,
14 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
#OnThisDay in 1942 - About 254,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews (or at least 300,000 by different accounts) were sent to Treblinka during the Grossaktion Warschau. The vast majority was murdered there between Tisha B'Av (July 23) and Yom Kippur (September 21) of 1942. 
During the Grossaktion, Jews were terrorized in daily round-ups, marched through the ghetto, and assembled at the Umschlagplatz station square for the so-called "resettlement to the East" (Umsiedlung).
From there, they were sent aboard overcrowded Holocaust trains to the extermination camp in Treblinka.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest World War II ghetto in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles (3.4 km2), or 7.2 persons per room.
The Nazi police conducted most of the mass deportations of the ghetto inmates to Treblinka via pendulum trains carrying up to 7,000 victims each.
For eight weeks the rail shipments of Jews to Treblinka went on without stopping: 100 people to a cattle truck, 5,000 to 6,000 each day including hospital patients and orphanage children.
On arrival at Treblinka, stripped victims were marched to one of ten chambers disguised as showers, and suffocated to death in batches of 200 with the use of monoxide gas (Zyklon B was introduced at Auschwitz some time later).
In September 1942, new gas chambers were built, which could kill as many as 3,000 people in just 2 hours. Civilians were forbidden to approach the area.
Many of the remaining Jews decided to fight, and many of them were helped by the Polish underground. The Jewish Combat Organization was formed in October 1942 and tasked with resisting any future deportations.
Meanwhile, the Polish Home Army, Armia Krajowa, began to smuggle weapons, ammunition and supplies into the Ghetto for the uprising.
Jürgen Stroop, German SS commander who led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 was awarded the Iron Cross First Class by the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel for his "murder expedition".
After the war, he was placed on trial by the Americans and sentenced to death. His execution was not carried out; instead, he was handed over to the Polish authorities for re-trial.
He was again sentenced to death in Poland and executed on the scene of his crime on 8 September 1951.
