Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camps.

Theresienstadt served as a transit camp for Czech Jews whom the Germans deported to killing centers, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps in German-occupied Poland, Belorussia, and the Baltic States.

Theresienstadt was a concentration camp and a transit camp en route to the killing centers in the east. At peak capacity, in September 1942, Theresienstadt held approximately 60,000 prisoners crammed into an area with streets barely over 700 yards long.

Theresienstadt, town in northern Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), founded in 1780 and used from 1941 to 1945 by Nazi Germany as a walled ghetto, or concentration camp, and as a transit camp for western Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.

In 1941 the Nazis established a ghetto in Theresienstadt (Terezin), a garrison town in Northwestern Czechoslovakia, where they interned the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, elderly Jews and persons of “special merit” in the Reich, and several thousand Jews from the Netherlands and Denmark.

Theresienstadt was a combination of ghetto and concentration camp near the in the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia – the modern-day Czech Republic. It existed for three and a half years from November 1941 until May 1945.

It served as a minor military base first for the Habsburg Monarchy until 1918 and then for the First Czechoslovak Republic until 1938. The Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (or German occupied Czechoslovakia).

Learn about the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto, which served multiple purposes from 1941-45 and had an important propaganda function for the Germans.

Reinhard Heydrich requested Theresienstadt as a Jewish settlement site on October 10, 1941 and proposed it be for German, Austrian, and Czech Jews over the age of 65, those with disabilities, decorated WWI veterans, or known people i.e. minor celebrities whose disappearance might attract attention.

The Nazis removed 7503 Jews from Theresienstadt between 16 and 18 May 1944 to reduce overcrowding at the ghetto, holding them in a special camp at Auschwitz in case the Red Cross requested to visit them there.