Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

creating a culture that will reject such crimes as an option available to states, armies,
and individuals.
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On the first evening of the Jewish holy season of Passover,
April 19, 1943, the Nazis, under the command of General Jürgen Stroop (1895–1951),
attempted to destroy the Warsaw Ghetto and its Jewish inhabitants as a next-day birthday
present to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). By the time of the planned invasion,
only between fifty-five thousand and sixty thousand Jews remained in the ghetto.
The vast majority of the previous inhabitants of the ghetto, approximately three hundred
thousand, had already been transported to their deaths in the East, mainly to the
Treblinka death camp. Much to the Nazis’ surprise, the residents had gotten wind of this
military initiative (German, Aktion), and a resistance effort organized by the Jewish
Fighting Organization (ZOB), composed largely of Zionist young people and headed by
Mordecai Anielewicz (1919–1943), prepared to meet the invaders with a Herculean
guerrilla effort of only about 500 inexperienced fighters, along with another 250 fighters
attached to a separate group, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW).
The battle, beginning on April 19, lasted until May 16, a tortuous four weeks, when the
command bunker at Mila 18 was finally destroyed and the ZOB leadership, including
Anielewicz, killed. (In a communiqué on April 23 to another leader of the resistance
movement, Yitzhak Zuckerman [1915–1981], who was outside the ghetto, Anielewicz
wrote, “My life’s dream has been realized: I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto
in all its greatness and glory.”)
Prior to this final confrontation, because the Nazis were largely unsuccessful in directly
killing the resisters, they (the Nazis) resorted to the somewhat unusual technique of burning
the houses in the ghetto street by street and block by block. On May 16, General
Stroop reported: “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more! More than 56,000 Jewish
bandits have been captured.”
A leather-bound scrapbook consisting of German memoranda and pictures of the devastation
was later presented directly to Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), General
Fredrich Krupp, and General Stroop himself. Though not materially affecting either the
outcome of World War II itself or the planned Nazi “Final Solution” against the Jews, the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising remains the major symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi tyranny.
In 1948, the noted Israel sculptor Nathan Rapoport (1911–1987) unveiled the Ghetto
Uprising Monument in Warsaw, with a smaller version placed at Yad Vashem, Israel’s
Holocaust Memorial Authority in Jerusalem, Israel.
Wegner, Armin T. (1886–1978). Armin Wegner was born on October 16, 1886, into
an old Prussian family in the town of Elberfeld/Rhineland (Wuppertal), Germany. A
German pacifist, he enlisted in the German army in 1914 as an officer in the medical
corps. In 1914–1915 he was stationed in Poland and was awarded an Iron Cross for bravery
when tending to wounded soldiers under enemy fire.
In April 1915, he was transferred to the Ottoman Empire as part of the German commitment
to their Turkish ally. On his first period of extended leave, between July and
August 1915, he took the opportunity of investigating the rumors he had heard about
wholesale killings of Armenians throughout the Empire, and he traveled extensively
looking for ways to chronicle what he saw. Contravening orders from both his German
superiors and his Ottoman hosts not to divulge publicly the things he witnessed, Wegner
collected both written and visual evidence (including documents, photographs, and
WEGNER, ARMIN T.
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