A cotton thread for sewing uniforms for the German Wehrmacht, from a Jewish cloth factory in the Lodz ghetto, 1941

A cotton thread for sewing uniforms for the German Wehrmacht, from a Jewish cloth factory in the Lodz ghetto, 1941

baumwollnahzwirn khaki-sandfarben litmannnstadter fabrik fur NAHGARNE AG litzmannstadt 1941 - a cotton thread for sewing Color Brown - which was made by Jews for the German Wehrmacht at the "LFN Litzmannstädter" factory in the Lodz ghetto in 1941.

These threads were used by the Jews to sew uniforms for two units in the German army, for the German units that fought in North Africa (on there labels was written: "FÜR UNIFORMEN DER SÜDFRONT / AFRIKA" - for the soldiers of the South African Front). The color of these was green, and the thread before us which was sewn "for fur NAHGARNE AG". Whose color is brown.

In the early years of the Lodz ghetto, the Jews set up more than a hundred small and medium-sized factories on their own initiative, in which they produced a variety of goods for the Germans, in exchange for food. The Jewish Altenstern ("Council of Elders"), headed by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, set up factories in the ghetto, organized the work there and tried to obtain orders from the Germans for goods. The Jews also saw their work in factories as a way to prove to the Germans their economic value, and thus to be saved from deportations to extermination. The factories in the ghetto were called "ressorts" by the Jews (short for "Arbeitsressorte"). The Jewish Council saw the establishment of the resorts as a way to save the population imprisoned in the ghetto from starvation, while the hungry Jews of the ghetto were willing to work for meager food rations, when the alternative was starvation.

In May 1940, the first tailoring resort opened. "300 tailors worked there, who brought the sewing machines and desks from their homes", notes Michal Unger. "There was not enough work for everyone, so they were divided into two groups and worked alternately. The first orders that came from the city were few and far between". The answer to most of the first orders was given by using raw materials collected in the ghetto itself, since at the beginning of the operation of the resorts the Germans did not provide raw materials. The resorts produced mainly products required for the war economy of the Reich. In October 1940, the German administration of the ghetto, headed by Hans Biebow ((Head of the German Nazi administration in the Lodz ghetto in occupied Poland, executed on June 23, 1947), decided to participate in the establishment of manufacturing plants in the ghetto. In the late 1940s, expressed goods orders satisfied, and orders from the resorts increased. In 1941, the increase in the number of resorts continued. In January 1941 Biebow noted: "The excellent processing of the uniforms made the client, the navy ... to hand over all the work almost exclusively to the ghetto ... the best proof of fair and solid execution is the smallest percentage of the goods returned (out of hundreds of thousands of shirts to the army, returned  C. 700) ... "(Michal Unger, Lodz: The Last of the Ghettos in Poland, p. 155-163).

About 120 resorts, most of them in the textile industry, were established in the Lodz ghetto, employing more than 70,000 Jews. The resorts slightly alleviated the famine, cold, and disease in the ghetto, but despite their existence, most of the ghetto population perished from starvation and disease, as well as deportations to extermination camps that began in 1942, in which tens of thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths. In June 1944, 77,000 people remained in the Lodz ghetto. About 90% of them were employed in manufacturing plants. Until August 1944, almost all the Jews of the ghetto were deported to the Chelmno and Auschwitz extermination camps. Of the more than 200,000 Jews in Lodz, about 7,000 survived the concentration camps.

A 50-gram cotton thread roll, with original production labels of the ghetto. Height 7 cm. Diameter 4 cm. Very good condition.