Chaim Rumkowski
Head of Judenrat in Lodz Ghetto.
Chaim Mordechaj Rumkowski (February 27, 1877 – August 28, 1944) was the head of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Łódź Ghetto appointed by Nazi Germany during the German occupation of Poland.
Rumkowski accrued much power by transforming the ghetto into an industrial base manufacturing war supplies for the Wehrmacht in the mistaken belief that productivity was the key to Jewish survival beyond the Holocaust. The Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1944. All remaining prisoners were sent to death camps in the wake of military defeats on the Eastern Front.
As the head of the Judenrat, Rumkowski is remembered for his speech Give Me Your Children, delivered at a time when the Germans demanded his compliance with the deportation of 20,000 children to Chełmno extermination camp. In August 1944, Rumkowski and his family joined the last transport to Auschwitz, and he was murdered there on August 28, 1944, by Jewish Sonderkommando inmates who beat him to death as revenge for his role in the Holocaust. This account of his final moments is confirmed by witness testimonies of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.
Background
Chaim Rumkowski was born on February 27, 1877, to Jewish parents in Ilyino, a shtetl in Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire. In 1892, Rumkowski moved to Congress Poland. He became a Polish citizen after the establishment of the Second Polish Republic in 1918.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q278963. VIAF identifies the subject as 144996789. The Library of Congress control number is n83154830. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1877, 1944, 1892 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chaim Rumkowski” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.