Kraków Ghetto

The Kraków Ghetto
Arched entrance to Kraków Ghetto, 1941
Kraków location in the interwar period Map of the Holocaust in Poland including death camps marked with skulls, and Nazi-era Ghettos marked with red-gold stars

Kraków area, late 1939. Captive Jews, assembled for slave labor, sit on an open field surrounded by new barbed wire fence

Deportation of Jews from the Ghetto, March 1943

Bundles abandoned by Jewish deportees from the Kraków Ghetto, March 1943

The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major, metropolitan Jewish ghettos created by Nazi Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and persecution of local Polish Jews, as well as the staging area for separating the "able workers" from those who would later be deemed unworthy of life. The Ghetto was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943, with most of its inhabitants sent to their deaths at Bełżec extermination camp as well as Płaszów slave-labor camp, and Auschwitz concentration camp, 60 kilometres (37 mi) rail distance.

Before the German-Soviet invasion of 1939, Kraków (Cracow) was an influential centre for the 60,000–80,000 Polish Jews who had lived there since the 13th century. Persecution of the Jewish population of Kraków began immediately after the German troops entered the city on 6 September 1939 in the course of the invasion. Jews were ordered to report for forced labour beginning in September 1939. In November, all Jews twelve years or older were required to wear identifying armbands. Throughout Kraków, synagogues were closed and all their relics and valuables confiscated by the Nazi authorities.

By May 1940, the Nazi occupation authority under Gauleiter Hans Frank announced that Kraków should become the "racially cleanest" city in the General Government (an occupied, but unannexed part of Poland). Massive deportations of Jews from the city were ordered. Of the more than 68,000 Jews in Kraków when the Germans invaded, only 15,000 workers and their families were permitted to remain. All other Jews were ordered out of the city, to be resettled into surrounding rural areas of the Generalgouvernement.