The bodies of emaciated Jews who are thought to have died of starvation on the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland between 1941 and 1942 were collected and recovered in carts.

    In the streets of Warsaw, Poland, emaciated bodies thought to have died of starvation between 1941 and 1942 were collected and recovered in carts. The bodies of the starving victims of the Warsaw Ghetto were photographed in front of their homes in the Ghetto. The pitiful victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, who had died of the atrocities, were lying lifeless, rudely transported in crude hearse-like carts, waiting to be buried.

    After the invasion of Poland on September 1st 1939, 3 million Jews came under Nazi control. In accordance with their anti-Semitic beliefs, they wanted to remove the Jews from the newly acquired land. The Nazis segregated the Jews from the rest of the population and developed ghettos to forcibly house them. Overcrowding, combined with a lack of clean water supplies and proper sewage systems, led to poor hygiene and the spread of disease. The Warsaw Ghetto was established on October 12, 1940, one year after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.Approximately 375,000 Jews from Warsaw were forced to leave their homes and move to the ghetto, a small area covering 3.4 square kilometers. From July to September 1942, more than 260,000 people, over half the population of the ghetto, were deported to Treblinka, where the majority were killed. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1945, but by May 16, 1943, the German army suppressed the uprising. The surviving ghetto residents were deported to concentration camps and extermination centers.

   On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, to concentrate the Jews of Poland in large towns and cities near railway lines. A Jewish Council of Elders was set up to administer the newly uprooted Jewish communities. The Jewish Council was controlled by the SS and had to comply with their demands.

    Measures were taken to concentrate the Jews in towns and cities, and the problems of the Jews arriving were left to the local authorities and the Jewish Councils set up in each town. The first ghetto was opened in Piotrkow on October 8th 1939. The first large ghetto was then established in Radomsko on December 20th 1939, and in Łódź in February 1940. Over the next two years, hundreds of ghettos were set up across Poland.