Walter Többens
Textile manufacturing plant in the Warsaw Ghetto
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Native name
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Többens und Schultz & Co |
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| Slave labour | |
| Industry | Textile manufacturing |
| Owners | Fritz Schultz, Walter Többens |
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Number of employees
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18,000 (1942) |
Többens and Schultz (German: Többens und Schultz & Co) was a Nazi German textile manufacturing conglomerate making German uniforms, socks and garments in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere, during the occupation of Poland in World War II. It was owned and operated by two major war profiteers: Fritz Emil Schultz from Danzig, and a convicted war criminal, Walter C. Többens (i.e. Walther Caspar Toebbens, from Hamburg).
Schultz and Többens appeared in Warsaw in the summer of 1941, not long after the Ghetto was closed off with walls topped with barbed wire. The unemployment, hunger and malnutrition there were rampant. At first, they both acted as middlemen between the German high command and the Jewish-run workshops, and placed production orders with them. Within weeks they opened their own factories in the Ghetto using slave labour on a record scale.
By spring 1942 the Stickerei Abteilung division run by Schultz at Nowolipie 44 Street had 3,000 workers making shoes, leather products, sweaters and socks for the Wehrmacht. Other divisions were making furs and wool sweaters also, guarded by the Werkschutz police. Some 15,000 Jews were working for Többens in the Warsaw Ghetto, at the Prosta Street and at the Leszno Street factories among other places. Staying with any of them was a source of envy for other Jews living in fear of deportations. In early 1943 Többens gained for himself the appointment of a Jewish deportation commissar of Warsaw in order to keep his own workforce secure and maximize profits.
Resulting from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the destruction of an entire city district by the SS, in May 1943 Többens had transferred his businesses, including 10,000 Jewish slave workers with families spared from Treblinka, to the Poniatowa concentration camp facility set up near Lublin, part of the so-called "territorial solution to the Jewish Question" never fully realized by the Schutzstaffel (SS). Fritz Schultz took his manufacture along with 6,000 Jews and their 400 children to the nearby Trawniki concentration camp commanded by Karl Streibel.
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Wikipedia