Drohobycz Ghetto

Drohobycz Ghetto
Commemorative plaque at the ghetto house of Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz Drohobycz Drohobycz location south of Belzec in World War II
Also known as	Drohobych Ghetto
Location	Drohobycz, German-occupied Poland (now Ukraine)
Date	July 1941 to November 1942
Incident type	Imprisonment, starvation, mass shootings, deportations to Bełżec extermination camp
Organizations	Nazi German SS, Orpo battalions
Victims	10,000 Polish Jews

Drohobycz Ghetto or Drohobych Ghetto was a World War II ghetto created by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland for the purpose of persecution and exploitation of Polish Jews in the city of Drohobycz after the Nazi takeover of the region in Operation Barbarossa. The ghetto was liquidated mainly between February and November 1942, when most local Jews of Drohobycz were transported in Holocaust trains to the Belzec extermination camp.

Before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, Drohobycz (Drohobych, now Ukraine) was a provincial city in the Second Polish Republic with 80,000 inhabitants, the seat of Drohobycz county with an area of 1,499 km² and population of around 194,400. Drohobycz belonged to Lwów Voivodeship region of south-eastern Kresy, with a sizable Jewish population; exceeding that of Ukrainian and Polish.

Following the invasion, the territory of the interwar Poland was divided in September 1939 between the Nazi Germany and the USSR. The city was attached to the Soviet Ukraine under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. In the expanded Soviet republic, Drohobych became a center of the Drohobych Oblast. The Soviet repressions of Polish citizens circled around the mass deportations to Siberia in cattle trains – men, women and children. A group of local Polish boyscouts and soldiers of the defeated Polish Army created the clandestine White Couriers organization, which in late 1939 and early 1940 smuggled hundreds of people from the Soviet zone of occupation to Hungary, across the Soviet-Hungarian border in the Carpathians.