ing the demolition of the buildings knocked down to build the ghetto walls (letter of the Commissioner of the Jewish District to the District Board, dated 7 November 1941).
In practice, the entire compulsory organisation of metal-scrap collection, which—as mentioned above—was formally controlled by the Department of Industry and Trade, was in the hands of the Georg Binder Company. Another thing is that the Jewish metalowcy501 did business on the side under the guise of collecting scrap metal, a business was not always good for the Jewish owners of the machines.
This was the party attacking the machines. What did the Jewish producer do to defend himself? One must consider that as medium and major industry abandoned the defence of their machines, the problem mostly concerned minor manufacturers, that were more vulnerable to German “care”, taking the shape of a commissary board, or simply direct confiscation. To defend his machine, a minor manufacturer had to hide it carefully from agents of Binder or some other German company. To illustrate how this was done, we will now cite the following example:
[6] A company owned by Toba Zemsz had a metalwork workshop located in a demolished building at Grzybowska Street 3. From before the war, the company had a machine for manufacturing pipe elbows for iron stoves—the only such machine in Poland. Somehow, the company received the commission for a mass order from the Heeresverwaltung—Unterkunftsstelle (garrison commissariat) for their products. Naturally, this export is carried out without the involvement of any official body, such as the Transferstelle. Instead, a paper is issued (a pass) and 1,000 cubits—the maximum total daily production—leaves Grzybowska Street 3 and goes outside the ghetto. Although the pass is good, caution is even better. The Toba Zemsz Company finds another “link.” A fictional Aryan company is set up, registered under the name of Stanisław Nowicki, formally located on Wolska Street. However, a branch of the Nowicki Company is located at . . . Grzybowska Street 3, next to Toba Zemsz’s workshop. And so, the official recipient of articles produced by Toba Zemsz’s workshop is a legitimate Aryan company, covered against any confiscation. It turns out that they were right to be cautious. The army order has become the object of envy of a certain German company from Łódź,
