Expulsion of the Jews of Katowice

Katowice, capital of industrial Upper Silesia, annexed to the Reich within the first weeks of the war, was home to a Jewish community that had grown up in the nineteenth century alongside the rise of coal and steel, and had once hosted one of the earliest conferences of the Jewish national movement. The great synagogue was set ablaze at the very start of the occupation. The German administration established there the headquarters of the body responsible for Jewish forced labor in the province, and set about emptying the city: its inhabitants were expelled to Sosnowiec, Będzin, and the Gouvernement général, before being overtaken by the deportations to Auschwitz.