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Ghettos - Animated Map/Map

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ghettos occupation Third Reich Romania Hungary Baltic countries occupied Poland

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Major ghettos in occupied Europe [LCID: eur74910] — During the Holocaust, the Nazis and their allies imprisoned Jewish people in ghettos. Ghettos were areas of cities or towns where authorities forced Jews to live under miserable conditions separated from the non-Jewish population.

In total, the Nazis and their allies (including Hungary and Romania) established more than 1,300 ghettos. Most of these ghettos were located in German-occupied Poland, the German-occupied Baltic states, and the occupied Soviet Union. Additionally, the Germans created the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the occupied Czech lands) and several ghettos in Salonika (Thessaloniki) in German-occupied Greece. There were no ghettos in western Europe.

Ghettos were a key means of isolating, controlling, and ultimately murdering millions of Jews.
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Ghettos in occupied eastern Europe, 1941-1942 [LCID: eeu74150] — Item View

Ghettos in occupied Poland, 1939-1941 [LCID: pol74490] — Germany occupied western Poland in fall 1939. Much of this territory was annexed to the German Reich. Eastern Poland was not occupied by German forces until June 1941. In south-central Poland the Germans set up the Generalgouvernement (General Government), where most of the early ghettos were established. Ghettos were enclosed districts of a city in which the Germans forced the Jewish population to live under miserable conditions. Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities both from the population as a whole and from neighboring Jewish communities. The Warsaw ghetto, established on October 12, 1940, was the largest ghetto, in both area and population. There, more than 350,000 Jews--about 30 percent of the city's population--were eventually confined in about 2.4 percent of the city's total area.
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Ghettos in the Baltic Countries, 1941-1943 [LCID: bal19020] — Item View

Bohemia and Moravia 1942, Theresienstadt indicated [LCID: the74020] — Item View

Romanian camps and ghettos, 1942 [LCID: rom77140] — Item View

Ghettos in occupied Hungary, 1944 [LCID: hun74020] — Item View

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