In the ghetto workshops, women, men, and children labored to the point of total exhaustion. These workshops had been set up by Chaim Rumkowski, who had been appointed by the Germans as head of the Jewish administration. In an effort to save at least some of the ghetto inhabitants, he attempted to make the workshop laborers indispensable to the German occupiers by having them fillorders for the Wehrmacht.
The German ghetto administration, however, supplied too little food. As a result, one quarter of the 200,000 people in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto died of hunger and disease. In addition, the SS had the infirm, children under ten, and old people – all classified as "unable to work" – taken to the Kulmhof (Chełmno) extermination camp. In the summer of 1944, Himmler, the chief of the SS, ordered the deportation of the remaining ghetto inhabitants to Auschwitz, sealing the failure of the strategy of survival through work.