Ernst Wolfgang had first compiled a long company and family history in 1950, in a document which made no mention of dealings with the SS or concentration camp ovens. Annegret Schüle notes that Ernst Wolfgang glosses over his brother’s suicide, almost as if it was a family tradition, stating that ‘on 31 May 1945 Ludwig Topf chose to end his life – as his father had done in 1914’. Ernst Wolfgang then adds that both brothers were in grave danger during the war as ‘passionate enemies of Hitlerdom’.144
By the mid-1950s, with the denazification tribunal and the criminal case behind him, Topf might have been lulled into a false sense of his security; he may have allowed himself to believe that his past actions were well and truly buried. But in 1957, just as Ernst Wolfgang’s financial woes are at their worst, former Dachau inmate and journalist Reimund Schnabel published a book called Macht ohne Moral (Power without Morals), which printed documents linking Topf and Sons directly to the SS and the Holocaust. Schnabel had spent time in Dachau for opposing the Nazi euthanasia programme and had written the book to drum up opposition to a plan to allow former Waffen-SS officers, up to the rank of lieutenant colonel, to join the West German army. The book contained photos of piles of bodies of the victims and the ovens themselves, a letter from Topf and Sons to the SS construction management at Mauthausen concerning the incineration capacity of the double-muffle oven, and a letter to Auschwitz from 1 April 1943 quoting a price for building a giant ring cremation oven.
Topf and his wife Erika immediately understood the book would have a ‘devastating impact on anybody who picked it up’, and drafted a 21-page typed response to the main allegations levelled against Topf and Sons. As the archive files show, they took pains to revise and edit the draft several times to ensure that their justifications were exactly right.
Topf began by questioning whether the letters in the book were genuine, and then criticised their inclusion ‘as though this had formed part of the horrendous crimes’. The Topf company carried out its business in ‘exemplary fashion’, Ernst Wolfgang continued, and had always provided technology ‘for the best possible attainment of the greatest possible reverence, as required by the laws relating to cremation’.
Topf continues with what are now familiar justifications for the company’s actions, before claiming that Topf and Sons was a well-known protector of Jews, and the Topf brothers represented ‘a family with the qualities of humanity, especially chosen to protect its persecuted Jewish fellow citizens and colleagues to the very best of its ability, and that we demonstrably did, to the point of self-sacrifice, right up to the end of the war’.
In what he knew was an outright lie, Topf claims that no ‘service personnel from the SS or from any concentration camp were ever received or seen’ in the company, and there had never been ‘any meeting with the SS … in Berlin or anywhere else’. He then goes to great pains to prove that neither of the Topf brothers were Nazis, and that they hadn’t benefited from the Third Reich:
Between 1933 and 1945, we did not take on a single new member of staff with good ‘party connections’, nor did we recruit any such staff from operations. Throughout the twelve Hitler years, we carried out all our customer commissions but did not sympathise in any way whatsoever with either the NSDAP or its affiliated organisations, economic enterprises or functionaries. We deliberately assigned a non-party member to deal with all agencies. We consciously swam against the tide, and consequently encountered serious difficulties with all authorities and party agencies.
We also strictly adhered to our policy relating to treatment of staff, i.e. all staff, whether German or foreign nationals, were treated with equal decency, without any discrimination on the basis of religion, race or language. We also consciously avoided either recruiting, transferring or promoting active party members or other pro-Nazi elements. We rigorously adhered to this principle, even though it put us at a disadvantage when it came to the assignment of white- and blue-collar workers by the Labour Office and State Labour Office. As a consequence of this, our company became a meeting place for opponents of the Hitler system. Of the approximately thirty people we made departmental managers, only three to five were nominal party members.
The ‘political unreliability’ of the Topf brothers can be demonstrated by the fact that neither brother received a war service medal, something handed to many other business owners in Erfurt. In addition, the ‘foreign nationals’ (slave labourers) left the company at the end of the war in an orderly and friendly fashion:
No plundering or destruction of any kind in their camp, the administration block or workshops. No red flag raised. No fighting with Germans … Groups marched off in orderly fashion over a number of days, having first taken their leave of us through spokesmen. Many individual groups of Russian, French and Italian backgrounds thanked us with handshakes.
It is in this document that Ernst Wolfgang Topf refers to the respectable and honourable heads of department who worked for Topf and Sons, and specifically calls Fritz Sander a ‘man of almost excessive integrity’. A succession of investigations had proven that ‘no one in our company had been guilty of anything at all, either morally or in practice’. Challenging the very title of Schnabel’s book, Topf stated that he could ‘describe [his] company and the entirety of its conduct, throughout the twelve years of the Hitler regime, with the phrase: ‘Morality without Power’.145
Yet none of this lengthy justification did Ernst Wolfgang any good. When Schnabel’s book was published, in 1957, Topf was already under investigation for promissory note fraud (a crime that involves two or more people sending each other promissory notes as a means of proving that a business is solvent, when there are no actual deals to underpin them). The publication of Macht ohne Moral was the final nail in the coffin for the new Topf company. A loan that had been previously agreed on from the burden sharing office was abruptly turned down. Commerz-und Credit Bank and Deutsche Bank followed suit by refusing to administer a state loan.
The J. A. Topf company of Wiesbaden continued to limp along in its final incarnation until 1961, when a groundbreaking West German TV documentary series Drittes Reich highlighted that ‘the company that supplied the cremation ovens used in the concentration camps’ was now headquartered in Mainz. A few months later, a book by Robert Neumann called Hitler: Aufstieg und Untergang des Dritten Reiches brought even more unwelcome attention from the foreign press after publishing a copy of the Topf and Sons patent for the ‘continuous operation corpse incineration oven for mass use’ and a copy of correspondence with the SS at Auschwitz about the ventilation systems for the gas chambers.
Topf had escaped another police investigation in January 1960 in connection with ‘gassing ovens at concentration camps’, by offering up his usual justification that ‘anything burned in these ovens was already dead’, but as a result of the new television series and book, Ernst Wolfgang found himself referred back to investigators from the Central Land Judicial Administration Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes who passed the case to a special unit preparing for trials in relation to Auschwitz.
Despite the many efforts to bring Topf to justice, he never faced any further prosecution for the actions of Topf and Sons during the Holocaust. The immediate consequence of the new media revelations was that J. A. Topf and Sons was finally deregistered. J. A. Topf and Sons was dissolved on 18 March 1963 and the last Topf brother was out of business for ever. Ernst Wolfgang’s wife Erika died a month later on 23 April.
Despite living on in a state of some dereliction, Ernst Wolfgang survived for another sixteen years – dying on 23 February 1979 in the northern German town of Brilon. He was seventy-four years old, an age many of his victims never reached. He had defiantly evaded justice to the very end.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ATONEMENT
When Hartmut Topf was sixteen, his young teacher Heinz Bunese warned him that he was under the imminent threat of arrest by the East German authorities. ‘They’re after you,’ Bunese told him: ‘You�
��d better disappear.’ Borrowing five marks in West German currency from a friendly neighbour, Hartmut hastily caught a bus from his home in Falkensee in the Soviet zone and headed to West Berlin. In the autumn of 1950, eleven years before the Berlin Wall was built, it was still possible for workers with the right papers to cross the city, but Hartmut did not have the right papers and it was a nerve-racking journey; he knew that he would be arrested if caught. The new East German communist police and customs officers were often on the commuter buses, on the lookout for the wrong people, but they couldn’t apprehend every passenger. And, much to Hartmut’s relief, he made it.
I went to Spandau. I didn’t know where to go, so I asked the first policeman I saw and he told me that there were places that welcomed refugees. I went to one of the places he mentioned, got registered, answered some questions, had a medical test and after a few weeks I was accepted as a political refugee – and then I was sent to West Germany.146
As a teenager, Hartmut had been involved in small acts of rebellion against Soviet rule, refusing to sign a telegram for Stalin’s birthday, and smuggling in airmail copies of West Berlin newspapers to secretly distribute in school text books. But eventually he had been exposed, and his choice was to flee or be sent to prison. Now that he had made it to the West he was free to build a new life for himself, but in many ways he was still a young boy away from his family for the first time.
While his mother understandably missed him, his sister Karin remembers being pleased about inheriting Hartmut’s bicycle. ‘I didn’t really notice his absence. Perhaps it was even a relief, because I was also a bit difficult. I had my own ideas, and my own ways.’
Not only was Hartmut leaving his family behind, but also his home town. With refugees flooding into West Berlin from the Soviet zone, housing was horrendously overcrowded and priority was given to families with children. There was no place in Berlin for a sixteen-year-old with few skills, and Hartmut was sent to Hanover where he boarded with other young men. Eventually he managed to secure an apprenticeship with his father’s old company, Siemens, and began a career as a telecoms engineer.
Life in the West was about far more than work, however. Although Hartmut completed his three-year apprenticeship, living in Hanover opened his eyes to theatre and music, and he began to envision a different future for himself:
I met very interesting people in Hanover. I met lots of people involved in theatre and I sang in a choir. I went to the theatre almost every evening. I cut a strange figure wearing my leather shorts and carrying a ceremonial knife while I wandered around in the theatre canteen after the show with the actors … I even celebrated my twenty-first birthday on a concert tour of the Matthäus-Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach. We performed in Belgium and in Aachen. It was another world. That would have never happened in Falkensee.
Even so, Hartmut longed to return to West Berlin, and eventually managed to do this, working a string of day jobs while indulging his passion for the theatre in his spare time. At work, Hartmut was often preoccupied, thinking about the theatre, and the day jobs seemed to inevitably end with his dismissal. As the years passed, Hartmut married and divorced his wife, becoming a single father to their son, Till. Eventually he vowed never to take another full-time job that he woke up dreading, and embarked upon a freelance radio, journalism and theatre career that sustained him for the rest of his life.
In 1956 there was a Soviet military intervention in Hungary, and the army crushed the revolt. My friends, who were actors and artists, were desperate and cried. They were all so involved. I said I have to be closer to the action – and I decided to go to Berlin. I hoped I would also get the chance to go to a theatre school there, but I wasn’t accepted to any. Then I got a job in a small Christian theatre: the Vaganten. The director, Horst Behrend, had four children and was very conservative. He was a bit of a dictator in his theatre, but very devoted to it. He was a Christian and secretly he was a homosexual. He allowed me to work there as an assistant and I learned a lot. It was the best theatre experience I ever had; we put on beautiful plays and I was respected. Later I organised big theatre events, and I also helped organise the filming of Katz und Maus by Günter Grass in Poland in the ’60s.
In the 1960s, Hartmut also began working in puppet theatre – something he had been drawn to since his experiences with his childhood friend Hans Laessig decades earlier:
I like to call it an infection. Puppetry was contagious in my early years. Then I rediscovered it after meeting a puppeteer called Steinmann in Berlin … and I assisted him on the technical side of things in his little theatre, like the sound engineering and the light equipment. I stayed backstage and did all that, and through that I met many, many puppeteers, and I wrote critiques about puppetry festivals. I joined UNIMA, the reformed Union Internationale de la Marionette that was founded in Prague in ’29 by a puppeteer’s friends. I became a notorious festival-goer and the nickname I earned is pretty accurate – I am a puppet diplomat. I connect and I bring people together.
Puppetry, theatre and politics were becoming intertwined in Hartmut’s world, especially in Berlin where everyone was either a dissident or refugee, or an American agent or Stasi spy. His puppet theatre work took him across the border into Poland and Czechoslovakia, and ultimately back to East Berlin, where he reconnected with his family and learned what little he could about the history of Topf and Sons.
My theatre career and journalism absorbed me completely – but of course I read all of the important books, like Eugen Kogon’s work on the SS system and the concentration camps. I was familiar with a lot of political literature. I had my own political education, but there was a big lapse of time before I could look into Topf and Sons in Erfurt.
The lapse Hartmut mentions refers to the decades when Topf and Sons continued to operate as a company in East Germany. There appears to have been no appetite, either under Soviet occupation, or East German rule, to account for the company’s role in the Holocaust (other than the rather strange criminal case of the 1950s, which was dismissed almost as soon as it emerged).
Under the leadership of Willy Wiemokli, who became the head of the company in 1946, Topf and Sons continued to make payments to the wives of Kurt Prüfer, Gustav Braun, Fritz Sander and Karl Schultze while they were under arrest in the Soviet Union, and in 1948 both Paul Erdmann and fitter Martin Holick received fifty-year anniversary commemorations for their dedicated services to the company. Payments to the wives of the four arrested men stopped when Topf and Sons became a state-run enterprise in 1949, and all mention of the war and working with the SS was whitewashed from the company’s history.
Until 1952, Topf and Sons was known as Topf Works VEB, but the company was renamed in 1952 to remove the Topf family name, and then again in 1957 when it became known as VEB Erfurt Malting and Storage Construction. The crematorium division had been closed down two years previously in 1955, with all drawings, documents and models sent to another company in Zwickau, and the new company focused instead on grain malting equipment which was exported to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and then later to Libya, Angola, Cyprus and other countries sympathetic to East Germany.
Just as the old Topf administration building was still the heart of the company, the Topf family park was also still in use – housing a company clubhouse and restaurant in Ludwig Topf’s villa, and at various points, a hostel for apprentices, swimming pool and kindergarten in the grounds.
The expropriation of the Topf family park and villa is referred to in a 1980s company history, as an example of the triumph of the workers in beating their capitalist bosses.
When Hitler came to power, the company experienced a brisk upturn in productivity. It started producing parts for ships and aircraft, as well as grenades and cremation ovens. During the Second World War, the concentration camps were equipped with cremation ovens produced by ‘Topf and Sons’. However, the workers employed by the company at that time did not know what the ovens were being used for. They had only been told t
hey were incineration ovens for animal innards. This inhumanity was only uncovered after the end of the war and the liberation of the prisoners from the concentration camps.
The company brochure continues with an account of the foreign workers forced to work for Topf and Sons during the war, stating: ‘The workers had to work under a piecework system so that the factory owner could hold orgies in his luxury villa, now the Erfurter Mälzerei- und Speicherbau clubhouse.’ Next to this statement is an illustration of Buchenwald and the oath of the Buchenwald survivors swearing to destroy fascism.147
In such a way, the history of Topf and Sons had been rewritten to serve the propaganda of communist-controlled East Germany. Annegret Schüle writes that:
Even though the Topf fitters spent long periods of time in the camps; even though the mobile ovens were built in the Erfurt company and were returned there for repair; even though the staff involved spoke quite openly of the equipping of the gas chambers; this version of events, with its abstruse reference to the incineration of animal innards, declares the entire workforce collectively innocent [creating] the impression that the Topf villa, which was expropriated and placed at the disposal of the workers after the war, could now serve as a symbol that the oath taken by the Buchenwald survivors had now become reality at VEB Erfurter Mälzerei- und Speicherbau.
The fall of communist East Germany and the reunification of Germany in 1990 spelled the end for many state-owned enterprises – including the VEB Erfurt Malting and Storage Construction (EMS), the company that was once Topf and Sons. Now under the leadership of Gustav Braun’s son, Udo (who had finally surpassed his father’s achievements), EMS was placed under the administration of the ‘Trust Agency’ which sought privatisation. Ultimately, Udo Braun’s efforts ended in failure; the company was initially sold before it petitioned for bankruptcy on 19 June 1996.
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