Warsaw Ghetto Weapons
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was an immediate disadvantage for the Jews. They were missing their key stone to their uprising against the German Nazis; proper weaponry.
Before the Warsaw Uprising occurred in the Jewish Ghettos, the Jews needed weaponries to fight against the German Nazi soldiers. As the ghettos were highly patrolled by the Nazi authorities, collecting weapons was near impossible during before the uprising.
This led to a massive demand for weapons by the Jewish underground organizations.
However, the Jews were able to collect bits and pieces of weaponry that did not turn out to be that successful. Although they had their weapons, they were often not even a match to the over powered weapon and technology of the Nazis and this led to their rather quick downfall.
But in a scenario and situation the Jews were in, it is quite a feat that they were able to get enough weapons to fight against the Nazis. How did the Jews get their weapons before the uprising?
It all started when the underground Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ZOB) was created after the devastating deportations of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
The ZOB attempted to get their weapons during the summer of 1942 from the Polish military underground movement (Home Army) but they failed to get their weapons. However, things looked brighter when the ZOB finally received some weaponries from the Home Army around late October of 1942.
Yitzhak Zuckerman the officer in charge of the weapons smuggling in the underground of the Jewish Combat Organization made his weapon shipments into very small segments in order to make it less obvious to the Germans. Therefore, around 10-20 pieces of arms were shipped at a time, mainly consisting of small calibre pistols and hand grenades.
Furthermore, the home army managed to train the soldiers with sabotaged and homemade weapons such as molotov cocktails etc. According to Marek Edelman at the time uprising started, each of the unit had a pistol with 10–20 rounds of ammunition, 2–5 hand grenades, and some with few of the fuel bombs. There were several rifles at their disposal and one heavy machine gun at that point of the uprising.
With the weapons they scarcely collected, they attempted their first revolt against the German escorts on January 18, 1943. That day, a group of Jewish fighters mainly armed with pistols, attempted a infiltration of a column where Jews were being forced to the Umschlagplatz (transfer point) and at a prearranged signal, they fought against their German escorts.
Obviously, the Jews’ weapons were not as advanced and lethal compared to what the German escorts were carrying. This led to a mass Jew killing on that day. But on the bright side, this sufficiently slowed down the German escorts, leading to Jews that were in columns at the transfer point to run away.
Moving further into the timeline of the uprising, on August 2nd of 1943, around 1,000 Jewish captives at the Treblinka managed to steal weapons from the camp’s armory and attempted a revolt. Several hundred inmates escaped, but the rest were recaptured and killed. But the remaining of the few hundreds managed to give a little more hope to the ZOB by giving them stolen weapons. But they knew that it was pretty much pointless as the ghettos were annihilated back in May 16th 1943.
The Jews managed to collect weapons, but it was a quite poor attempt. Often times the Jews would not get enough weapons nor advanced weapons to match up against the powerful Germans.