In directing its output towards the war effort, and profiting from forced labour, Topf and Sons was doing nothing out of the ordinary. It would come to light that many German companies did the same, and on a far larger scale. The economy of the Third Reich had been propped up by this practice since 1937, and by August 1944 there were 7.5 million foreign workers in Germany, most of them forced labourers. Steel giant Krupp employed 75,000 forced labourers; Audi (then known as Group Auto Union) used more than 20,000 concentration camp workers; carmaker BMW has admitted to using more than 50,000 forced labourers producing arms and U-boat batteries; and the chemical and pharmaceutical companies BASF, Bayer and Hoescht had a total of 80,000 forced labourers on their books. Records of Erfurt’s Jewish families show that local companies were also using forced labour – including one called Thuba that made bathroom boilers, and another that manufactured aeroplane parts.
What made Topf and Sons unusual, however, was not their use of forced labour, abhorrent as that was, but the initiative the company would take in developing the technology to drive the Holocaust. It was this work that would demonstrate a combination of technical innovation and a horrifying lack of human empathy. Yet, such disinterest and disregard for human life should not be confused with a lack of emotion. Far from it. Topf and Sons regarded their work as nothing less than a ‘project of passion’ – and it would inflame the pride, loyalty, jealousy and ambition of several men, including company directors Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig Topf; engineers Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander, Karl Schultz and Paul Erdmann; and operations director Gustav Braun.
Out of this handful of men, it is Kurt Prüfer and Ludwig Topf who demand the most immediate attention.
Prüfer would come to distinguish himself as the true ‘pioneer of annihilation’. Without his singular focus, technical skills and drive to better himself, it is doubtful that Topf and Sons would have developed the expertise to become market leaders in crematoria or that the company would have forged such a mutually beneficial partnership with the SS.
Prüfer was born in Erfurt in April 1891, the youngest child in a big working-class Protestant family of thirteen children, who relied on their father, an engine driver, to support them. After spending eight years at school, Prüfer started work, undertaking a three-year bricklaying apprenticeship which he completed successfully, passing with a grade of ‘very good’. He went on to study at the School of Arts and Crafts in Erfurt for two terms, before taking a course in building construction at the Royal Building Trades School.
With this training behind him, Prüfer was now well equipped to earn a good living working in the construction industry. During this time his father had opened a restaurant near Topf and Sons and Prüfer would often overhear conversations about the company that piqued his interest. The workers who came to the restaurant on 12 Nonnerain to eat and drink talked about an exciting, expanding, international company – a machinery factory and furnace builders that seemed in spirit with the scientific and technical revolution of the times. The promise of living a more ambitious life obviously appealed to a young Kurt Prüfer (who spoke English and some French) and he made his first, handwritten application to join Topf and Sons on 12 December 1909 at the age of eighteen:
The undersigned takes the liberty of enquiring whether it would be possible to join your firm as an engineer in April 1910, and permits himself to include his CV below.
I, Kurt Prüfer, son of the locomotive driver Hermann Prüfer, was born on 21 April 1891, and from the ages of six to fourteen attended citizen school, from which I graduated from the highest class. After my confirmation I did three years’ practical training with the master carpenter Herr Otto Berghof. I then did two semesters at the state School of Arts and Crafts, and I am currently in my fourth semester at the Royal Building Trades School, Erfurt, where I shall remain until the end of the semester.
In the hope that my request will meet with your valuable consideration, I remain, yours faithfully,
Kurt Prüfer14
He was swiftly rejected by Ludwig Topf Sr, but this did not deter him from applying again only four months later. In his second application he stated that although he had now completed a fourth term in a building construction course and was working for Erfurt architect Gustav Leithold, ‘a post in your honoured institute … would correspond more to my wishes’. Again Prüfer was rejected. He worked another year as a foreman and engineer in the construction industry for the A. Dehne building company before making a third application to Topf and Sons in the summer of 1911. This time he was successful and, after a four-week probation period, he was given a full-time job at Topf and Sons on 16 June 1911. Prüfer’s determination to join Topf and Sons seems all the more remarkable given that his starting salary of ninety marks a month was significantly lower than what he had been earning before, and he had less responsibility – working not as a foreman but on construction drawings and structural calculations.
Prüfer was employed at Topf and Sons for more than a year, until October 1912 when he was called up to do military service. Enlisted into the 71st Erfurt Regiment, he remained in the army until the end of the First World War. The 71st Erfurt Regiment first saw battle on the Eastern Front in the first Battle of the Maurasian Lakes, but was then transferred to the Western Front in October 1915 and fought at Verdun, the Somme, Arras and Passchendaele.
Historian Annegret Schüle speculates on the impact of these experiences on Prüfer’s character: ‘The significance of Prüfer’s wartime experiences for his later actions should not be underestimated. As a soldier on the Western Front he learned that human life is worthless and he was confronted with mass death. The fact that he himself survived can only have intensified his ambition and pride.’15
In truth, though millions of other men were also scarred by the horror and mass casualties of First World War, very few went on to inflict suffering on others in their later lives with such cold calculation.
On 21 December 1918 Kurt Prüfer was discharged from the army and returned to Erfurt to work for the city council as a structural engineer where, for five months, he helped with the clearance of war damage. Prüfer then went back to the Building Trades School and spent another two terms studying civil engineering. He passed his exam on 15 March 1920 and then reverted to his original pre-war ambitions – he returned to work at Topf and Sons.
More than ten years had passed since Prüfer sought to join the company as a teenager. He was now a 29-year-old qualified engineer working in Division D, Furnace Construction. To round out his life, Prüfer also got married at this time, to his wife Frieda, who was a year older than him, but the couple would never have children.
Working in furnace construction, an offshoot of the company’s main activities and such a small part of Topf and Sons’ income, seems like an odd choice for an ambitious man – but Prüfer had foresight. In 1920, the furnace construction division worked mainly on building industrial furnaces, but Prüfer saw and understood the rising movement for human cremation and anticipated a growing area of business. Annegret Schüle prescribes his interest in cremation as a ‘way of working through his encounter with mass death at the Front and of finding a way of dealing with death, within ordered, technical parameters’.16 It was just as likely, however, to have been a shrewd career move by a man always looking for the next step ahead.
Like most German workers, Prüfer’s fortunes fluctuated in the early 1920s and the years of the Weimar Republic. His salary rose dramatically in line with the rampant inflation of the times, but in 1924 he wrote about being dismissed from his job. By mid-1924, however, the situation had stabilised and Prüfer began to receive pay rises that mirrored the growing importance of his work. On 1 March 1924, his wage rose to 290 Goldmarks (the German currency that preceded the Reichsmark) then to 345 on 1 April, before reaching 380 on 1 November. Six months later, he began to receive a commission of 1 per cent gross profit for sales of cremation furnaces and fixtures.
Yet, despite his pay rises, and his seeming determ
ination to work for Topf and Sons against all odds, Prüfer would always feel that he was being treated unfairly at the company and that his ‘loyalty’ went unrecognised. His personnel file contains none of the warm notes written by the Topf brothers to other employees upon hearing of the birth of babies or death of relatives – and Prüfer himself sends Ludwig Topf only a brief, curtly written Christmas card, which he posts on Christmas Eve, too late to reach his boss on time.
This sense of grievance would be inflamed over the years by a series of tense working relationships – none more strained than that between Prüfer and his soon-to-be manager, Fritz Sander.
Sander was fifteen years older than Prüfer, and came from a more middle-class family, with a father who was an office worker in Leipzig. Like Prüfer, however, Fritz Sander had studied for only an intermediate technical qualification, and had not attended university, nor had he fought in the First World War. But if Prüfer believed that the two men should have been equals, the reality was that Sander was Prüfer’s boss as the most senior man in the furnace construction division, and in charge of overseeing all of Prüfer’s designs. Sander was also bestowed with a rank and series of responsibilities that demonstrated he was held in a regard by the Topf family never extended to Kurt Prüfer.
After ten years with the company, Sander was promoted to senior engineer. In 1928 he was given joint powers of attorney, meaning that he could represent the company legally with two other company officers. In 1939 this was extended, and Sander was given power of attorney alongside only one other company representative. Despite the crucial role he would play in mediating between the company and the SS, Kurt Prüfer was never awarded this privilege – and the slight rankled. (The Topf brothers note in Prüfer’s file that he must never be given the right to oversee business dealings alone, as he is not to be trusted.)
The animosity between the two men was visceral – and ran both ways. Sander often commented on Prüfer’s absence record, changing ‘due to illness’ to ‘supposedly due to illness’ – or specifically ‘supposedly due to gall bladder trouble’ on various occasions. His suspicions were perhaps well founded, as Prüfer’s absence record totalled more than twenty-four days in 1944 – and he petitioned the company on many other petty matters, including the right to leave work ten minutes early to catch his train:
Erfurt, 2 October 1943
To the company directors
RE. WORKING HOURS
Dear Herr and Herr Topf
The new working hours mean I often have to catch the 17:30 train which, to make matters worse, regularly runs fifteen minutes late. You may not be aware that, due to my wife’s illness, I also have to take care of all the food shopping. I am therefore requesting permission to leave ten minutes before the official close of business, so that I can catch the train at 17:12 (which, incidentally, runs on time).
Since my official start time is still 7.30 a.m. but the train gets me here at 7 a.m., I would still be working my full hours.
Hoping you will grant my request.
Kurt Prüfer17
Prüfer also filed an insurance claim for a new suit after snagging his jacket on a filing cabinet (the claim was rejected). Sander’s distaste for his colleague, and his attitudes, was reflected in a disparaging poem about Prüfer that was published in the 1938 commemorative booklet, which referenced Prüfer’s lack of enthusiasm for his work.
Realising that he had little room for advancement in a company that neither liked nor respected him, Prüfer ruthlessly pursued what he considered to be the most effective way forward: developing a successful cremation oven production unit from which he initially took a commission, and cementing a strong personal bond with the SS which he could use as leverage with regards to his employers.
His professional partner in crime would be the dilettante Ludwig Topf, self-styled cremation expert and supposed author of a 1934 Topf advertising brochure, lauding the ‘modern process of cremation’ used by Topf – and calling the Topf technique ‘the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology’.
Together Ludwig Topf and Kurt Prüfer had worked hard to associate Topf and Sons with technologically advanced cremation that fully supported human dignity in death, and had put the company in pole position when the Cremation Act of May 1934 made cremation legal throughout Germany. Now they would also be fully prepared to take advantage of economic opportunities that arose from the mass murders committed by their new political masters.
Ludwig believed that his faith in Topf and Sons was in fact very similar to faith in National Socialism. ‘Just as with the war in which we currently find ourselves,’ he expounded, ‘we must not count the cost but must simply believe, and when we believe then we achieve. The political example of our Führer proves this. He started with just a very small number of men. People back then could have said he was crazy, but he did it.’
CHAPTER THREE
A BEAUTIFUL NAME
Hartmut Topf did not know his father’s cousins, Ludwig or Ernst Wolfgang. As a child he never enjoyed the opulence of the family park, and never saw the famous company letters spelled out on the steep roof of the administration building. All that Hartmut knew was that he was from a famous family, a family that had built a business that could make him proud of the Topf name.
I knew that we were the Topf family, and that Topf was known all over the world for their big factories and chimneys and ovens. I knew I had this beautiful name, and that I belonged to some sort of a dynasty. I still have the contract, written in original handwriting, from when my grandfather decided to leave the business – and the brothers promised each other mutual help.
Hartmut’s father, Albert, was the son of Julius Topf, who had dissolved his partnership with Ludwig Sr to concentrate on market gardening.
We all knew that that my great-grandfather founded J. A. Topf and Sons, and that his two sons, my grandfather Julius and his brother Ludwig Sr, took over the company. My grandfather left the company in 1904 and died of sepsis in 1914. Ludwig Sr committed suicide in the same year. I never knew them.
Hartmut’s one remaining link to his grandfather Julius is a copy of Julius’s curriculum vitae. In a later version, typed up by Hartmut’s Uncle Heinz during the Third Reich, all references to being a Freemason have been removed. ‘He omitted all signs and secret hints of Masonry, because under the Nazis it was forbidden.’ Despite the dangers, however, Hartmut’s father, Albert, would always keep the last vestiges of Julius’s history as a Mason. ‘My father, Albert, lost his own father when he was fourteen,’ Hartmut says. ‘He was always longing for a father.’
As the youngest of the nine siblings, Albert Topf was the baby of the family. Hartmut says: ‘Everybody loved him because he was the youngest. His older sisters all took care of him wherever they could. My father was sort of a pet child for the whole family, and he was helpful to everybody.’ Albert grew up and lived in Erfurt until he was twenty-eight. After completing a compulsory year of military service, he graduated from the engineering school at Ilmenau and then worked in a factory before moving to Berlin. By this stage Julius’s widow and children were no longer on speaking terms with Else Topf or her two sons, Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang so, despite Albert’s inclination towards science and engineering, there was no possibility of a career at the family firm. Instead Albert took a job with electrical giant Siemens and moved to a wooden hut in Siemensstadt a town close to the factory near Spandau, on the outskirts of Berlin. Returning to Erfurt to see his family, he would meet and then marry a local girl, Irmgard, who was working at his sister Agnes’s kindergarten – just across the street from the Topf family park.
Part of Albert’s work involved developing 16 mm film and film cameras for Siemens and he often took home movies of his new wife and young family. One silent reel shows Irmgard sitting in the back garden of the kindergarten singing with her colleagues; another shows their new baby Hartmut being spoon-fed dinner by his grandmother. ‘I was born and baptised in Siemensstadt,’ says Hartmut. �
��Berlin was a booming industrial town and Siemens had a huge factory. I spent the first year of my life in that wooden cabin, and my father would add on to it every year, making it very comfortable and well fitted out.’ Although Siemensstadt was his father’s world, Hartmut would occasionally visit the homes of some of the men Albert worked with, and come away with the odd present, like a toy train.
Hartmut’s most vivid memories of his childhood begin, however, when the family bought a parcel of land in the then almost rural suburb of Falkensee, where they built their own home. Albert’s brother Karl, an architect who had also built the Erfurt kindergarten, helped design a large modern house with two rooms downstairs, three rooms upstairs and a central heating system: ‘There was a bathroom with an oven that you could heat with coal or wood and once a week on the weekend everybody got a warm bath,’ Hartmut remembers. It was a major step up for the family who had received no notable upturn in their finances – Albert Topf cycled the two miles to the station every day for his train ride to Siemens where he worked at the same engineering job.
At Falkensee, Hartmut, his parents and his two sisters, Elke and Karin, settled into a happy family life.
‘I saw our house being built as a small child,’ Hartmut says. ‘I remember some of the craftspeople working there, like the bricklayers. I grew up in that house and in that garden. We had a piano, a very important thing in those early years.’
Hartmut’s father could be taciturn and quiet: ‘He was sometimes a bit blunt and he could be very short with you. He had a strange sense of humour. He was not a big speaker.’ At home Albert would work away on a big table, making progress on his latest film project, or his glass photography negatives.
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