Architects of Death

by Karen Bartlett

  6. As company production director, Braun was involved in every last detail of the work being done in the factory workshops, and also in the departments and offices that reported to him. He was interested in everything they did and would check their work. It is therefore impossible that he did not know what was being produced in the factory or where it was going to be sent.

  Prüfer’s statement is so clear and well-argued that it can only have been agreed in advance with the Soviet authorities. Having marshalled this evidence, the interrogator then tells Braun:

  The statements of the prisoner Prüfer during this head-to-head encounter are sufficient proof that the construction and outfitting carried out by the Topf company in the concentration camp crematoria was not only done with your knowledge, but also with your direct participation. Drop your stubborn denials and tell us the truth.

  Braun refuses to back down, however:

  The statements made by the prisoner Prüfer during this head-to-head encounter are not what happened in reality, so I cannot confirm them. I again stress the fact that I was aware Topf and Sons was producing cremation furnaces, but I neither knew nor cared who for or on whose behalf.

  In response, Prüfer states he stands by his account and that he would like to ask Braun two direct questions:

  Does Braun remember the following incident? In the summer or autumn of 1942, we received the second order from the SS construction management unit at the Auschwitz concentration camp for the construction of five three-muffle furnaces for Crematorium III in Birkenau. Since the written order did not specify a priority level or the sequence in which the work should be carried out, I told Braun about the order when I met him in the company secretariat, and showed it to him. Braun immediately went with me to see the company’s planning department manager Mersch, with whom we then reached an agreement on the matter. On our way to Mersch’s office, Braun asked me the following question in jest, or more specifically, he stated in a jokey fashion: ‘Boys, is there anyone else to burn there?’ I replied in similarly jokey fashion.

  Secondly, Prüfer says:

  Does Braun remember that in early 1942, the company was visited by a SS officer from Berlin who wanted to negotiate the construction of new cremation furnaces for the SS? The company boss Ludwig Topf called a meeting to discuss this, in which Braun, Mersch and the SS man participated.

  At this meeting it was said that the company was fully occupied with the fulfilment of urgent orders for spare parts for military aeroplanes and could not accept any new orders from SS organs for the construction of cremation furnaces.

  In response, Braun simply states that he is ‘unable to recall these incidents’. The following day, when Gustav Braun’s solo interrogation resumes, he appears to have realised the futility of maintaining his denial. Braun now states that while he did not oversee plans for the crematoria, he was aware of their existence:

  I’m not claiming I didn’t know anything about them. Whenever the company had a major order, the company boss Ludwig Topf, or his co-owner Ernst Topf, would inform me of it and we would agree an achievable deadline.

  In individual cases I was consulted about things such as deadlines and stocks of materials for various orders. The orders received from customers were processed by the company’s technical departments. In addition, as operations director I carried out briefings of the foremen every morning, in the course of which their work for the next few days was discussed. This was based on the requirements arising from the current status of the work that needed to be done for individual orders, which the planning department had already passed to the workshops.

  These briefings were also attended by the manager of the production planning department, who passed the orders to the workshops and managed the deadlines for their completion. Thus I was always informed about the company’s operational plans, even though I was not [officially] informed about the plans created by the general planning office.

  The interrogator responds: ‘So that means you were informed that Topf and Sons had accepted and carried out orders from the SS organs for concentration camps?’

  Braun says: ‘Yes, as operations director I knew that the company had accepted and carried out orders for the Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps.’

  Braun goes on to admit that these orders were for crematoria and that, as operations director, he provided the space in the factory to assemble the furnaces, as well as arranged for metal workers to complete the installation. In the final part of his confession he states: ‘Under my directorship, the Topf and Sons factory produced ventilation systems with inward and outward ventilation which I later learned had been installed in the gas chambers.’

  ‘Why did you deny these facts during your head-to-head encounter with Kurt Prüfer?’ the interrogator asks.

  Braun responds: ‘Because I couldn’t remember clearly and also I was afraid that admitting it would [make things worse for me]. After the head-to-head I thought about it all and decided to tell the truth here.’130

  As his interrogation shows, Braun always maintained that he was initially unaware that Topf and Sons were producing ventilation systems for Auschwitz-Birkenau that were intended for the mass murder of millions in the gas chambers. Yet, the evidence of the Topf and Sons internal memo of 1943, referring to the ‘gas cellars’ at Birkenau, contradicts this.

  In addition to the charges laid against him relating to his knowledge of the production of machinery for the crematoria and gas chambers of concentration camps, the Soviet authorities also questioned Braun rigorously over his role reporting on company activities to the Gestapo, and his treatment of foreign labourers. As Annegret Schüle points out in her book on Topf and Sons, it is difficult to single Braun out for his relationship with the Gestapo – all companies were required to have a surveillance officer and Braun was appointed to this role by Ludwig Topf.

  Similarly, there is no evidence that Braun mistreated the foreign workers who came under his area of responsibility as operations director at Topf and Sons. Braun claimed that he had intervened on their behalf when they complained about poor food provision in 1943, and Udo Braun says some of the forced labourers went to the Braun house to say goodbye at the end of the war.

  At the end of his interrogation, Braun ‘confessed’ to the charges against him and was sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour – as were Kurt Prüfer and Karl Schultze. As an engineer, Braun was sent to work on the railway line 428 km south of Moscow at Kuybyshev. A fellow German prisoner reported that, even in an international group of highly skilled workers, ‘his work is the best’. After nine years, Braun was released and returned to Erfurt in October 1955.

  Udo Braun remembers that ‘Those nine years were horrible for our family. I was the son of a war criminal. Nobody said that directly to me, but they insinuated it by not letting me go either to secondary school or to university.’

  During his father’s absence, Udo had stepped in to offer his family emotional and financial support – particularly his mother, whom he adored. In 1955, Udo was working in the Wismut mines to earn money for the family.

  One day I received a telegram: ‘Can you come home, please. Father is back.’ I took the telegram to the Russian shift manager. He was very decent and gave me time off. He knew I always met my quota, which was very important to the Russians. So I got a week off to go home. My brother met me at the train station and showed me a passport photo of my father. He told me, ‘This is how he looks.’ I was shocked.

  The Gustav Braun who stepped off the train was, in his son Udo’s eyes, a broken man.

  When I got home there was a man standing in front of me who resembled my father. By now I was a big lad, built like a brick shithouse, and he couldn’t cope with me. And I couldn’t cope with him. Our communication was dire. Neither of us knew what to say. I didn’t even know how to address him. Should I call him ‘Papa’? Or ‘Father’? ‘Papa’ was customary in our house. ‘Mutti’ and ‘Papa’. But I just couldn’t say ‘Papa
’. Once I very nearly addressed him with ‘Sie’ [formal address for older strangers].

  For the rest of Gustav Braun’s life, he never discussed his work for Topf and Sons, or his time in Russia, with his son.

  I missed out on vital years. I was nine when he ‘went away’ to Russia. In his papers, he used to refer to his time in Russia as ‘a change of scenery in the USSR’. Otherwise he wouldn’t mention a single word about it. And it wasn’t like anyone would have said to him ‘Come on, tell us all about it.’ No way. He once told me that he’d been imprisoned with criminals, and that sometimes they were forced to sleep with a big plank of wood chained across their legs. So that was pretty drastic. But when the Russians realised what he could do, they moved him to an engineering office where he could work on construction projects and he did much better there.

  Above all, Udo sensed that his authoritarian father was now a frightened man. ‘My mother told me that my dad went downstairs one day and saw a railway worker walking past wearing a uniform.’ Gustav Braun was now afraid of men in uniforms. ‘My dad ended up hiding behind a pillar. He was a completely broken man. My mother said: “What’s the matter with you? It’s just a railway worker.”’

  Shortly after returning to Erfurt, Gustav Braun moved back to his home town of Heilbronn, where his eldest son Hans was living. Although Udo’s mother and younger brother also went to Heilbronn, Udo stayed behind in Erfurt – and began working for Topf and Sons as a fitter.

  We didn’t talk much. It was simply impossible. There was no common ground. Later, he wrote to me from Heilbronn saying it wasn’t good enough for me to be just a fitter. So he sent me some formulae that he thought I could use in my career. Just imagine, he was a brilliant structural engineer himself – and he sent me these formulae and said I shouldn’t get married, even though my mother wanted me to get married because in communist East Germany getting married meant that the government would allocate you an apartment and furniture.

  On occasions when they did meet, Udo felt that his father continued to torment him. One day when Udo was visiting his parents in Heilbronn, his father announced that he was going to take Udo out for an afternoon snack. This consisted of some sausage, bread and a quart of wine. Udo remembers the scene well:

  I had grown up without drinking wine, so when he went to the toilet I got the sugar and put some into the wine. That was a mortal sin. When we got back home he said to my mother: ‘I won’t go out with this Rindvieh [moron] anymore. He doesn’t know how to behave.’ That was my father.

  As the son of a Republikflüchtling (a refugee from East Germany), Udo Braun found himself persecuted by the authorities. Yet despite this, he worked his way up the company ladder until he held his father’s position at the company that was once Topf and Sons, but which had now been renamed VEB Erfurter Mälzerei- und Speicherbau (EMS).

  On 11 May 1958, three years after his release, Gustav Braun died of cancer in Heilbronn. For Udo, his father’s death offered a chance to hold the kind of conversation that had never been possible during his lifetime:

  A couple of years after he died, I went to the cemetery and talked to him. I said: ‘Father, we can end our war. I accomplished everything that you accomplished. Even a bit more than you did. You can be nice to me now. I have made up for what was lost.’ We worked in the same office without knowing it. First him as director and then me – years later – as head of production. That is quite ironic.

  During his years living and working in what was then East Germany, Udo visited the camp at Buchenwald – and witnessed some of its horrors:

  I have been to Buchenwald several times. Normally, I went with other employees from the company. It smelled very bad. Terrible. I saw the furnaces; terrible. There are images and the machinery … It is very moving and upsetting. It really does get to you. There is no room for laughter or for jokes. You can’t imagine it happening again – one couldn’t bear that. This is particularly true when you have not only seen Buchenwald, but also the pictures published by the media. Terrible, terrible things. Many people should see the camps, but, above all, it’s the sabre-rattlers who should make the trip. Buchenwald is horrifying.

  Despite seeing this evidence with his own eyes, Udo says that he still struggles to accept the fact that his father, or Topf and Sons, were totally culpable – especially given his own long career with the company after the war.

  I was an apprentice when I first heard about their having built the crematoria, or rather machines for the disposal of corpses, but I didn’t gather the extent of the measures taken to perfect the process. East Germany was not so keen on dwelling on the past. I only really began to understand it all later. I’ve always had problems, even to this day, with the apportionment of blame. Yes, the company built the furnaces and they shouldn’t have done that. They built the furnaces with German thoroughness –this is an enormous disgrace – but they also built good machines. Other machines. Good people participated, including skilled German craftsmen who built malting plants and silo facilities, some of which are still being used today. When I was working in a senior position at the company, I came across many Topf installations. This gave rise to a kind of inner conflict. The fact that Topf and Sons built those ‘perfectly efficient’ furnaces is very, very bad. But the Krupp steel and armaments company acted badly as well by building canons. And those who built other guns were bad, too. As were all the other people who supplied war materials. I cannot say that it was solely the fault of Topf and Sons. But what happened at Buchenwald was and remains atrocious.

  Working for the renamed Topf and Sons after the war, Udo Braun found himself having to defend the company more frequently as the decades passed. On one occasion, a Jewish group told him they believed the company should be taken into Jewish hands – something Udo rejected.

  It’s not a question of too much or too little culpability. I feel it’s like this: they built the furnaces and now everybody has come down on them. I took a senior position in the company afterwards and then we built our machines. History is a great burden for us … The allocation of blame had exceeded any limit. Everybody thought that they had to say something against us. This was very difficult for the subsequent employees who had played no physical part in constructing the furnaces. Our name was Erfurter Mälzerei und Speicherbau. But people kept saying: ‘Ah, these are the Topfs who built the furnaces.’ Why should this shame be heaped on us? We didn’t do anything wrong. Do you understand? That bothered me terribly … I am not capable of attributing the right amount of blame. There is always guilt if this kind of thing happens, but there has to be a limit to it.

  Nor does Udo Braun accept his father’s personal role in developing the technology that fuelled the Holocaust.

  ‘I have always wondered why my father was attacked and dragged off, while the Topfs got away unscathed. They just went for Braun, Erdmann, Prüfer and Schulze. That doesn’t seem right to me.’ Later, he added:

  You can accuse my father of being in charge of war defence within the company. The question of his guilt … in relation to the ovens, is something that I don’t see. His role in war defence – yes, he’s guilty where that’s concerned. But he played no part in the construction of the ovens.

  History, however, takes a different view. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Gustav Braun’s conviction was reviewed again by the public prosecutor’s office of the Russian Federation in accordance with a new law ‘Governing the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression’. After reviewing the files, the public prosecutor’s office reaffirmed the original charges against Kurt Prüfer, Karl Schultze and Gustav Braun, stating that all the men ‘were correctly convicted and are not eligible for rehabilitation’.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  POWER WITHOUT MORALS

  ‘No one in our company was guilty of anything at all, either morally or objectively. It is no empty phrase when I describe my company and the entirety of its conduct throughout the twelve ye
ars of the Hitler regime with the phrase: ‘Morality without Power.’

  ERNST WOLFGANG TOPF, 1958131

  Despite lengthy wrangling, Topf and Sons of Erfurt officially passed out of Topf family hands on 10 May 1947, when it became a state-owned enterprise and no compensation was awarded to its former owners. On 1 June 1948, sequestered companies in the area of Soviet occupation were deemed ‘people-owned’ – and renamed VEB.

  For the remaining members of the Topf family, this was a setback. Yet, it was far from the end of the story. For Ernst Wolfgang Topf, the loss of the company was merely a waypoint in the ongoing efforts to clear his name and re-found Topf and Sons in the West. He would dedicate the rest of his life to achieving this goal.

  Together with his sister Hanna, Ernst Wolfgang had set up a new company in Gudensberg, a small town near Kassel, as early as 2 November 1945 – while he was still actively fighting to retain control of Topf and Sons in Erfurt. The new company, J. Topf GmbH, was listed as a hardware retailer and Johanna Topf, Ernst-Otto Keyser and Heinrich Mersch were all shareholders. (Mersch, the managing director of the new company, was a former head of planning at Topf and Sons and was in a relationship with Johanna Topf.)

  From the beginning, however, the Topfs’ new enterprise was dogged by revelations of their business dealings during the war. On 6 March 1946, local Kassel newspaper Hessische Nachrichten published an article titled ‘Soap from human fat’, detailing how the Nazis exploited the murder of millions for profit, including breaking teeth and melting down gold fillings, stuffing mattresses with women’s hair and stealing all of the belongings of those sent to concentration camps (although they did not make soap from human fat). The article, which was based on prosecution documents presented at the first Nuremberg trial, goes on to name companies which supplied cremation ovens: the Kori company, Didier-Werke and Topf and Sons. ‘In the offices of the Auschwitz concentration camp, members of the Soviet State Commission found extensive correspondence between the camp management and the company of Topf & Sons, Erfurt.’132