Market Day and Jews In Occupied Krakow 1939

Rare footage from October, 1939. Market Day and Jews In Occupied crakow, Poland, with a German amateur 16mm color film.

Original movie is silent. Soundtrack was added in 2009 by ROMANO-ARCHIVES.
Editing by ROMANO-ARCHIVES.

By November 1939, the Jewish population of Krakow had grown to approximately 70,000.
Upon the German invasion of Poland, the German army occupied Krakow in the first week of September 1939. The German military authorities initiated immediate measures aimed at isolating, exploiting and persecuting the Jews of the city. On October 26, 1939, that part of German-occupied Poland which the Germans did not annex directly came under rule of civilian occupation authorities under the leadership of Hans Frank, the former legal counsel to the Nazi Party.

In May 1940, the Germans began to expel Jews from Krakow to the neighboring countryside. By March 1941, the SS and police had expelled more than 55,000 Jews, including refugees from the German-annexed District Wartheland; about 15,000 Jews remained in Krakow.

The SS and police planned the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto for mid-March 1943, in accordance with the Himmler's order in October 1942 to complete the murder of the Jews residing in the Generalgouvernement, incarcerating those few whose labor was still required in forced-labor camps.

On March 13-14, 1943, the SS and police carried out the operation, shooting some 2,000 Jews in the ghetto. The SS transferred another 2,000 Jews -- those capable of work and the surviving members of the Jewish Council and the Jewish police force (Ordnungsdienst) -- to the Plaszow forced-labor camp, and the rest of the Jews, approximately 3,000, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in two transports, arriving on March 13 and March 16. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the camp authorities selected 549 persons from the two transports (499 men and 50 women) to be registered as prisoners and murdered the others, approximately 2,450, in the gas chambers. HY"D. Click here for more.