ABSTRACT
The economic crisis and the changing parameters of the Soviet fur trade, the emergence of the Third Reich, and its anti-Semitic program in particular, further destabilised the social underpinnings of industrial district. This chapter examines the global economic crisis initiated by the Wall Street stock market crash at the end of the 1920s and then the changes in the USSR's foreign trade policy that turned the main trade partner of Leipzig district into an autarkic entity. It also examines the disruptive impact of anti-Semitism in the Third Reich on the social composition of an industrial district based on a balance between Jewish and gentile firms. The chapter reflects on the impact of political and economic crises upon the social structure of the industrial district. It emphases on the mechanisms of the Leipzig fur industry as an industrial district and to what degree the threefold challenges of the early 1930s eroded or reproduced these mechanisms.
