Berlin were taken to Chełmno (Kulmhof) and murdered. According to USHMM, almost 11,000 of the Jews deported to Łódź from Germany, Austria, Prague and Luxembourg were murdered at Chełmno that May. Yad Vashem, citing the historian Rita Meyhöfer, lists only one to four known survivors from each of the four Berlin transports. One of them was Heinz Friedländer, deported at the age of 11. He survived the ghetto and several concentration camps and later became a well-known historian in the United States as Henry Friedlander.

4 transports from Berlin brought 4,207 people here.