"The Bialystok General District ... constituted an independent administrative district within the German regime in occupied Poland...

"During the first months of the German occupation ... the Jewish population ... suffered a wave of mass murders.... 31,000 Jews, mostly men, were shot by the Einsatzgruppen near their homes. On the eve of mass deportations to Treblinka and Auschwitz, in the autumn of 1942, there were about 210,000 Jews in the district, concentrated in ghettos. ...

"In the first half of October 1942, the Reich Security Main Office issued an order to local SS authorities in the Bialystok General District to liquidate all the ghettos in the district and deport the Jews. But after the intervention of the German army and German civilian authorities that employed Jewish labor in war-economy enterprises, it was decided that the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto would be postponed. <1>

"The deportation fo the Jews from the Bialystok district to Treblinka and, in part, to Auschwitz commenced after the deportation of most of the General Government Jews had been completed. It began in mid-October 1942, and continued until mid-February 1943. ... At the end of this period, only 30,000 Jews from the entire General District remained in the Bialystok ghetto." (Arad)

<1> Eisenbach, Artur, "Hitlerowski Polityka Zaglady Zydow", Warszawa, 1961 pp. 457-459

Work Cited

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7

The original plaintext version of this file is available via ftp.

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