The Lodz Ghetto and the Kriminalpolizei: Jews, Neighbors, and Perpetrators in the Holocaust

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Eastern European Jewish Studies The Workers Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies Admission: Free Watch the video

The German criminal police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo) maintained a permanent station in the Lodz ghetto, which over the four years of its existence imprisoned some 200,000 Jews. Responsible for stopping smuggling networks and for gathering information about hidden possessions inside and outside the ghetto, the Kripo relied heavily on local ethnic Germans, the so-called Volksdeutsche. These policemen exploited their prewar social networks in their investigations and carried out violent acts against Jews familiar to them. They deployed their Polish and Yiddish language skills in interrogations of suspects, and they used their knowledge of Jewish religious practices and local customs to spy on the Jews and later to evaluate their confiscated property.

In this talk, Winson Chu focuses on how police records in Poland and survivor sources at YIVO enable a better understanding of such prewar connections with wartime perpetrators. By providing additional detail and context to existing accounts of ghetto experiences, this approach re-embeds Jews into interethnic relations in prewar Lodz and Nazi-occupied Poland and questions the common perception of the Lodz ghetto as “hermetically sealed.”

About the Speaker

Winson Chu is Associate Professor of Modern Central European History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dr. Chu is currently working through the YIVO archives with the assistance of the Workmen's Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies. His project focuses on how locals serving in the Kriminalpolizei in the Central Polish city of Łódź/Litzmannstadt facilitated the Holocaust.

His first monograph, The German Minority in Interwar Poland, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012 and received a Fraenkel Prize commendation by the Wiener Library in London. He is also co-author of "A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe?: The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during the Two World Wars," which appeared in German History in 2013, and "From Łódź to Litzmannstadt: German Pasts and Holocaust Sites in Post-Communist Poland," which appeared in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2017.

Dr. Chu has had fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in Israel, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He worked on the "Germanness" module within the German Historical Institute’s digital project "German History Intersections." He has served on the governing board of the Polish Studies Association, the academic council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, and the executive board of the Central European History Society.