As German forces entered the ghetto to complete its liquidation, roughly 750 poorly armed fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization ambushed them with pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails, forcing an SS column to retreat on the first day. The uprising, the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, held out for nearly a month before German troops burned the ghetto block by block, killing or deporting its remaining 50,000 inhabitants.
The Germans had expected to clear the Warsaw Ghetto in three days as a birthday gift for Hitler. Instead, when SS General Jürgen Stroop's troops marched in on the morning of April 19, they walked into an ambush: fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), commanded by 24-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz, opened fire from windows, rooftops, and sewers with a smuggled arsenal of pistols, a handful of rifles, and homemade Molotov cocktails. The startled Germans retreated, leaving behind casualties and an abandoned tank.
What had been planned as a swift roundup became a month-long battle. Stroop's forces resorted to burning the ghetto building by building, block by block, to root out fighters hiding in cellars and bunkers. Anielewicz wrote to a comrade on April 23 that his dream of armed Jewish resistance had "come true," and died soon after in the bunker at Miła 18 along with dozens of other fighters, likely by suicide rather than capture.
By May 16, when Stroop declared the operation complete, the ghetto had been reduced to rubble and roughly 50,000 Jews had been killed or deported to Treblinka. The uprising accomplished no strategic victory, but it became an enduring symbol of resistance against annihilation, inspiring later commemorations and shaping how the Holocaust would be remembered.
Key people: Mordechai Anielewicz, Jürgen Stroop