Brześć Ghetto

Brześć Ghetto
Preserved house with commemorative plaque at the former ul. Długa street of Brześć ghetto
Brześć location north of Sobibor in World War II
Also known as	Brześć Litewski Ghetto
Location	Brześć, German-occupied Poland
Date	December 16, 1941 to October 15, 1942
Incident type	Imprisonment, starvation, mass shootings
Organizations	Nazi SS
Victims	18,000 Polish Jews

The Brześć Ghetto or the Ghetto in Brest on the Bug, also: Brześć nad Bugiem Ghetto, and Brest-Litovsk Ghetto (Polish: getto w Brześciu nad Bugiem, Yiddish: בריסק or בריסק-ד׳ליטע‎) was a World War II Jewish ghetto created by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland in December 1941, six months after the German troops had overrun the Soviet-occupied zone of the Second Polish Republic under the codename Operation Barbarossa. Less than a year after the creation of the Ghetto, around October 15–18, 1942, most of approximately 20,000 Jewish inhabitants of Brześć were murdered; over 5,000 were executed locally at the Brest Fortress on the orders of Karl Eberhard Schöngarth; the rest in the secluded forest of the Bronna Góra extermination site (the Bronna Mount, Belarusian: Бронная гара), sent there aboard Holocaust trains under the guise of 'resettlement'.

Before World War II, Brześć nad Bugiem (known as Brześć Litewski before the partitions, now Brest, Belarus) was the capital of Polesie Voivodeship in the Second Polish Republic (1918–39) with the most visible Jewish presence. In the twenty years of Poland's sovereignty, of the total of 36 brand new schools established in the city, there were ten public, and five private Jewish schools inaugurated, with Yiddish and Hebrew as the language of instruction. The first ever Jewish school in Brześć history opened in 1920, almost immediately after Poland's return to independence. In 1936 Jews constituted 41.3% of the Brześć population, or 21,518 citizens. Some 80.3% of private enterprises were owned by Jews. Before World War I, Brześć (then known as Brest-Litovsk) was controlled by the Russian Empire for a hundred years following the partitions of Poland, and all commercial activity was largely neglected.