The new ghettos were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life with the aim of economic exploitation.

[1] The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions and lack of food resulted in a high death rate among them.

[2] In most cities the Jewish underground resistance movements developed almost instantly, although ghettoization had severely limited their access to resources.

[3] The ghetto fighters took up arms during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust known as Operation Reinhard (launched in 1942), against the Nazi plans to deport all prisoners – men, women and children – to camps, with the aim of their mass extermination.

[10] There were other such struggles, leading to the wholesale burning of the ghettos such as in Kołomyja (now Kolomyia, Ukraine),[11] and mass shootings of women and children as in Mizocz.