On October 2, 1940, Ludwig Fischer, Governor of the Warsaw District, signed a decree on the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree was announced through street megaphones on October 12, during the holy day of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement. The Governor’s official decree was preceded by a series of repressions against the Jewish population, under way since the German Army occupied the city in September 1939. On October 7, 1939 the Jewish kehilla was transformed into the Judenrat (the Jewish Council), which consisted of 24 members and was headed by Adam Czerniakow, the kehilla’s chairman. The occupier began to concentrate Jews in the assigned city quarters. Already in November 1939 the north-western quarter, inhabited predominantly by the Jews, was being surrounded by a barbed wire fence with signboards warning: “Plague zone, no entry for soldiers”. The fence was introduced under the instruction of the SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Already towards the end of the first month of the war Heydrich issued a command to concentrate all members of Jewish communities in larger towns connected by railway lines, and subsequently to separate them from the “Aryan” population. According to the official line of argument Jews were being isolated in order to protect Poles, among other things from those who spread contagious diseases, especially typhoid fever, which was allegedly rife amongst the Jewish population. It was part of a broader spectrum of the Nazi propaganda, which rested on a widespread anti-Semitic campaign, in order to give legitimacy to the new administration’s attitude towards Jews.
