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Architects of Death

Page 24

by Karen Bartlett


  A lifetime has passed since the men of Topf and Sons sat at their desks and dispassionately planned murder, but the memorial poses an eternal question: how would we act today?

  CONCLUSION

  ‘I inherited the name. I did not inherit the company, fortunately. Even so, I felt an obligation. As a child I bathed in the glory of being a Topf, and now I feel I have to tell the horrible story of their infamy. I have to make my contribution. That is my responsibility.’ 156

  HARTMUT TOPF, 2017

  Hartmut Topf’s long involvement with the company that bore his name began more than sixty years ago – but in a surprising development it appears that he was not the only member of the family to discover the truth about Topf and Sons in a darkened cinema. In another town in Europe, a young boy was also watching the weekly newsreel when he saw the logo Topf and Sons on the oven doors of a concentration camp. This young boy had grown up believing he was the son of Ludwig Topf – and he was a child no one in the family knew existed. Florian, as he wants to be known, was born in 1937, the result of a brief encounter at a party in Munich between Ludwig and his mother, who was a young student of art history.

  ‘I knew almost nothing at all about my father, just his name and how they’d met – and even that I didn’t know at first. Other than that, my mother was totally clam-like on the subject, which put me off asking questions,’ Florian says.

  She’d grown up in a deeply Catholic family and giving birth out of wedlock carried a huge stigma. Because of this, she moved away from Munich before I was born and gave birth to me in Milan, where no one knew her. I had my mother’s surname and I don’t think she tried to get Ludwig Topf to acknowledge paternity. I don’t know why she didn’t, maybe because she knew he was from a renowned industrial company and didn’t want to embarrass him.

  Florian says he grew up desperate for a father, even as an adult he often invented names for his father when dealing with the authorities. In the aftermath of the war, life was unstable and unpredictable in Europe – Florian attended six different primary schools in the space of four years, he then went on to study at a grammar school, followed by a stint at a boarding school in Germany. It was hard to be close to his mother, he says, when she was working and he spent so little time with her. In the holidays he often lived with his grandparents: ‘The absence of a father lingered over my whole childhood and spoilt it. I desperately missed having the sense of a normal home life, and I was very conscious of not knowing anything about my father.’

  Then, as a teenager, he saw the name Topf and Sons on screen for the first time.

  I was watching the Wochenschau weekly news programme that came on before the film at the local cinema, and I saw the report on the concentration camps with the ‘Topf and Sons’ plaque on the cremation furnace. I can’t actually remember whether I asked my mother about it at the time, but she would always fall silent at the mention of my father so I always found it very difficult to raise the subject.

  Florian’s maternal family were doctors, but even though his grandfather was labelled a ‘Jew doctor’ for treating Jewish patients after Kristallnacht, Florian is still inclined to excuse Ludwig Topf’s role in the Holocaust:

  I don’t think he was a Nazi; I think he acted out of necessity and pragmatism, and a sense of responsibility for the company’s workers. Yes, he collaborated, but I’ve read both Jean-Claude Pressac’s and Annegret Schüle’s books and I think that the collusion was pragmatic, not from the heart. They had just wanted to be the best engineers and do the best by their business, and they hadn’t really thought much beyond that. It can’t have been easy for them, and when you run a company of that size, a certain amount of collaboration would have been inevitable. The work for the concentration camps only accounted for a very small percentage of the company’s turnover, and was therefore commercially insignificant.

  Having searched all of his life for his father, Florian now finds it hard to believe that Ludwig Topf was a bad person. Although his mother had no papers or photos relating to the Topfs, Florian has seen Ludwig’s photo published in books – and thinks he looks like a nice easy-going sort of man, although, he adds, ‘In order to have taken his own life, he must have been a very disappointed and disillusioned person.’

  Before retiring in 2015, Florian had a long career in business and industry, working in England, Belgium and Switzerland. Very much a family man, he married in 1967 and had three children and nine grandchildren. It was his children who encouraged him to find out more about the Topf family. After meeting Hartmut for the first time in late 2017, the two men conducted a DNA test that confirmed Ludwig Topf was indeed Florian’s father. Asked how his children feel about being descendants of the Topf family Florian says: ‘They feel proud. They knew my mother came from a family of doctors, and were proud of that, but they feel that an industrial family – especially such a major one – is even better.’157

  Florian is not the only son in this book to be seeking a missing father: Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf lived, unsuccessfully, in the shadow of theirs; Hartmut sought to redeem the family name for his ‘good’ father; while Udo Braun remained unreconciled with Gustav Braun to the end.

  The question of family legacy is a large one. It is something that even Hartmut, who has carried out so much work on restitution and remembrance, struggles with. Visiting Erfurt in September 2017, he explains that he now believes Topf and Sons was ‘partly guilty’ – partly because, as Florian also states, the Topf family only made a small financial profit from their work on the Holocaust. Standing in front of the Topf and Sons’ ovens at Buchenwald, and confronted with the visible evidence of the crime, he seems unsure about how to express his emotions – instead he tells a long story about the death of a family friend in Berlin. When the friend died, Hartmut’s son, Till, asked him why he didn’t appear to be sad. Hartmut told his son that he had known his friend’s death was coming and he had grieved for a long time in his own way.

  ‘It’s a sad story,’ he says about the role Topf and Sons played in the Holocaust.

  And it’s a great pity that we have to deal with all those atrocities and crimes, in Europe, in our country and, of course, in our family. But this is a general grief, it’s not a personal thing. I am only one of those catalysts to keep the memory alive or to ask people, at least from time to time, to reflect on that side of our history.

  He adds: ‘We should be decent. I am not the protagonist of this story. I always say to people I am a catalyst and I’ve been working on for this for so many years now, but please don’t make me an angel or a hero – I’m not.’158

  The story of Topf and Sons may be one without heroes, but Hartmut Topf is undoubtedly responsible for ensuring that the company is held accountable to history for its crimes. Through the Topf archives, and the work of historians, we can understand how one small group of men were driven by very human emotions. Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf were weak and greedy men, prepared to do anything to cement their precarious positions at the head of their father’s company. They knew that in doing so they were developing technology that would enable the mass murder of millions of innocent people. This did not deter them in the least – and their collaboration in the Holocaust would be something that Ernst Wolfgang Topf would lie about for the rest of his life. They bear the ultimate responsibility for their crimes.

  For the engineers themselves, Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander and Karl Schultze, it was a question of personal ambition, rivalry and financial gain. There they sat, on the third floor of the administration building, drawing up ever-wilder plans for the more efficient disposal of human life – all the while thousands of their victims were trapped in Buchenwald, a concentration camp that could be seen out of the window on the Ettersberg hill. And beyond the engineers were the fitters, the men on site who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust on a day-to-day basis; more remotely the secretaries who typed the memos; the managers and paper pushers who stamped the files; and the operations director who joked that, sur
ely, there could almost be no one left to burn.

  Topf and Sons was by no means unique in serving the SS and the Third Reich; in that, they were like thousands of other technocrats, scientists, engineers, town planners, economists, doctors and business men. In making such a pact with the devil they were given permission to shed their civilised skin, and dream their wildest dreams; to make real their biggest professional ambitions without regard for human life or dignity. Even today their sheer detachment and disinterest creeps from the pages of the archive and lays its cold fingers upon anyone who reads it, yet it was the very ordinariness of their human motivations that makes them so easy to understand – and so appalling.

  The founders of Topf and Sons: J. A. Topf (centre), Julius Topf (left), Ludwig Topf Sr (right).

  The Topf family in the late nineteenth century.

  COURTESY OF NIKOLA KUZMANIC

  Despite humble beginnings, Topf and Sons expanded and became a large firm in Erfurt.

  COURTESY OF NIKOLA KUZMANIC

  Ernst Wolfgang Topf and Ludwig Topf.

  COURTESY OF TOPF & SÖHNE MEMORIAL

  Ludwig Topf in army uniform in the early 1940s.

  COURTESY OF LANDESARCHIV THÜRINGEN - HAUPTSTAATSARCHIV WEIMAR

  The main administration building at Topf and Sons as it was during the 1940s.

  COURTESY OF LANDESARCHIV THÜRINGEN - HAUPTSTAATSARCHIV WEIMAR

  The commemorative brochure printed for the sixtieth anniversary of Topf and Sons in 1938.

  Kurt Prüfer, head of the oven construction and cremation department at Topf and Sons.

  COURTESY OF LANDESARCHIV THÜRINGEN - HAUPTSTAATSARCHIV WEIMAR

  Karl Schultze, head of ventilation systems at Topf and Sons.

  COURTESY OF LANDESARCHIV THÜRINGEN - HAUPTSTAATSARCHIV WEIMAR

  Fritz Sander, co-head of the furnace construction division at Topf and Sons.

  COURTESY OF LANDESARCHIV THÜRINGEN - HAUPTSTAATSARCHIV WEIMAR

  Ernst Wolfgang Topf (third from left) with his brother Ludwig (fourth from left) and other family members outside Ludwig’s modernist villa in the Topf family park.

  COURTESY OF HARTMUT TOPF

  Topf and Sons employees at work in the main administration building during the 1930s.

  COURTESY OF NIKOLA KUZMANIC

  The entrance to the concentration camp at Birkenau, summer 1944.

  COURTESY OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU MEMORIAL

  The Topf and Sons ovens in Crematorium I at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  COURTESY OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU MEMORIAL

  The Topf and Sons ovens in Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  COURTESY OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU MEMORIAL

  The exterior of Crematorium III at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  COURTESY OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU MEMORIAL

  The Auschwitz-Birkenau Commandant Rudolf Höss moments before his execution.

  COURTESY OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU MEMORIAL

  Topf and Sons operations director Gustav Braun (right) with his son Udo (left).

  COURTESY OF UDO BRAUN

  Udo Braun as he is today.

  COURTESY OF UDO BRAUN

  Hartmut Topf with his parents, Albert and Irmgard.

  COURTESY OF HARTMUT TOPF

  Hartmut Topf with his sisters Elke (left) and Karin (right).

  COURTESY OF HARTMUT TOPF

  Hartmut Topf in front of the Topf and Sons ovens at Buchenwald.

  COURTESY OF NIKOLA KUZMANIC

  The Topf and Sons insignia, still visible today, on the ovens at Buchenwald.

  © KAREN BARTLETT

  The remains of the ‘Goethe oak tree’ in the grounds of Buchenwald.

  © KAREN BARTLETT

  Wolfgang Nossen, former president of the Jewish community in Thuringia, and supporter of the Topf and Sons memorial site in Erfurt.

  © KAREN BARTLETT

  The former Topf and Sons administration building, and now memorial site, in Erfurt.

  © KAREN BARTLETT

  A collection of ash canisters and fire bricks made by Topf and Sons for the SS, now on display at the Topf and Sons memorial in Erfurt.

  COURTESY OF NIKOLA KUZMANIC

  The drawing board and window on the third floor of the Topf and Sons administration building where Kurt Prüfer worked.

  © KAREN BARTLETT

  The small wooden house where Ludwig Topf stayed the night before he committed suicide in the Topf family park.

  © KAREN BARTLETT

  Hartmut Topf in front of what was once Ludwig Topf’s modernist villa.

  © KAREN BARTLETT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As an English writer and journalist living in London, completing this book required help and input from many people.

  Without the research and translation work of Paula Kirby, this book could not have been tackled at all. Paula, an experienced German translator with an incredible knowledge of, and interest in, German history, devoted an enormous amount of time to translating secondary literature into English for me. She then took on the unwieldy task of sorting thousands of primary archive documents from the Thuringia State Archive, identifying relevant information and translating it. In addition, she was always happy to translate emails, work on footnotes relating to German sources – and conduct phone interviews in German, including an interview with ‘Florian’, who believes he is the son of Ludwig Topf.

  The second person who worked extensively on the German portion of the book was Britt Pflüger, herself an author and editor. Britt proved invaluable in navigating the Thuringia State Archive, which was no easy task, and doing a preliminary sift through thousands and thousands of files to identify useful material. Britt also spent many hours reading German newspapers and magazines from the 1940s, as well as conducting and translating long interviews in Erfurt and Weimar.

  The final person to help translate German material into English was Caterina Andreae, who swiftly and expertly translated a series of first person audio interviews with some of the key people mentioned in the book.

  Of the many people who cooperated, helped and agreed to be interviewed, the most important, of course, was Hartmut Topf. Hartmut plays a key role in this story – his efforts played a large part in bringing the Topf and Sons memorial in Erfurt to fruition. Hartmut also spent many days being interviewed for this book, showing me his childhood scenes in Berlin and Erfurt, and introducing me to others in the story. He facilitated many interviews, and made available many photos and family documents.

  I would like to thank the Thuringia State Archive in Weimar, which houses the archive for Topf and Sons, as well as the Buchenwald Memorial and the Auschwitz Memorial, for making documents and photos available to me.

  For German readers interested in a detailed history of Topf and Sons, I recommend Annegret Schüle’s book Industrie und Holocaust: Topf & Söhne – Die Ofenbauer von Auschwitz, which is a definitive text based upon the Topf and Sons archive. Annegret is also the director of the Topf and Sons memorial in Erfurt, and I appreciate the time she spent discussing this book with me, and for connecting me with Hartmut Topf.

  I would also like to thank Rüdiger Bender, a trustee of the memorial in Erfurt, and the very first person to speak to me about Topf and Sons. Rüdiger was always willing to connect, and reconnect, with me over several years to discuss his project – and I have always been struck by his political passion and determination to make the story of Topf and Sons a relevant one in today’s world.

  This book has been a particularly difficult and time-consuming project, and so I have to thank my mother in particular for stepping in so often and helping to organise the rest of family life so that I could pursue it. I also have to thank my father and many others for believing in this book from the beginning, as well as Gaia Banks at Sheil Land, and Olivia Beattie and Bernadette Marron at Biteback Publishing for supporting with all the practical steps that turned it into a reality.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1 Author interview wi
th Hartmut Topf.

  Chapter One: Born and bred at J. A. Topf

      2 Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, 1984, p. 45.

      3 Ibid., p. 47.

      4 Kurt Prüfer personnel file, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

      5 David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780–1918, Blackwell Publishing, 1997, p. 1.

      6 Annegret Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust: Topf & Söhne – Die Ofenbauer von Auschwitz, Wallstein Verlag, 2010, pp. 29–30.

  AS footnote 69: Mein Lebenslauf [My Life] (E.W. Topf), undated (presumably early 1946). ThHStAW [PK: i.e. Thuringian State Archive, Weimar], Collection: Jean-Claude Pressac Nr. 81, sheets 1–22, this quote from sheet 1. Dieter Wettig, grandson of the Topf director, Heinrich Wettig (died 1926), was one of Ernst Wolfgang Topf’s playmates. He confirmed that the family lived on company land (statement made by Dieter Wettig to the author). The baptismal register shows the address as Dreysestraße 7. Baptismal register of the Merchants’ Church, Erfurt, 1903/4.

 

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