546 The Ringelblum Archive. Warsaw Ghetto. Everyday Life.
Chapter Eleven: The Thirteen contains material on the activities of the Gestapo representatives in the Warsaw Ghetto, the so–called “Office to Combat Usury and Speculation,” often referred to as “The Thirteen” for its street address, Leszno 13. The office, the only institution in the ghetto not subordinated to the Jewish Council, was set up in the autumn of 1940 with a very murky area of responsibility, which was vaguely defined as fighting profiteering. In reality, the organization focused on extortion from ghetto businesses and controlled smuggling.
Only single documents of those included in this volume have appeared in print to date. Some of them, though not published, are already widely referred to in the scholarly literature. Only now, however, will they be available to a wider circle of researchers and to the general public.
