During the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II, the "Einsatzgruppe II" entered Starachowice on September 27, 1939 to commit various crimes against Poles. During World War II it was occupied by Germany and in 1940 the Germans carried out mass arrests of local Polish intelligentsia. Poles were used as forced labour in the local factory. During the Holocaust, the ghetto in Wierzbnik was liquidated on October 27, 1942, and many of its prisoners were sent to the death camp Treblinka. The remaining Jewish residents of Starachowice and Wierzbnik were sent to German labor camps in the vicinity. Those camps were liquidated in the summer of 1944. The remaining survivors were deported to Auschwitz where many of them met their deaths at the hands of the Schutzstaffel. There was a munition plant there where Jewish slave labor was used. In 1944, during and following the Warsaw Uprising, the Germans deported thousands of Varsovians from the Dulag 121 camp in Pruszków, where they were initially imprisoned, to Starachowice. Those Poles were mainly old people, ill people and women with children. 10,000 Poles expelled from Warsaw stayed in the town, as of 1 November 1944.