The fur collection drive

On 24 December 1941 Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Judenrat in Warsaw, noted in his diary that under a new order the Jews had to surrender all furs, men’s and women’s, and that he was personally responsible for it. The deadline was set for 28 December. In the last days of December the same order was announced to Jews throughout the General Government: in Kraków, Lublin, Radom, Lwów and the smaller ghettos. Anyone who still had a fur coat, a fur collar or even a scrap of fur after the deadline was to be shot. The furs, taken from people in the middle of a freezing winter, were meant to warm the German soldiers who were fighting outside Moscow in summer uniforms.

It is sometimes claimed that “all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe” had to collect furs from the Jews. That is a generalisation. The order of 24–25 December applied to the General Government. Similar requisitions were carried out at the turn of 1941 and 1942 in the ghettos of the Warthegau, including Łódź, and in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, and at the beginning of January 1942 an order to surrender furs and woollen clothing was extended to Jews in the Reich itself. It was not, however, a single uniform operation across occupied Europe, but a series of orders issued by different occupation authorities, above all in the occupied territories of Poland and the USSR.

Winter outside Moscow

The Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union convinced that the campaign would be over before winter. Winter uniforms had been prepared only in small quantities, and even those were stuck at congested stations in Poland and Belarus. When temperatures outside Moscow fell to between minus 25 and minus 35 degrees at the beginning of December and the Red Army went over to the counter-offensive, frostbite became a scourge for the Germans comparable to their combat losses. On 19 December Adolf Hitler took command of the Army himself. The next day, 20 December, the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels appealed on the radio to Germans to give woollen clothing, furs, skis and boots for the soldiers in the East. The collection (Wollsammlung), run from 27 December as part of the Winter Relief, lasted until January 1942. Propaganda later announced that tens of millions of items of clothing had been gathered.

Goebbels’s appeal was an admission that the army was not prepared for a winter war, but also an opportunity to display the unity of the “national community” with the front. Of the Jews the authorities asked nothing – they took, under threat of death.

The order in the General Government

The decision was taken at the level of the General Government administration, headed by Hans Frank, and was announced by the district governors, the Kreishauptmänner (county chiefs) and the city commissioners. In Warsaw, Order No. 7/41 of 25 December 1941 was issued by the commissioner for the Jewish district, Heinz Auerswald, a subordinate of the district governor Ludwig Fischer. The Jews were to hand over all fur coats, fur collars and “all other furs and pelts”, worked or unworked, including the trimmings on children’s clothing. Jews found in possession of such items after the deadline were to be shot. According to Czerniaków’s notes, Auerswald explained that the order also covered Jews who were citizens of other states; only citizens of neutral countries, such as Sweden or Switzerland, were exempt.

The details varied from place to place. News reached Czerniaków that in Radom and Lublin only the pelts themselves were being handed in, without the linings and outer shells of the coats, while in Kraków, where Jews had been forbidden to leave their homes, they were also ordered to hand over new, unworn underwear and high boots. In Lwów the “fur action” remained in survivors’ memories alongside the earlier resettlement actions and shootings.

The Warsaw Ghetto hands over its furs

In the Warsaw Ghetto furs were received at the community headquarters at 26/28 Grzybowska Street and in the building at 27 Grzybowska Street, and later at seven collection points. On 27 December huge queues stood outside the collection points; by noon 8,870 receipts had been issued. The normal work of the community offices came to a halt as every official counted and sorted furs. According to a tally Czerniaków entered in his diary on 29 December, by the evening of 28 December the collection had brought in, among other things, 690 men’s and 2,541 women’s fur coats, more than 8,000 fur linings, 5,118 muffs, 39,556 fur collars and 2,201 sheepskin coats. The deadline was extended; the collection finally closed on 4 January 1942, and the furs were taken under escort in SS lorries to the Umschlagplatz for delousing and sorting. According to a later note by Czerniaków, more than 180,000 fur garments were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto in the course of the whole operation.

At first the inhabitants of the ghetto did not believe the order was genuine. Then many tried to save whatever they could. According to accounts collected by the Ringelblum Archive (PL), furs were smuggled to the “Aryan side” or sold to Poles for a fraction of their value, anything rather than hand them over to the Germans. Some people destroyed their furs or cut them up. Everyone knew what a winter without warm clothing meant in unheated flats. On 11 January Czerniaków noted that there had been a severe frost for several days, all the harder to bear because people had lost their furs, and that everyone seemed to have a cold.

The operation had one more macabre epilogue. Auerswald told Czerniaków that the governor would agree to release Jews sentenced to death for leaving the ghetto if the Judenrat delivered 1,500 sheepskin coats within a week. The community collected money from the better-off inhabitants, bought up pelts and sewed sheepskin coats day and night in a cold workshop on Gęsia Street. On 17 January Fischer extended the deadline and agreed to commute the death sentences on the women and release the children, and to send the remaining prisoners before a medical commission that was to select those fit for work.

Place in the war

The fur collection was not a murder, but it belonged to the same system that murdered. It showed that the Jews of occupied Poland had no rights at all, not even to a coat, and that any order could carry the death penalty. The plunder of Jewish property had gone on since the first weeks of the occupation; in the winter of 1941/1942 it took the form of a compulsory “levy” for an army that was at that moment losing the battle outside Moscow. For the ghetto inhabitants, weakened by hunger and typhus, the loss of warm clothing in the coldest months meant further deaths.

The operation came at the turning point at which German policy towards the Jews was moving from isolation in ghettos to extermination. On 8 December 1941 at Chełmno on the Ner the killing of Jews from the Warthegau in gas vans began, and at Bełżec construction of the first extermination camp in the General Government was nearing completion. A few weeks after the furs were handed over, on 20 January 1942, Reich officials at the Wannsee Conference discussed the coordination of the “final solution of the Jewish question”. In the summer of 1942 more than a quarter of a million people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, and Czerniaków, unwilling to sign the deportation lists, took his own life.