Even at a time of such political upheaval and revelations, it appears that one reader of the Hessische Nachrichten was paying attention, lodging a criminal complaint against Ernst Wolfgang and leading the US Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) to reopen its investigation.
This ‘dirty denunciation from a Gudensberg resident,’ as Kurt Schmidt described it,133 had far-reaching consequences. On 25 March 1946, Ernst Wolfgang was questioned by the CIC and issued a statement where he claimed upon his ‘sacred oath’ that Topf and Sons was never involved in the ‘horrors, such as the recovery of gold teeth and hair,’ and that the company’s ‘perfectly normal’ transactions with the SS were extremely urgent war orders that he would have been ‘severely punished’ for delaying or sabotaging. Clearly Topf and Sons had never thought it had anything to hide, he added, otherwise the company would never have stamped its logo on the cast-iron fittings for the camp crematoria. ‘Had we known or suspected that they were to be used for anything evil, my brother would have omitted the company logo from the parts lists.’134 More truthfully, perhaps, he would have stated that neither brother thought he would have to face the consequences of his actions.
After holding Ernst Wolfgang Topf under arrest for two or three weeks, the American CIC released him without charge, after failing to locate the crucial evidence needed to prosecute him. Soon after, however, Topf was to become embroiled in the much longer process of a denazification tribunal, which would last from April 1946 until March 1950.
Not long after the denazification investigation against Ernst Wolfgang began, J. Topf GmbH collapsed. Topf himself had left Gudensberg (probably as a result of the notorious newspaper article) to live with his parents-in-law in Wiesbaden. The company that Kurt Schmidt reported was in a ‘desolate state’ had been taken over by Heinrich Mersch, who had fallen out with the Topfs and renamed the company after himself.
The denazification process applied to everyone living in the American-occupied zone – and began with a requirement that every citizen fill out a notification form about their relationship to the Nazi Party. Ernst Wolfgang Topf did this on 26 April 1946, stating that he rejected national socialism – and that he had actively opposed it for the entire twelve years of Nazi rule. In a statement he claimed that he had joined the party at ‘the last moment’ in 1933 and had done so to prevent the ‘anti-Semitic demon’ that had already broken out at Topf and Sons.
As a member of the party, however, his case was put forward for investigation at a denazification tribunal – which were lay courts largely implemented by Germans themselves under guidelines laid down by the American military. Those incriminated were called before a hearing and assigned to one of five categories: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers and exonerated persons.
Ernst Wolfgang’s case came before the Fritzlar-Homberg denazification tribunal in Hesse. Topf began preparing his defence by asking the works council at Topf and Sons in Erfurt to issue him with another Certificate of Political Innocuousness, as they had done in 1945 – but there is no record that they did this. By August that year, however, the charges levelled against Ernst Wolfgang Topf were beginning to seem more serious, with three people writing to Topf to tell him that he was accused of producing the inward and outward ventilation systems for the gas chambers.
Ernst Wolfgang replied in his usual, slightly hysterical and disingenuous manner, claiming that he was a ‘deceived victim’. Topf replied that even the fitters themselves could not have ‘divined that an inward and outward ventilation system could be abused!’ and added that the system in itself was ‘the most innocent thing in the world’.135
In his defence, Ernst Wolfgang then told a further series of outright lies. He began by stating that his brother, Ludwig, who he said was ‘always open with me about his struggle with suicidal thoughts’, had never implied ‘any kind of connection between the ventilation and that “procedure”.’ Neither of the brothers had known any of the people responsible, either in the camps or in Berlin. ‘There was never even a single personal visit to Erfurt for the purposes of discussing the orders with us. They didn’t even know we existed.’136
Although evidence existed, the complicated course of Ernst Wolfgang’s tribunal demonstrates the difficulties of acquiring true information, especially working across different occupied zones, and with people and organisations that often had their own agendas in terms of protecting themselves or accusing others.
Ernst Wolfgang Topf’s tribunal began in December 1946 with an initial aim of obtaining sworn statements about him from two non-suspect witnesses. In July 1947, the public prosecutor and president of the tribunal wrote to the SED (the Socialist Party of East Germany that would rule the DDR from 1948 until 1989) and the Erfurt police requesting information about the Topf brothers. A police employee, Kurt Ziegenbein, replied in August that year, reiterating that Ludwig Topf had committed suicide before questioning by the Allies and that Ernst Wolfgang had fled to the West. Both these events had occurred due to ‘installation of crematoria in all of Germany’s concentration camps at the behest of both brothers’. Ziegenbein added that the brothers had ‘definitely’ been ‘informed of what was happening in the camps’.
As a police officer, Ziegenbein had been a colleague of former Topf worker and ex-communist resistance member Bernhard Bredehorn, and former Topf fitter Heinrich Messing (Bredehorn had briefly been head of the police force in Erfurt, before being forced out in 1947, and Messing also occupied a prominent police position for a time). As such, Ziegenbein clearly knew where his loyalties lay, as he also stated that the Topf brothers had forced the workers to install the crematoria against their own wishes – and went on to make other, unproven allegations against Ernst Wolfgang. Contrary to all other reports, Ziegenbein said that Ernst Wolfgang had been a member of the Nazi Stormtroopers, the SA, involved in carrying out pogroms against the Jewish population of Erfurt and was a ‘200 per cent’ Nazi who liked to run around in a uniform.
When the denazification tribunal replied to the letter, asking for verification of these allegations, they waited several months before receiving a reply on 3 February 1948 that it was a case of mistaken identity with another Ernst Wolfgang Topf in Erfurt (there was no other Ernst Wolfgang Topf – the Erfurt police were clearly trying to seal the case against Ernst Wolfgang with false accusations).
A lack of interest and support for the denazification process meant that the tribunal was severely hampered by a lack of reliable information. The American-controlled document centre in Berlin replied to a request for information, but did not mention either of the two CIC investigations that had been conducted against Ernst Wolfgang. The Russian consulate, the mayor of Erfurt and the Erfurt police did not reply at all. In February 1948, the works council at the company that was once Topf and Sons replied to the tribunal, stating that the company had supplied crematoria for the concentration camps, but then added a series of allegations that the Topf brothers had been drunken brawlers, and had once hit each other with clubs in front of the workers.
In March 1948, the case against Ernst Wolfgang was passed on to the Wiesbaden tribunal, where he was now living, and the public prosecutor followed a new line of inquiry that Topf and Sons had developed and produced a mobile oven for Buchenwald. This mobile oven was illegal – and was perhaps the most incriminating evidence in the entire case presented against Ernst Wolfgang. By letter, a former Buchenwald prisoner, Werner Munchheimer said that he had read many times in his work with the Buchenwald camp construction department that the Topf company had built the cremation ovens. Munchheimer referred this to his former departmental head, Alfred Ingehag, who confirmed the company had installed static and mobile ovens, but this letter of 5 January 1950 was the last letter in the denazification file.
The advent of the cold war meant that, by 1948, the Americans had lost interest in pursuing the long-running denazification process – and it was wound up in 1950. In March that year the denazification case against Ernst Wolfgang Topf was d
ropped, because ‘the accused was only an ordinary member of the NSDAP from 1933, and never held any office or rank in the party’.137
By the end of the war 8.5 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party. Of that number, nearly one million (950,000) found themselves before a denazification tribunal. (The class makeup of the group in itself was interesting – nearly half of civil servants went before a tribunal, whereas only 3 per cent of workers did.) Yet the tribunals were placed under competing stresses from the beginning; all those who were assigned to the most serious categories were forbidden from engaging in anything other than ‘ordinary labour’ until the tribunal process was complete. As a result, the tribunals were torn between ‘the two equally pressing obligations of freeing the little Nazis from discrimination at the hands of the law, and punishing the big Nazis as quickly as possible’.138
At the end of the denazification tribunal process only 1,654 people were classified as category 1 – major offenders. A further 22,122 people were classified as category 2, while 106,422 people were deemed ‘less interested persons’. As one observer put it: ‘The system had run the sea through a sieve, in order to catch a couple of big fish.’139
One of those fish who had escaped the net was Ernst Wolfgang Topf. The denazification tribunal had failed to hold him to account just as it failed to hold many others to account. But the evidence of the illegal mobile oven at Buchenwald was sufficient for the public prosecutor to hand over Topf’s file to the criminal authorities. This time Topf faced a charge of accessory to murder.
Despite the severity of the charge, the criminal case proceeded with as much confusion and as many obstacles as all of the other attempts to hold the Topfs accountable for their actions. The Wiesbaden state prosecutor’s office opened file number 3Js 737/50 against Ernst Wolfgang Topf and, at the beginning of 1951, it wrote to the state prosecutor in Erfurt asking for information.
In Erfurt, however, a strange turn of events, meant that four Topf employees (now working for the renamed Topfwerke Erfurt VEB) were arrested on suspicion of crimes against humanity after a socialist party group within the company alleged that they had been seen burning sensitive documents relating to Topf and the SS in the steam-heating system – in the middle of summer.
The allegation itself was a strange one: why would anyone draw attention to themselves, by doing something so conspicuous, when they could have removed and disposed of the documents in a much more discreet way? The burned papers turned out to be personal documents, and the claim itself appears more like a trumped-up charge indicating a rift in the workforce, and the breakdown of the conspiracy of silence that had held strong at Topf since the end of the war, with former colleagues now turning on each other.
Two of the four men who were charged, Max Machemehl and Paul Erdmann, had certainly known about Topf and Sons’s relationship with the SS and the supply of crematoria and gas chamber ventilation equipment to the camps. Charges against the other two, Herbert Bartels (the director of Topfwerke VEB) and commercial assistant Wilhelm Gleitz seem less explicable.
Nonetheless, all four were immediately dismissed from the company without notice and their files passed to the criminal police. Here again, however, the case stalled. The police officer in charge of the case insisted that nothing would come of the matter as the Soviets had no interest in it, and sure enough the investigation was halted in mid-February 1951.
All the men were released from custody on 23 February, but the case had at least succeeded in proving Erdmann’s involvement and knowledge of Topf and Sons’s actions. Erdmann had always maintained that he never supplied installations to Auschwitz, and that there was no correspondence on this matter. A search of his office for the investigation in 1950 proved otherwise. Investigators discovered a signed letter to the SS Reichsführer construction management Auschwitz, the copy of an operating manual for mass extermination systems and a drawing showing the feed between the gas chambers and the ovens.
Max Machemehl – immortalised in Topf’s sixtieth anniversary celebration booklet as the man in the upstairs office who knew everything about the running of Topf and Sons – also steadfastly maintained that he knew nothing about the ‘technicalities’ of the supplies to the SS:
‘Technical matters were dealt with solely by Department D … So far as orders for cremation facilities were concerned, I was merely informed that such orders existed.’ He had nothing to conceal, he added, ‘because the connections were not known to me’. Challenged by the police officer leading the investigation about why he had not turned his back on Topf and Sons when he discovered they were supplying ovens to the concentration camps, Machemehl replied: ‘If I had known back then what we found out after the war about the crematoria in the concentration camps, then I wouldn’t have hesitated – I would have given up my job at once, in keeping with all my decades of conscientious conduct in all aspects of business life.’140
After the Erfurt case was closed, and the four men had been released, the state prosecutor replied to the inquiry from Wiesbaden stating, untruthfully, that the investigation was still ongoing and that they had secured statements from Topf oven fitters claiming that they had repeatedly asked to be removed from working on the installations in the camps – but that these requests had been rejected by the Topf brothers. The Wiesbaden prosecutor responded to this letter, asking to see copies of the statements as they were of considerable importance in determining ‘whether or not the accused knew of the criminal purpose for which the cremation ovens supplied to the concentration camps were to be used’. Although the Erfurt prosecutor general instructed the office to send these statements to Wiesbaden, they were never delivered.
In an interim report of 6 June 1951, the Wiesbaden prosecutor, Dr Konig, stated that they were unable to demonstrate that Ernst Wolfgang Topf had had dealings with the SS at Buchenwald, or other camps, or that he knew about the criminal use of the ovens.
Without access to the SS files at Auschwitz that documented correspondence between the camp and Topf and Sons, witness statements from camp survivors, or the Soviet interrogation reports for Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander or Gustav Braun, the investigation largely accepted Ernst Wolfgang’s version of events. On 10 June 1952, the criminal case against him was officially closed, with the prosecutor noting that ‘it had not been possible to disprove the accused’s claim that he had never dealt with technical matters and had not been informed about the real purpose of the cremation ovens supplied to the Buchenwald camp’.141
Topf and Sons’s copies of the files detailing their work with the SS have never been discovered. While the controversial amateur historian Jean-Claude Pressac (more of whom later) claimed that Kurt Prüfer had disposed of the files prior to his arrest, Annegret Schüle suggests that Ernst Wolfgang Topf actually passed the files to the American CIC at the end of the war – before they mysteriously disappeared. Even without the files, the evidence of what Topf and Sons had done was always in plain sight – the Topf name was branded across the ovens in iron letters, and Buchenwald survivors testified to the role Topf and Sons played in building the crematoria. Yet the American forces seemed relatively disinterested in Topf and Sons, perhaps because they were so overwhelmed by the horrors that they had seen in the camp and the other, more obvious, perpetrators of war crimes.
With the conclusion of the case, Ernst Wolfgang Topf was free from the prospect of a life in prison. The long-drawn-out denazification case, which was followed by criminal proceedings, had done nothing to deter him from trying to re-establish his business in West Germany – and he demonstrated that he intended to restart Topf and Sons using a patent for the ‘process and device for the incineration of bodies, carcasses and parts thereof’.142
This patent was not, as is sometimes reported, based on the techniques Topf and Sons employed, or had planned to employ, in the ovens of the concentration camps. But the very fact that a new company run by Ernst Wolfgang was intending to make money from ‘carcass incineration’ outraged Holocaust survivors
and the families of victims.
In December 1947, Topf applied for a business permit in Wiesbaden and opened an engineering office in Recklinghausen, hiring an engineer and some shared work space in a wooden barracks. From the outset, the company focused on furnace and oven construction, as Ernst Wolfgang probably surmised that a lack of capital would make it more difficult to break into the bigger malting and storage businesses. There is no doubt that Topf planned to recreate an almost exact replica of the business he’d presided over in Erfurt, even wanting to assign the same departmental letters, including the infamous Department D for oven construction and furnace constructions. A 1953 brochure proudly proclaimed ‘Seventy-five years of Topf’ ovens, which were ‘of first-class quality’ and ‘the product of long years of experience’.
Yet, although some of these ovens were sold to civic crematoria in West Germany during the early 1950s, the new Topf company struggled under insurmountable debts. Soon the company office and Topf’s family home were relocated in an unsavoury part of town in nearby Mainz, where potential customers were put off by having to run the gauntlet of ‘prostitutes, ex-offenders and drunks’ to get to the office entrance.
By 1956, the Topf company had given up selling cremation ovens, and was focusing on making municipal incinerators, while Ernst Wolfgang employed desperate measures to stave off insolvency and apply for loans. These efforts proved to be nothing more than sticking plasters: two years later, the Topf family was registered as living on state welfare, with Ernst Wolfgang marked down as unfit for work on health grounds. The new Topf company was economically dormant from 1959 until its final dissolution in March 1963.
These economic difficulties faced by a small, failing company, which Ernst Wolfgang Topf likened to ‘the life of a tiny creature’143 were severe, but they were just a small fraction of the problems Topf was facing. However grandiose his plans, Topf was constantly forced to respond to damaging accusations aired in books and the media, and his denials appeared to do nothing to stem the tide.
Architects of Death Page 21