It must be said that the work of workshops, transactions carried out by the Department of Industry and Trade (whose commercialised branch later became known as “Lieferungsgesellschaft des Jüdischen Gewerbes GmbH”, or the Jewish Industrial Supply Company),505 and any other export businesses within the official institutions were disproportionately low in relation to “illegal” exports, or rather for transport from the ghetto which occurred without the involvement of the Transferstelle.
Such export smuggling was the second track of the economic life of the ghetto.
It is a thorn in the side of the Transferstelle, which cannot reconcile two obvious facts: that official Jewish agents maintain that there are no resources in the ghetto whatsoever, and, on the other hand, that the ghetto, “deprived of any resources”, runs an export business worth millions, supplying finished products outside.
The Transferstelle, as an official body unsuited to adapting to external conditions, had to overcome a number of difficulties regarding resources. The government agencies controlling economic resources on behalf of Kraków considered the size of the Warsaw ghetto to be too insignificant to allocate a quota of raw materials there. The Transfer, however, to justify its existence as an institution that was the centre of all economic life in the ghetto, and even supported it (Wirtschaftsförderung506 was a very important Transferstelle Department), had in some way to emphasise that lack of resources prevented the development of that life. Inquiries come from the Reich, German merchants arrive, wishing to order articles from Jewish craftsmen—and there are no raw materials, even for the most basic ones such as timber. So, because of the lack of raw materials, the Transferstelle’s position is a little shaky. If, therefore, a Jewish illegal exporter has enough resources from the free market, how could he get them without the Transferstelle, and—most importantly—for whom does he work? This issue is of utmost interest to the institution at Królewska Street 23,507 which [10] wants to penetrate the open secrets of ghetto export and direct this export to its official path.
