Paole Zion

Walter Toebbens, a leading German industrialist and major “employer” of the “productive Jews” of Warsaw, was brought from Berlin to solve the Nazis’ difficulties by “peaceful means”. He was to convince the Jewish civic and religious leaders to surrender their followers for “re-settlement”. Instead, Toebbens decided to take the opportunity …

1943-02-20

225

A062

Walter Toebbens, a leading German industrialist and major “employer” of the “productive Jews” of Warsaw, was brought from Berlin to solve the Nazis’ difficulties by “peaceful means”. He was to convince the Jewish civic and religious leaders to surrender their followers for “re-settlement”. Instead, Toebbens decided to take the opportunity to move his shops – lock, stock and workers – out of the doomed Ghetto. Appeals and lies brought about 250 of his 1600 laborers to the site of the Schultz & Schilling Brush Works on Shwentoyerska Street. Here they, along with the tools and goods of the factory, were loaded onto a convoy of trucks. Near noon, the convoy moved off, with a single aged armored car in the lead, under the guard of the despised Vernichtung – anti-Semetic Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian volunteers under SS command. The trucks were bound by a circuitous route for the rail station at Umschlagplatz. Within minutes, however, a commando from the Paole Zion group ambushed the convoy.

Warsaw Ghetto, Poland

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II to oppose Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Majdanek and Treblinka death camps. After the Grossaktion Warsaw of summer 1942, in which more than a quarter of a million Jews were deported from the ghetto to Treblinka and murdered, the remaining Jews began to build bunkers and smuggle weapons and explosives into the ghetto. The left-wing Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and right-wing Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) formed and began to train. A small resistance effort to another roundup in January 1943 was partially successful and spurred Polish resistance groups to support the Jews in earnest. The uprising started on 19 April when the ghetto refused to surrender to the police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who ordered the burning of the ghetto, block by block, ending on 16 May. A total of 13,000 Jews died, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated. German casualties were probably fewer than 150, with Stroop reporting 110 casualties.

Axis

Partisan

Scenario Type = Standard