An integral part of Hitler's "Final Solution" the Nazi's established ghettos throughout all their conquered lands. These were confined areas where they caged the Jews until they could be sent to extermination camps.

The Warsaw Ghetto was created after Germany, without declaring war, invaded and overtook Poland. Nazi's herded Jews from surrounding areas into Warsaw's Ghetto until by the summer of 1942 nearly half a million people lived within 840 acres that were surrounded by 10-foot walls. Starvation and disease killed approximately 80,000 of these people, and beginning in June of 1942 over 5,000 Jews A DAY were transferred out of the ghetto to concentration camps, in particular Treblinka.

As deportations continued the ghetto prisoners’ attitudes changed from despair to a determination to resist. Newly formed organizations, and particularly several Jewish youth organizations, began to take control of the ghetto including the Jewish Fighting Organization, or the ZOB.

In April of 1943 Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered a special operation to clear the ghetto, and on April 19, the day of Passover and the day before Hitler's birthday, German troops moved into the Warsaw Ghetto with a plan to liquidate it in three days, but the Jews held out for nearly a month. With only a few pistols, homemade bombs and knives Jewish resistance hid, fought, and endured relentless and ruthless Nazi artillery, smoke bombs, dogs, and fire.

The one-sided battle continued until May 16 when Jewish ammunition was exhausted. SS Major General Jurgen Stroop who supervised the German attack on the ghetto, in a final attempt to disgrace and demoralize the Jews, ordered the dynamiting of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw writing in his report to Hitler: "The Warsaw Ghetto is no more."

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a revolution in Jewish history as understood in a note written by Mordecai Anielewicz, the young commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Underground Resistance wrote in a note shorty before he died, to his colleague Yitzhak Zuckerman: "My life's dream has now been realized: Jewish self-defense in the ghetto is now an accomplished fact ... I have been witness to the magnificent, heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters."