After the first mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto in the summer of 1942, several Jewish resistance groups started planning an armed struggle against the liquidation of the ghetto. They set up hiding places and tried to obtain weapons.

On April 19, 1943, the German occupiers wanted to clear the ghetto entirely and deport all remaining Jews to Treblinka extermination camp. The insurgents started shooting and were initially able to push back the German police and SS units. Not until May 16, after almost four weeks, were the SS, police, and Wehrmacht able to quash the uprising. Roughly ten thousand ghetto prisoners were murdered. Around thirty thousand survivors were deported to Treblinka, Majdanek, and other camps. Only a few Jews were able to hide or escape through the sewer system.

Starting in 1942 in the forests west of Minsk, Anatolij “Tuvia” Bielski and his brothers established a Jewish partisan unit. They assassinated people who collaborated with the German occupation forces. They also supported other Soviet partisan units in acts of sabotage and attacks on transportation routes. The partisan unit helped Jews escape from the surrounding ghettos. The men, women, children, and elderly who were rescued lived as a community in the forest. Men who were fit for combat participated in armed operations. Partisans ensured that the communal camp was protected, and they acquired food and weapons. Weapons were repaired in the camp and ammunition was produced. About 1,200 people survived with the Bielski group.

In early 1942 a Zionist resistance organization was founded in Toulouse, the Armée Juive (Jewish Army). Up to two thousand Jewish activists helped Jews escape; starting in 1943, they fought with weapons against the German occupiers and their collaborators. They also smuggled Jews who wanted to join Allied armies across the border to Spain. The Armée Juive was funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief organization based in New York.

Even in the extermination camps, Jews managed to resist. They hid other prisoners or attempted to smuggle messages out of the camps. In Treblinka, prisoners attacked the heavily armed SS men and their auxiliary troops on August 2, 1943, with axes, a few guns, hand grenades, and burning gasoline-filled bottles. They set prisoners’ barracks and the service buildings on fire. However, the stone-walled gas chambers remained undamaged. Four hundred prisoners managed to escape and about four hundred others were killed during the quashing of the uprising. Subsequently, within three days the SS murdered nearly ten thousand prisoners from the Bialystok ghetto in the gas chambers of Treblinka. In 1943 and 1944, prisoners also rebelled in the Sobibor and Auschwitz extermination camps.