Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Warsaw Ghetto: Planned Starvation Policy
Reply-To: kmcvay@nospamnizkor.org
Organization: The Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org

At its most swollen, the ghetto housed 445,000 Jews, and was the 
largest concentration of Jews and Jewish workers in Poland. The 
ghetto's living conditions would have been irrational if the Germans' designs
for Polish Jews had accorded any significant place for them to work
productively; the Germans' policies, in fact, form a textbook plan of how to
turn healthy, able workers quickly into shadows of human beings, into decrepit
living skeletons, or real ones. The Warsaw ghetto contained 30 percent of
Warsaw's population in 2.4 percent of its area, making for a population density
of 200,000 per square mile. It had a housing density of over 9 people per ROOM
in every apartment. Water, heating, and sewage were catastrophically
inadequate. The unbearable overpopulation of the ghetto together with the
unhealful hygienic conditions were alone bound to produce illness and disease.
Yet the food situation, which amounted to a policy of planned starvation, made
these other inhuman conditions, by comparison, seem livable. The official daily
food ration for Jews of the Warsaw ghetto was 300 calories. For Poles it was
634 calories, and for Germans it was 2310. The Jews did not even receive all of
this pitiful, offical allotment. The predictable, expected consequences of this
policy occured. The inhabitants of the ghetto quickly reached a permanent state
of semi-starvation, producing a dangerously weakened population unsuitable for
sustained work, let alone for physically taxing employment. The number of
deaths in the ghetto, mainly due to starvation and its attendant afflictions,
was staggering, averaging about 4,650 Jews per month between May 1941 and May
1942, which was over 1 percent of the population each month, or 12 percent a
year.

                                  Work Cited

Goldhagen, Dr. Daniel. "Hitler's Willing Executioners," Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1996. 289.

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