Jewish “Ghettos” in Europe: Revisiting the East–West Divide in Holocaust Historiography

Standard accounts of the Holocaust place eastern Europe, and Poland in particular, at the center of this history. They correctly note that the majority of European Jews lived in central and eastern Europe, and it was these Jewish populations who overwhelmingly fell victim to the Nazi regime’s genocidal policies. Scholars also underscore ghettos and extermination camps as uniquely Eastern European phenomenon. I argue that this divide between East and West is much too neat. Similar antisemitic tropes dominated Nazi ideology about Jews and Jewish spaces in Eastern and Western Europe. In particular, the conspiracy theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism” shaped Nazi views of urban Jewish districts as sites of contagion, immorality, and oppositional politics. The regime implemented policies to cleanse these spaces of Jews and Jewish influences, policies which began at the local level in Germany and assumed nationwide, and later as war and genocide fused together, European-wide dimensions.

This paper examines Nazi rhetoric regarding Jewish districts (often referred to as “ghettos”) and the practices of spatial cleansing (including confiscation, segregation, and the wholesale destruction of property) that the regime implemented to target these spaces. Contemporary propaganda accounts and newspapers capture Nazi views about these districts while local and federal archival documents detail the regime’s policies against them. Two main case studies throw these similar histories from West and East into sharp relief: the destruction of the “Old Port” district in Marseille, France beginning in February 1943 and the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto following the ghetto uprising in April and May 1943. This paper supports recent arguments in Holocaust historiography that emphasize the centrality of ideology but specifically shifts attention to the mobilizing power of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” At the same time, this research challenges arguments that focus solely on eastern Europe as a site of radicalization.