Abraham Gancwajch
Abraham Gancwajch (1902–1943) was a prominent Nazi collaborator in the Warsaw Ghetto during the World War II occupation of Poland, and a Jewish kingpin of the ghetto underworld. Opinions about his ghetto activities are controversial, though modern research concludes unanimously that he was an informer and Gestapo(german: Geheime Staatspolizei) The Secret State Police established in the Third Reich, which ruthlessly fought against all forms of resistance in the occupied territories. Identified with the most terrible German crimes against Poles, and after 1942 also against Jews. Disbanded with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. Recognized as a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. collaborator motivated chiefly by personal interest.
Gancwajch was born in Częstochowa, Poland. As a youth, he apprenticed as a journalist and editor in Łódź, and eventually left Poland for Vienna, Austria, where he worked as a reporter on Jewish affairs for the Gerechtigkeit (Justice) periodical edited by Irene HarandIrene Harand (1900 – 1975) was an Austrian human rights activist and campaigner against antisemitism. She was born a Roman Catholic in Vienna and was an early organiser of protests against Nazi Germany's persecutions of Jews. She started the Harand Movement, an organisation World Movement Against Racial Hatred and Human Suffering in 1933 and actively campaigned throughout Europe before World War II. . He was expelled from Vienna around 1936–1938 and returned to Poland, having gained his reputation as a teacher and a Zionist journalist with an oratorical skill.
After the German invasion of Poland, he surfaced in Warsaw as a refugee from Łódź, and as a person with connections to the German SicherheitsdienstSicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers SS (SD, Reichsführer SS Security Service) - an organ of intelligence, counterintelligence and the SS security service, operating in the Third Reich in 1931–1945. (SD). He first became a Nazi collaborator as a leader of the Hashomer HatzairHashomer Hatzair was a Socialist-Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-Hungary. By 1939, Hashomer Hatzair had 70,000 members worldwide. They focused their attention on resistance against the Nazis. Its members were involved in jewish resistance movement; took a part in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, rescue jews in Hungary, Lithuania and Slovakia. After the war, the movement was involved in organizing illegal immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine., delivering weekly intelligence reports to the Germans. In December 1940 he founded the Group 13 network (polish: Trzynastka / A thirteen) - a Jewish Nazi collaborationist organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, described by historicians as the Jewish Gestapo.
Gancwajch believed the Germans would win the war and called on Warsaw’s Jews to serve them as a basic means of surviving. He preached collaboration with the German conquerors in a booklet which outraged Ghetto residents. He was also a proponent of the Nazi Madagascar Plan to create an autonomous settlement for all Jews under the protection of the Third Reich in an overseas country. Adam CzerniakovAdam Czerniaków (1880-1942) - engineer, economic, educational and social activist (for the integration of the Polish and Jewish nation), journalist, president of the Jewish Religious Community in Warsaw, president of the Warsaw Judenrat in 1939-1942. In 1942, on the day of the commencement of the great liquidation action, he refused to sign the announcement on the forced deportation of Jews from Warsaw (and in fact deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp). The next day, he committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide. A short letter to his wife was found on the table: "They demand me to kill children of my nation with my own hands. I have nothing to do but to die.", whom Gancwajch attempted to usurp as head of the JudenratJudenrat (Jewish Council or Jewish Council of Elders) - organizations established by Nazi German authorities during World War II with the task of administering Jewish communities and implementing German orders issued against them. In addition to collaborating with the occupier, most Judenrat also engaged in corruption and were aimed at the destruction of the Jewish population. Only a few of them undertook cooperation with partisans., mentioned him in his diary as a despicable, ugly creature
. Janusz KorczakJanusz Korczak, full name Henryk Goldszmit, ps. "Old Doktor" or "Mister Doktor" (born on July 22, 1878 or 1879 in Warsaw, died in August 1942 in Treblinka) - Polish-Jewish doctor, educator, writer, journalist and social activist. A theoretician and practitioner of children upbringing, creator of an original system of work with children, based on partnership, self-governing procedures and institutions, and stimulating self-education. Researcher of the world of children. He was a pioneer in the field of educational diagnosis and a precursor-activist for the human-children rights. In 1926 he initiated the first periodical, mostly edited by children - "Little Review" (polish: "Mały Przegląd"). As a Jew-Pole, he felt a double national identity., who ran an orphanage in the Ghetto, when asked why he was dealing with him, replied, I will see the devil himself to save my children.
Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering (the so-called Group 13) – a racketeering network that was officially to have combated black-marketeering in the Ghetto – gathered the greatest crooks in the Warsaw ghetto. Despite its noble name, it was doing exactly what it should fight. Denouncing, smuggling, bribery and blackmail – all under the control of the “editor” Abraham Gancwajch.
His contacts with the director of propaganda, Wilhelm OhlenbuschWilhelm Ohlenbusch (born December 28, 1899, died 1997) - head of the propaganda department at the office of the Warsaw district, appointed on February 1, 1941 as the president of the main propaganda department (German: Haupteilung Propaganda) in the General Government subordinated to the Ministry of Propaganda of the Reich (German: Propagandaministerium) PROMI for short., and his unwavering allegiance to the German occupier meant that Gancwajch enjoyed special privileges. He did not have to wear an armband with the Star of David, and the road to the Aryan part of the city was open to him.
He could make really big money. He was in charge of over a hundred houses, a poster office, several factories, and lots of other smaller businesses. It is no wonder then that one never ate and drank so much as at the gala dinners at Gancwajch, to which he invited the greatest celebrities of the Warsaw Ghetto.
With thousands of people starving around him, Gancwajch organized his son’s bar mitzvah with great pomp at the New Azazel Theater, which ended in distributing coffee and bread to the poor. As one of the witnesses says: it must have cost him a fortune
. Gancwajch was a master in creating (or rather doubling existing) institutions that, apart from a positive-sounding names, did not have much to offer. Jewish Ambulance Service, for example, had its own ambulance, but it was mainly used for smuggling goods. As one of the witnesses wrote: The poor horse was bowing under the weight of the contraband goods that were in the locked car
.
Gancwajch, who believed that only cooperation with Germany could bring salvation to his people, found out firsthand about the true intentions of the Nazis: After most of the Group 13 was eliminated by the Germans in 1943, Gancwajch reemerged outside the ghetto on the Aryan side in Warsaw, where he and other members of his group, pretending to be Jewish underground fighters, were hunting for Poles hiding or otherwise supporting the Jews. He was also the leader of the infamous Żagiew, a Gestapo-sponsored Jewish organization. He is also known to have tried to sabotage attempts at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jewish Combat Organization sentenced him to death but were never able to execute him. His ultimate fate remains unknown, however he was probably shot in Pawiak PrisonPawiak - the non-existent prison at Dzielna street 24/26 in Warsaw, erected in the years of 1830–1835 between Dzielna, Pawia and Więzienna Streets. In the years 1939–1944, the Pawiak prison was the largest German political prison in occupied Poland. According to estimates, about 100,000 people passed through Pawiak, of which about 37,000 were murdered, and about 60,000 were taken to concentration camps. The prison was destroyed by the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. in 1943.