Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camps. Its conditions were deliberately engineered to hasten the death of its prisoners, and the ghetto also served a propaganda role. Unlike other ghettos, the use of slavery was not economically significant.
The ghetto was established by the transportation of Czech Jews in November 1941. The first German and Austrian Jews arrived in June 1942; Dutch and Danish Jews came in 1943, and prisoners of a wide variety of nationalities were sent to Theresienstadt in the last months of the war. About 33,000 people died at Theresienstadt, mostly from malnutrition and disease. More than 88,000 people were held there for months or years before being deported to extermination camps and other killing sites; the role of the Jewish Council (Judenrat) in choosing those to be deported has attracted significant controversy. The total number of survivors was around 23,000, including 4,000 deportees who survived.
Theresienstadt was known for its relatively rich cultural life, including concerts, lectures, and clandestine education for children. The fact that it was governed by a Jewish self-administration as well as the large number of "prominent" Jews imprisoned there facilitated the flourishing of cultural life. This spiritual legacy has attracted the attention of scholars and sparked interest in the ghetto. In the postwar period, a few of the SS perpetrators and Czech guards were put on trial, but the ghetto was generally forgotten by the Soviet authorities. The Terezín Ghetto Museum is visited by 250,000 people each year.
Background
The fortress town of Theresienstadt () is located in the north-west region of Bohemia, across the river from the city of Leitmeritz () and about north of Prague. Founded on 22 September 1784 on the orders of the Habsburg monarch Joseph II, it was named Theresienstadt, after his mother Maria Theresa of Austria. Theresienstadt was used as a military base by Austria-Hungary and later by the First Czechoslovak Republic after 1918, while the "Small Fortress" across the river was a prison. Following the Munich Agreement in September 1938, Germany annexed the Sudetenland (German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia). Although Leitmeritz was ceded to Germany, Theresienstadt remained in the Czechoslovak rump state until the German invasion of the Czech lands on 15 March 1939. The Small Fortress became a Gestapo prison in 1940 and the fortress town became a Wehrmacht military base, with about 3,500 soldiers and 3,700 civilians, largely employed by the army, living there in 1941.
In October 1941, as the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was planning transports of Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate to the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, a meeting was held in which it was decided to convert Theresienstadt into a transit center for Czech Jews. Those present included Adolf Eichmann, leader of the RSHA section IV B 4 (Jewish affairs) and Hans Günther, the director of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague. Reinhard Heydrich, the RSHA chief, approved of Theresienstadt as a location for the ghetto. At the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, Heydrich announced that Theresienstadt would be used to house Jews over the age of 65 from the Reich, as well as those who had been severely wounded fighting for the Central Powers in World War I or won the Iron Cross 1st Class or a higher decoration during that war. These Jews could not plausibly perform forced labor, and therefore Theresienstadt helped conceal the true nature of deportation to the East. Later, Theresienstadt also came to house "prominent" Jews whose disappearance in an extermination camp could have drawn attention from abroad. To lull victims into a false sense of security, the SS advertised Theresienstadt as a "spa town" where Jews could retire, and encouraged them to sign fraudulent home purchase contracts, pay "deposits" for rent and board, and surrender life insurance policies and other assets.
History 1941
On 24 November 1941, the first trainload of deportees arrived at the Sudeten barracks in Theresienstadt; they were 342 young Jewish men whose task was to prepare the town for the arrival of thousands of other Jews beginning 30 November. Another transport of 1,000 men arrived on 4 December; this included Jakob Edelstein and the original members of the Council of Elders. Deportees to the ghetto had to surrender all possessions except for of luggage, which they had to carry with them from the railway station at Bauschowitz (Bohušovice), away; the walk was difficult for elderly and ill Jews, many of whom died on the journey. After arriving, prisoners were sent to the (), where they were registered and deprived of their remaining possessions.
The 24 November and 4 December transports, consisting mostly of Jewish craftsmen, engineers, and other skilled workers, were known as the Aufbaukommando (Work Detail) and their members were exempt from deportation until September 1943. The members of the Aufbaukommando used creative methods to improve the infrastructure of the ghetto and prepare it to house an average of 40,000 people during its existence. The construction project was funded by stolen Jewish property. When the first transport arrived, there was only one vat for coffee with a capacity of ; by the next year, there were sufficient kettles to make 50,000 cups of ersatz coffee in two hours. The waterworks often broke down during the first months due to inadequate capacity. To improve potable water supply, and so everyone could wash daily, workers drilled wells and overhauled the pipe system. The Germans provided the materials for these improvements, largely to reduce the chance of communicable disease spreading beyond the ghetto, but Jewish engineers directed the projects.
Jews lived in the eleven barracks in the fortress, while civilians continued to inhabit the 218 civilian houses. Segregation between the two groups was strictly enforced and resulted in harsh punishments on Jews who left their barracks. By the end of the year, 7,365 people had been deported to the ghetto, of whom 2,000 were from Brno and the rest from Prague.
1942
The first transport from Theresienstadt left on 9 January 1942 for the Riga Ghetto. It was the only transport whose destination was known to the deportees; other transports simply departed for "the East". The next day, the SS publicly hanged nine men for smuggling letters out of the ghetto, an event that caused widespread outrage and disquiet. The first transports targeted mostly able-bodied people. If one person in a family was selected for a transport, family members would typically volunteer to accompany them, which has been analyzed as an example of family solidarity or social expectations. From June 1942, the SS interned elderly and "prominent" Jews from the Reich at Theresienstadt. To accommodate these Jews, the non-Jewish Czechs living in Theresienstadt were expelled, and the town was closed off by the end of June. In May, the self-administration had reduced rations for the elderly in order to increase the food available to hard laborers, as part of its strategy to save as many children and young people as possible to emigrate to Palestine after the war.
101,761 prisoners entered Theresienstadt in the year of 1942, resulting in a peak population, on 18 September 1942, of 58,491. The death rate also peaked that month with 3,941 deaths. Corpses remained unburied for days and gravediggers carrying coffins through the streets were a regular sight. To alleviate overcrowding, the Germans deported 18,000 mostly elderly people in nine transports in the autumn of 1942. Most of the people deported from Theresienstadt in 1942 were killed immediately, either in the Operation Reinhard death camps or at mass execution sites in the Baltic States and Belarus, such as Kalevi-Liiva, Maly Trostenets, and Baranavichy. Many transports have no known survivors. The Germans selected a small number of healthy young people for forced labor. In all, 42,000 people, mostly Czech Jews, were deported from Theresienstadt in 1942, of whom only 356 survivors are known.
1943 In January, seven thousand people were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. During the same month, the Jewish community leaders from Berlin and Vienna arrived, and the leadership was reorganized to include Paul Eppstein, a German Zionist, and Benjamin Murmelstein, an Austrian rabbi; Edelstein was forced to act as Eppstein's deputy. At the beginning of February, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA, proposed the deportation of an additional five thousand elderly Jews. SS chief Heinrich Himmler refused, due to the increasing desire for Theresienstadt as an alibi to conceal information on the Holocaust reaching the Western Allies. There were no more transports from Theresienstadt until the deportation of 5,000 Jews to the Theresienstadt family camp at Auschwitz in September.
The inmates were also allowed slightly more privileges, including postal correspondence and the right to receive food parcels. On 24 August 1943, 1,200 Jewish children from the Białystok Ghetto in Poland arrived at Theresienstadt. They refused to be disinfected due to their fear that the showers were gas chambers. This incident was one of the only clues as to what happened to those deported from Theresienstadt. The children were held in strict isolation for six weeks before deportation to Auschwitz; none survived. On 9 November 1943, Edelstein and other ghetto administrators were arrested, accused of covering up the escape of fifty-five prisoners. Two days later, commandant Anton Burger ordered a census of the entire ghetto population, approximately 36,000 people at that time. All inmates, regardless of age, were required to stand outside in freezing weather from 7 am to 11 pm; 300 people died on the field from exhaustion. Five thousand prisoners, including Edelstein and the other arrested leaders, were sent to the family camp at Auschwitz on 15 and 18 December.
Two hundred ninety-three Jews arrived at Theresienstadt from Westerbork (in the Netherlands) in April 1943, but the rest of the 4,894 Jews eventually deported from Westerbork to Theresienstadt arrived during 1944. Four hundred fifty Jews from Denmark—the few who had not escaped to Sweden—arrived in October 1943. The Danish government's inquiries after them prevented their deportation, and eventually the SS authorized representatives of the Danish Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit Theresienstadt. The RSHA archives were transported to Theresienstadt in July 1943, reducing the space for prisoners, and stored in the Sudeten barracks until they were burned on 17 April 1945 on SS orders.
1944
In February 1944, the SS embarked on a "beautification" () campaign to prepare the ghetto for the Red Cross visit. Many "prominent" prisoners and Danish Jews were re-housed in private, superior quarters. The streets were renamed and cleaned; sham shops and a school were set up; the SS encouraged the prisoners to perform an increasing number of cultural activities, which exceeded that of an ordinary town in peacetime. As part of the preparations, 7,503 people were sent to the family camp at Auschwitz in May; the transports targeted sick, elderly, and disabled people who had no place in the ideal Jewish settlement.