La Shoah des ghettos

Unlike a widely held belief, the extermination of Jews was not decided during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, but long before. This idea had been haunting the minds of the German leaders since 1938 without having been formulated directly. In order not to shock public opinion, the regime's high dignitaries chose to accustom their subordinates to this funereal idea in a progressive way, first by taking a series of anti Semitic laws that excluded the Jews from society, then deciding to lock them up in ghettos.
From the outset, the ghettos were a temporary measure, used to give the leaders in Berlin time to find solutions to achieve their final goal. But they went far beyond… The 2 000 ghettos will be part of the logic of the genocide, taking the life of at least 800 000 Jews.
This new historical perspective on the chronology of the Holocaust allows us to consider the ghettos in a new light: these spaces have been an integral part of the Holocaust and its macabre process from the beginning.