Stadtplan von Warschau / Plan Warszawy.

Description

This seemingly typical city plan of Warsaw was produced by the travel guide and stationery company Ruch, which issued similar maps of the city for many years. However, a closer look reveals a haunting dimension to this map – it is bilingual, in both Polish and German, and it contains an outline of the city’s notorious Jewish Ghetto, cordoned off by the Nazis in 1940.

In Ruch’s distinctive layout, the city is present with residential and commercial urban areas shaded orange, cemeteries, parks, and other greenspaces shaded green, and everything else left unshaded. Rail lines are diligently traced, harkening to Ruch’s specialty in producing railway timetables and guide for Warsaw and Poland writ large. Aside from its cultural, economic, and political importance for Poland, Warsaw had an even greater significance from a military standpoint, as it was historically the major rail hub in Eastern Europe, where the standard gauge European network met the wide gauge Russian one (in the Interwar period, all railways in Poland were changed to standard gauge to slow any Soviet invasion). The two railway bridges over the Vistula seen here (commonly known as the ‘Citadel Bridge’ Most przy Cytadeli and ‘Cross-City Bridge’ Most średnicowy) thus played a crucial role in wartime logistics, and were consequently blown up by retreating German soldiers late in the war.

Throughout, many streets, parks, bridges, historical and cultural sites, and other features are labelled in both Polish and German, while others remain solely in Polish. An inset of the old city appears at bottom-right. Along the bottom of the sheet are advertisements in both Polish and German, mostly for companies focusing on machinery, chemicals, and other industrial products, while the back cover contains and advertisement for a long-established local pastry shop.

Near center is the planned central railway station – Warszawa Główna in Polish and Warschau Hauptbahnhof in German. This structure, partly operational but still under construction when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was meant to be the crowning achievement of the Polish Second Republic, a monumental Modernist and Art Deco complex where all the city’s train lines would meet. It was damaged in a fire on the eve of Germany’s invasion (probably an act of sabatoge) and was further damaged during the 1939 Siege of Warsaw but remained in operation during the war. However, in the aftermath of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the station was completely destroyed as part of the German destruction of the city.

Several streets and bridges are ghosted in, especially in the southern part of the city, suggesting planned future construction. These schemes may have derived from the so-called Pabst Plan and other Nazi schemes to completely destroy and depopulate Warsaw and rebuild it as a smaller city exclusively for ‘Aryans.’

The Warsaw Ghetto

Perhaps the most noticeable and certainly the most significant element of this map is the blue outline wrapping around much of the western part of the city, indicating the boundaries of the Jewish Ghetto. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto established by Nazi Germany during World War II, as part of the Holocaust. Prior to World War II, Warsaw had a significant population of Jews, numbering some 270,000 people, mostly concentrated in the northwestern part of the city. Already discriminated against under the interwar Polish nationalist government, the Jews of Warsaw – along with thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled to Warsaw during the German invasion of Poland – faced even worse prospects under Nazi occupation. Anti-Jewish laws similar to those that existed in Germany were implemented almost immediately. In April 1940, construction began on a wall circling the Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw; ethnic Poles were forcibly moved out, while Jews living in other parts of Warsaw were moved in. At its height, the ghetto housed some 400,000 people within 1.3 square miles (two sections divided at Chłodna Street, which were connected by a wooden footbridge), with entire extended families sharing a single room. Conditions inside the ghetto were horrific, with the Nazi’s first administrator, Waldemar Schön, pursuing a deliberate policy of starvation, causing some 100,000 deaths from hunger and related diseases (Schön survived the war and lived out his days in West Germany, never facing trial for his crimes).

As with the ‘Jewish Question’ more broadly, the Nazis debated what to do with the Jews in Warsaw, but in the summer of 1942 the ‘Final Solution’ was implemented. In a matter of weeks, at least 254,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were massed at the railyards (Umschlagplatz) to the north of the ghetto, shipped to the extermination camp at Treblinka, some 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, and murdered with horrific efficiency. Afterwards, news of their fate trickled back to Warsaw. When the Nazis again tried to round up more people to send to the camps on January 18, 1943, they encountered armed resistance by fighters wielding whatever weapons they could. The planned deportation was halted and both sides readied for more fighting, which broke out when German troops again entered the Ghetto on April 19, 1943. Harassing German troops for nearly a month, resistance fighters inflicted dozens of casualties on the Nazis despite being very lightly armed. The response was predictably cruel, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths in the fighting and in the extermination camps afterwards, though remarkably some of the resistance leaders managed to escape the city and survive the war. After the Ghetto was cleared of resistance and its inhabitants shipped off to extermination camps, the Germans systematically destroyed the area in order to suppress the uprising and built a concentration camp on its ruins. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was perhaps the single most inspiring act of resistance during the entire Second World War and an inspiration for the larger Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944.

Census

This map was printed by B. Wierzbicki and published by the Polnischer Verlag / Wydawnictwo Polskie for ‘Ruch,’ noted on the cover as an ‘Eisenbahnbuchhandelsgesellschaft.’ It is undated but given the inclusion of the Ghetto must date to between 1940 and 1943.

There appear to be two wartime editions of the map, the present edition published by Polnischer Verlag including the Ghetto outline and another edition by Atlas Verlags without it. Both are quite scarce, especially outside of Europe, and the present edition is only noted among the holdings of eight institutions, seven of which are in Poland and Germany (the eighth is the Imperial War Museum).