The Łódź Ghetto (German: Ghetto Litzmannstadt) was the second-largest ghetto (after the Warsaw Ghetto) established for Jews and Roma in German-occupied Poland. Situated in the town of Łódź and originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the German Army. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944, when the remaining population was transported to Auschwitz and Chełmno extermination camp. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated.

When German forces occupied Łódź in September 1939, the city had a population of 672,000 people, over one-third of them (233,000) Jews. Łódź was annexed directly to the Warthegau region of the Reich and renamed Litzmannstadt in honour of a German general, Karl Litzmann, who had led German forces in the area in 1914. As such, the city was to undergo a process of Aryanization: the Jewish population was to be expelled to the Generalgouvernement and the Polish population was to be reduced significantly and transformed into a slave labour force.

Łódź ([wut​͡ɕ] ( listen); Yiddish: לאדז', Lodzh) is the third-largest city in Poland. Located in the central part of the country, it had a population of 742,387 in December 2009. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is approximately 135 kilometres (84 mi) south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of canting: depicting a boat, it alludes to the city's name which translates literally as "boat".

Łódź first appears in the written record in a 1332 document giving the village of Łodzia to the bishops of Włocławek. In 1423 King Władysław Jagiełło granted city rights to the village of Łódź. From then until the 18th century the town remained a small settlement on a trade route between Masovia and Silesia. In the 16th century the town had fewer than 800 inhabitants, mostly working on the nearby grain farms.

With the second partition of Poland in 1793, Łódź became part of the Kingdom of Prussia's province of South Prussia, and was known in German as Lodsch. In 1798 the Prussians nationalised the town, and it lost its status as a town of the bishops of Kuyavia. In 1806 Łódź joined the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw and in 1810 it had 190 inhabitants. In the 1815 Congress of Vienna treaty it became part of Congress Poland, a client state of the Russian Empire.