Abraham Gancwajch

 The "13"

Nazi Collaborators in the Warsaw Ghetto

Abraham Gancwajch was born in Czestochowa but spent some time in Vienna and Lodz. He was a journalist and returned to Poland from Austria in 1936. In Lodz he worked as an editor of a pacifist anti-Nazi newspaper, but left Lodz and moved to Warsaw during the Nazi occupation.

He was the moving spirit behind the organisation known as the “Thirteen” which will be covered in greater detail below, which was dissolved in July 1941. He worked for the German Security Police in Warsaw, passing information to them about conditions in the ghetto, and the Jewish Underground. 

The Thirteen  (Trzynastka)

 Within the Warsaw Ghetto an agency known as the “Thirteen” – Trzynastka in Polish – and Das Draitzental in Yiddish was established.

The agency took its name from the address of its headquarters at 13 Leszno Street, and was imposed on the ghetto by the Germans. The principal aim of the “Thirteen” which was founded in December 1940 was the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering in the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw.

Its personnel sported polished boots, caps with a green band, epaulets and stars to denote rank. The ranks of the “Thirteen” numbered around three to four hundred men.

In May 1941 Abraham Gancwajch agency set up “First Aid” a kind of Red Cross emergency station. Gancwajch also established a department to supervise weights and measures in the Warsaw ghetto and an organisation of disabled veterans of the 1939 fighting, as well as cultural and religious societies.

Gancwajch’s past was shrouded in mystery, but his arrival and prominence in the Ghetto was no doubt sanctioned by the Germans, Gancwajch himself claimed that his privileged position grew out of his recommendation to the Germans by a relative of his, Moshe Merin, who was Chairman of the District Judenrat in Zaglebie.

Others claimed his rise to power was due to the recommendations of Dr. Ohlenbusch, whom Gancwajch had met when he was a journalist. Dr Ohlembush was in charge of the Propaganda department in Warsaw District, and subsequently was in charge of the Propaganda Department of Governor Frank’s administration in Cracow.

Stanislaw Adler recounted the membership conditions, and some of the members of the 13 cadres:

“The admission fee to become a member of the “13” was several thousand zlotys. At one point, when Gancwajch was in need of money, he began increasing the membership of his staff daily, and this provided him with a substantial sum of money.

This money was not for his personal use, but to pay bribes to the Germans to protect the “13” against threats of ending its existence. No special formalities or screening were used in recruiting candidates for the “13” so it comes as no surprise that elements from the criminal world became part of this organisation.

Read the full story here:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/The13.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Hitler; Himmler Shoah; Third Reich; Final Solution; Nazi; National Socialism; Jews; Judaism; The Holocaust; Auschwitz; Deathcamps; Sobibor; Belze; Treblinka; Krakow; Lublin; Action Reinhard; Wirth; Globocnik; Goering; Goebbels; Anne Frank; Propaganda; Genocide; Murder; Racism; Aryan; anti-Semitism; Israel; Torah; Talmud; Sephardic; Mengele; Euthanasia; Wannsee; World War II; Axis History; Gas Vans; Chelmno; gas chamber; Zyklon B; Buchenwald; concentration camp; Dachau; Bergen Belsen; Stuthoff; Gross Rosen; Mauthausen; Natzweiler; Survivors;