Nazi ghettos functioned as transit points toward mass extermination, not accommodation.

Evidence

The German authorities announced the plan to set up ghettos in Poland for the Jews in 1939. The first ghetto to be established was at Lodz in February 1940. It remained in existence for over four years because of its importance as a manufacturing center. The largest Polish ghetto, the Warsaw ghetto, was created in October 1940 when 140,000 additional Jews were moved in after the evacuation of 80,000 non-Jews. Following an edict of October 15, 1941, any Jew found outside the ghetto was under a death sentence. A policy of extermination by starvation was pursued. The massacre of the Polish Jews began in 1942 and in the middle of that year forced deportations began from the Warsaw ghetto. Amidst heavy resistance the Warsaw ghetto and the remaining inhabitants were finally destroyed in April and May of 1943. The Nazi ghettos were not a way of accommodating the Jews, but a transit point to their extermination. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2382

Categorization

• XREF: The contrast between medieval accommodation ghettos and Nazi extermination ghettos connects to the reader’s broader theme of how meanings of institutions shift across historical contexts, parallel to the sumptuary-law material.
• SEED: Angle: a conceptual history of the word ‘ghetto’ — from Venetian island to Nazi transit point to American inner-city. The semantic drift encodes changing functions of spatial exclusion.