and the family seat was seized by the Free State of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. At the back of Waren Town Hall a bullet hole can still be seen today as reminder of the affair. In 1920 the town began raising a spa tax. On 3 December 1920 Waren became the county town of the county of Waren. On 11 November 1925 the sub-district (Amt) of Röbel was incorporated into the Amt of Waren. In 1925 the first electric lights were lit. In the same year Waren Harbour reached its economic peak – 188 ships arrived and 208 departed handling a total of 22,330 tonnes of goods. In 1927 the following big firms were operating in the town: the Naschkatze dairy, the Piechatzek engineering works and iron foundry (today Mecklenburger Metallguss), the Steinborn steam-powered sawmill and the Thiele und Buggisch mill. There was also a milk exporting concern, Natura, a potato factory, the Strubelt steam-powered sawmill, a gas works and a fish-processing plant. There were 14 construction businesses, a roofing felt company, five mills, two cement factories and the Rosengarten Fishery. The Roman Catholic Church was consecrated on 15 September 1929. Nazi era At the district elections on 1 November 1931, the Nazis were the largest party. They filled the post of district chief executive (Amtshauptmann) on 1 April 1932 and mayor in December 1932. During the Nazi era, Jewish townsfolk were persecuted, expelled and murdered in concentration camps. The Jewish community, which had numbered 150 in the middle of the 19th century, had dwindled by April 1938 to nine. The old synagogue was sold in 1936 to a private owner, so that it was not destroyed by the Nazis. However, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated and destroyed in the November Pogrom of 1938. Since 1961 a memorial has commemorated it. In 1942 there were no Jews left in Waren. From 1936 the Dürener Metallwerke (suppliers to the military aircraft industry) established a plant in Waren, the Mecklenburgische Metallwarenfabrik Waren or Memefa, which belonged to the Quandt Group. Several thousand POWs, as well as men and women from the countries occupied by Germany, were used as forced labourers there, working sometimes in inhumane conditions. To provide works housing for the German workforce, from 1936 to 1941, a new residential area, the Westsiedlung, was built. For this the Berlin architect, Günther Paul (1898–1976), designed multi-family houses (in Thomas-Mann-Straße, Friedrich-Engels-Platz and Clara Zetkin-Straße), semi-detached houses