Piotrków was made into a county seat (Kreis) of the newly created Łódź District (Regierungsbezirk Litzmannstadt) of the German territory of Reichsgau Wartheland.

[4] In total, some 16,500[4]to up to 28,000[5] Jews went through the Piotrków Ghetto which was liquidated beginning 14 October 1942 in four days of deportations to Treblinka and Majdanek aboard overcrowded Holocaust trains.

[citation needed] It was an open type ghetto –- an early variant of Nazi ghettoization -– without the barbed wire fences introduced later throughout all of occupied Poland.

[5] The initial population of about 10,000 Jews were not required to use permits to move around town, but shootings by Ordnungspolizei became commonplace and a curfew in the ghetto was introduced.

[4] The influx of refugees expelled from other places, including Warsaw, Łódź, Bełchatów, Kalisz, Gniezno and Płock, caused the ghetto population to more than double by 1942.

In the course of the next few days, Jews were marched in columns to the railway station and loaded onto the awaiting freight trains without food or water, 150 to one car.