The first steps towards establishing a ghetto in Warsaw were taken by the Germans already in the autumn of 1939.
Adam Czerniaków , chairman of the local Judenrat, noted in his diary on December 20th: "Rumors about Praga (ghetto)". In January 1940, Waldemar Schön , who had collaborated with Hans Frank , among others, before the war, arrived in Warsaw . The General Government authorities entrusted him with the position of plenipotentiary for resettlement and the task of creating a ghetto in the city. Schön initially planned to relocate the Jewish community across the Vistula River and locate the ghetto in the aforementioned Praga district, but for many reasons – including economic and logistical ones – this idea was not implemented. The focus was on the northern district, inhabited mostly by the Jewish community. In March, the decision was made to build walls around the area the Germans designated as the "Seuchensperrgebiet" ("area threatened by epidemics"). Construction began in April 1940, at the expense of the Jewish community. The process took over two months. The section designated for Jews in Warsaw was designated in the so-called northern district. Since 1940, the city, where at the dawn of World War II almost a third of the population were Jewish, has been divided by a 16-kilometer-long wall. Until November 16, 1940, when the ghetto gates were closed, the boundaries of this district changed, and some previously planned sections were not included. In such cases, existing sections of the wall were dismantled.
The ghettos established by the Germans in occupied Poland are commonly associated with the wall surrounding them, but in the reality of the occupation, such structures around so-called Jewish districts were rare. They were certainly built in Warsaw, Krakow, and Nowy Sącz, but more often, ghettos were isolated by barbed wire fences, fences, or merely conventional boundaries.
By the end of 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto—an area of approximately four square kilometers—contained approximately 395 Jews . They had lived not only in Warsaw before the war but also had been forcibly relocated there from other locations, including territories incorporated into the Third Reich. In the following months, as successive groups of Jews were relocated to the ghetto, the number of people confined there increased. The population density reached nearly 129 per square kilometer. It is estimated that at its peak in March 1941, the ghetto held nearly 460 people. Within its walls were people of varying social standing, education, profession, religious beliefs, gender, and age. They were united by their racial origins, as defined by the Germans, and by the obligation to live within the walls.
Massive overcrowding quickly led to sanitary conditions that demeaned human dignity, leading to famine and infectious disease epidemics. From November 1940 to July 1942, approximately 100 ghetto residents died from hunger and disease. Poverty was so dire that naked bodies were often left in the streets to avoid burial costs. During the so-called Grossaktion (July 22–September 21, 1942), approximately 260 Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, approximately 10 were murdered on the spot, and nearly 11 were transported to labor camps, primarily in the Lublin District. After these events, approximately 35 Jews legally resided in the ghetto, and the number of unregistered Jews may have reached 20–30. This represents a total of over 50 people. The area of the ghetto was significantly reduced.
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