Lodz ghetto: various documents

Lodz ghetto: various documents 

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had run a Jewish orphanage before the war, was appointed 'Elder of the Jews' by the Nazis in 1939. He turned the ghetto into a hive of industry in the vain hope of securing the survival of most of its inhabitants by making them economically too valuable to the German war effort to be murdered. To achieve this aim, he agreed to the introduction and enforcement of a ruthless system of labour exploitation, a permanent state of hunger for most of his workers, and the creation of an utterly degraded class of Jewish collaborators and slave drivers. Having been responsible for the deportation of thousands of ghetto inmates to their deaths- which earned him the label 'collaborator'- Rumkowski, himself, was deported with his family to Auschwitz on 30 August 1944, where they were all murdered. 

Lodz ghetto: various documents