(Ladies and gentlemen,
I’m writing this off the top of my head and not checking my facts. They are essentially as laid out in this paper, but
the sources are imaginary—just to illustrate how to document a scholarly paper.)
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Could Have Succeeded:
But Would It Have Mattered?
One of the most horrifying realities of World War II surrounded the genocide of millions of people the Axis
Powers deemed inferior.
Jewish.
Of those, the best known group was
Every nation in Europe that fell under Axis
control had some Jewish citizens, and millions of these people were arrested, detained, and eventually executed, worked, or starved to death.
Poland’s Jews were the most
numerous group outside of Germany itself and, from the beginning of the war, suffered under Nazi rule.
Initially
confined to ghettos in major cities, the Jewish population was systematically deported to concentration camps and exterminated. When Jews failed to report for deportation
1
in sufficient numbers, the Germans decided to demolish the ghettos in every city, the largest of which was in Warsaw.
In the spring of 1943, some Jews in the Warsaw ghetto elected to resist militantly, and they held the German Army at bay for weeks longer than Poland itself had held out against the invaders in 1939.
The ghetto uprising failed
for a number of reasons, but it could have succeeded if different decisions had been made sooner and if the outside world had been willing to help.1
When the Germans decided to construct the Warsaw ghetto, the city held more than a million Jews.
Through
the passage of laws and military decrees, the Germans forced Jews who lived outside the Jewish area in Warsaw to move behind walls and barbed wire fences into a ghetto.
Short of jobs, housing, food, medical care, police and fire protection, the Jewish
