The Warsaw ghetto, which had already been declared a concentration
camp in February 1943, was finally dissolved in June 1943 . Moreover,
Himmler ordered the removal of all traces of its existence.
86
In July 1943
he also ordered that Sobibor extermination camp should be transformed
into a concentration camp and that the prisoners should sort captured
ammunition.
87
Those Jews in the General Government who had survived
June were concentrated in forced labour camps, most of which operated as
satellite camps of Majdanek.
88
In January 1944 the work camp Plaszow
(near Cracow) as well as those in Lemberg, Lublin, and Radom were
declared to be concentration camps.
89
With his order of 21 May 1943 that all Jews from Reich territory,
including the Protectorate, were to be deported ‘to the east’ or to There-
sienstadt, Himmler closed the last bolt-hole for those Polish Jews who had
hitherto been able to stay alive in Polish territories directly administered by
the Reich, namely eastern Upper Silesia, the Warthegau, and the district of
Bialystock.
90
Between 22 and 24 June 1943 the SS deported 5,000 Jews from
Sosnowitz and Bendzin to Auschwitz, and in the first half of August the last
ghettos in Upper Silesia were cleared.
91
Himmler encountered difficulties,
however, with the transformation of the Ło
´
dz
´
ghetto into a concentration
camp, for Arthur Greiser, the Reich Governor of the Warthegau, blocked
the order which would have deprived him of ‘his ghetto’.
92
The dispute
lasted from June 1943 until February 1944, when Himmler and Greiser
agreed to permit the ghetto to remain as a ‘Gau-ghetto’. However, only as
many Jews were permitted to live there as had to be ‘definitely retained in
the interests of the armaments economy’.
93
On the other hand, Himmler’s
order of August 1943 that the more than 100 Jewish forced labour camps in
the Warthegau should be liquidated had been carried out by October.
94
The Bialystock ghetto was also finally dissolved between 16 and 23 August,
after Globocnik had reported to Himmler on 21 June that the workshops
there were being transferred to Lublin. More than 25,000 people were
deported to Treblinka or to Majdanek, where they were to be deployed
as forced labour.
95
However, it was not only the occupation authorities for whom the
Warsaw ghetto uprising had acted as a wake-up call. Jewish resistance to
the extermination policy now flared up in other places as well. The SS were
faced with an armed resistance group when clearing the Bialystock ghetto,
96
and the same thing happened in August in the Glubokoje ghetto near
Vilnius.
97
Moreover, in August there was an organized mass break-out
666 a new opportunity?