The traditional form of discrimination against european Jews changed radically with the Nazis rise to power. From the beginning Hitler used the word ghetto and made it quite clear what he meant by it:

Already in 1935, for example, he stated privately to members of the Nazi party, including his assistant Fritz Wiedemann, whose note later became public, that Jews would be placed “into a ghetto, enclosed in a territory where they can behave as becomes their nature, while the German people look on as one looks at wild animals.”¹

The scene becomes even clearer in this fragment of a document written by the Polish government-in-exile: 

“Every day large coaches come to the ghetto; they take soldiers through as if it were a zoo. … Often soldiers strike out at passers-by with long whips. … They set up genre pictures (Old Jew above the corpse of a young girl).”²

The similarity of this characterization of the ghetto to a hunting park is sadly evident. Us “Aryans” here (bios), they, the “other”, there, like animals in a zoo (zoē). From the beginning, the Nazi idea of ghetto was topologically linked, albeit surreptitiously, with the logic of extermination. In its Nazi incarnation, the ghetto begins to bear a dangerous resemblance to Henry III’s menagerie(6.8).

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1. Duneier, Ghetto, 14. ↩︎
2. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919-1945, A Documentary Reader. Quoted by Duneier, 19. ↩︎