Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps

225 Pages·2018·5.15 MB·English

by  Karen Bartlett

For Max
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Cast of characters
Introduction: The puppeteer
Chapter One: Born and bred at J. A. Topf
Chapter Two: A deal with the devil
Chapter Three: A beautiful name
Chapter Four: Buchenwald
Chapter Five: Always at your service
Chapter Six: Auschwitz
Chapter Seven: Is there anyone left to burn?
Chapter Eight: Innovators until the end
Chapter Nine: Trials and retribution
Chapter Ten: A change of scenery in the USSR
Chapter Eleven: Power without morals
Chapter Twelve: Atonement
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Index
Plates
Copyright
CAST OF CHARACTERS
TOPF FAMILY
JOHANNES TOPF (1816–1891): founded J. A. Topf and Sons in Erfurt on 1 July
1868.
JULIUS TOPF (1859–1914): son of Johannes Topf. Ran Topf and Sons jointly
with his brother Ludwig Sr, until he relinquished his share due to ill health.
LUDWIG TOPF SR (1863–1914): son of Johannes Topf. Ran Topf and Sons until
his death in 1914.
ELSE TOPF (1882–1940): wife of Ludwig Topf Sr, mother of Ludwig Jr and
Ernst Wolfgang.
JOHANNA (HANNA) TOPF (1902–UNKNOWN): the eldest child of Ludwig Sr and
Else. Sister of Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang.
VIKTOR KARL LUDWIG TOPF (1903–1945): son of Ludwig Topf Sr. Brother of
Ernst Wolfgang. Director of Topf and Sons from 1933 until 1945.
ERNST WOLFGANG TOPF (1904–1979): son of Ludwig Topf Sr. Brother of
Ludwig Jnr. Director of Topf and Sons from 1933 until 1945.
HARTMUT TOPF (b. 1934): grandson of Julius Topf, great-grandson of Topf
and Sons founder Johannes Topf. Puppet diplomat and journalist.
TOPF AND SONS EMPLOYEES
KURT PRÜFER (1891–1952): joined Topf and Sons in 1911. Head of the oven
construction and cremation department.
FRITZ SANDER (1876–1946): employed at Topf and Sons since 1910.
Authorised company representative, and co-head of the Furnace Construction
division, D I. Reviewed all of Kurt Prüfer’s work.
KARL SCHULTZE (1900–UNKNOWN): head of Department B, Ventilation
Systems, at Topf and Sons.
MAX MACHEMEHL (1891–UNKNOWN): manager of the commercial department
at Topf and Sons and SS security representative.
HEINRICH MESSING (1902–UNKNOWN): a Topf and Sons fitter from Department
B (responsible for ventilation technology), who was deployed to Birkenau for
five months in 1943.
WILHELM KOCH (1876–UNKNOWN): a Topf and Sons furnace builder who
worked on the installation of the ovens in Auschwitz Crematorium II.
MARTIN HOLICK (1874–UNKNOWN): a Topf and Sons furnace builder who
worked on the installation of the ovens in Auschwitz Crematorium II.
WILLY WIEMOKLI (1908–UNKNOWN): bookkeeper at Topf and Sons from 1939
onwards. Wiemokli’s father was Jewish, and both were imprisoned by the
Nazis.
GUSTAV BRAUN (1889–1958): Operations Director at Topf and Sons from
1935–1945.
UDO BRAUN (b. 1936): son of Gustav Braun and head of VEB Erfurter
Mälzerei-und Speicherbau (EMS), formerly J. A. Topf and Sons.
INTRODUCTION
THE PUPPETEER
AUSCHWITZ, 22 MARCH 2017
It is not Hartmut Topf’s first visit to Auschwitz, and, at the age of eighty-
three, it may or may not be his last. Wearing his flat cap and the earphones for
the German-language audio tour, Hartmut straggles a way behind the rest of
his group, quietly taking in the scene of the main camp. It is raining heavily.
After three hours of walking through the grounds of the neighbouring camp,
Birkenau, his clothes are soaking. With wild grey hair sticking out over his
ears, a beard and a long raincoat buttoned to the neck, he looks something like
an electrified Sherlock Holmes. His blue eyes flick from scene to scene; a
barrack, the laundry room, the famous gate with the sign that says Arbeit
Macht Frei. Hartmut appears to be listening intently to something – although
it turns out that the audio guide has not yet begun. Instead he is thinking, as he
must be, about what it means to be a Topf at this place. A place he is
umbilically linked to, through a connection he has been trying to be make
sense of for almost his entire life. It would be easy for him to say he feels
regretful, guilty. Sad. Instead, he holds back. Pauses for a long second, and
frames his words carefully. ‘The crimes that happened here… are very sad,’
he says eventually.
Hartmut is a strange sort of guest of honour at Auschwitz. It is the opening
day for an exhibition exploring the work of the family company he was born
into, Topf and Sons, a name immortalised globally when post-war newsreels
showed images of Topf and Sons stamped in iron on the crematorium ovens
that fuelled the Holocaust. Once a venerable German family firm, well known
for making machinery for brewing and malting; it was a company that
descendants like Hartmut, whose great-grandfather J. A. Topf had founded the
company, could feel proud of. During the 1930s, however, Topf and Sons
developed a new line of business building ovens and ventilation systems for
the growing trend of human cremation – which promoted an altogether more
modern, regulated and hygienic way of death. Although this work remained a
tiny part of the business, and only ever accounted for 3 per cent of profits, its
grim achievements and legacy would consume the company, and ensure that
Topf and Sons would live in infamy.
By the end of the 1930s, a series of business decisions, family feuds and
bitter personal rivalries between employees would tie Topf and Sons ever
more closely into the ugliest work of the Nazi regime by producing the
ventilation systems for the gas chambers and the ovens that disposed of the
bodies of millions of their victims. The men behind these crimes, company
directors Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf, along with their managers,
engineers, oven fitters and ventilation experts, were not ignorant paper
pushers or frightened collaborators – instead they willingly engaged with the
Nazis, reaping the benefits, taking every advantage they could, and pushing
their designs for mass murder and body disposal further and further until they
could truly be described as the engineers of the Holocaust. They were men
who, by the end of the Second World War, were dreaming dreams of
extinction so outlandish that even the SS were unable to accept their plans.
In Berlin, their cousin Hartmut Topf was still a teenage boy when, sitting
in a cinema, he saw the post-war newsreel that showed the Topf and Sons
name inscribed above the oven in a concentration camp. Almost seventy years
later, he remains a man in shock: how did it come to be that a conservative
family firm in the pleasant Thuringian city of Erfurt could be responsible for
such heinous crimes?
‘When I got home, I asked my mother about what I’d seen in the newsreel,
but she knew nothing about it,’ Hartmut says. ‘By then my father was a
prisoner of the Soviet army. It seemed that no one could give me any answers,
and no one wanted any questions.’
Hartmut’s younger sister Karin looks blank when he asks her for her
reaction to the family’s place in history. ‘We’ve never talked about it,’ she
admits, sitting in their family home in Falkensee, a suburb just south of Berlin.
This is the house that their father built, and where Hartmut and his sisters Elke
and Karin grew up and lived out the war years. Karin makes clear though that
although she respects and supports Hartmut’s efforts over the years to reveal
the truth about Topf and Sons, in a quest for atonement, she remembers no
similar moment of astonishment upon discovering the dark side of the family
name. ‘I’ve never thought about it,’ she says, after giving the question puzzled
consideration.
Back at the Topf and Sons’ exhibition at Auschwitz, a small crowd gathers
as the German First Minister for the State of Thuringia arrives. Among the
group are some of the founders of the Topf and Sons’ memorial that now
houses a permanent exhibit at the site of the original factory. Annegret Schüle,
the director of the memorial and author of the German history of the company,
is there, as are two local journalists from Erfurt – and the leader of
Thuringia’s small Jewish community. Although Hartmut is the only member
of the family present, he melts inconspicuously into the background, coming
forward only when he is called. Yet he is undoubtedly part of a tireless effort
over nearly three decades to bring the truth about Topf and Sons to light.
Born into a family of engineers, Hartmut struck out on a separate path,
finding that his passion lay with theatre and journalism instead. After trying
and failing to become an actor, he pursued a lifelong interest in puppet theatre.
‘The beauty of puppet theatre is that you can soar, you can fly, you can
crash, you can die. You can do all the things that you cannot do as a human on
stage. And, of course, there is the mask,’ Hartmut says. ‘The puppeteer who
can do anything and ask anything without being seen. Without revealing
himself.’
As a small boy, Hartmut remembers his father acting out puppet shows
through the open dining room window of their house, while the children
watched from the garden. His real fascination with puppets, however, came
from his friend Hans Laessig, who lived down the street. ‘He made beautiful
wooden puppets, and I put them all along the shelf on the wall in my
bedroom,’1 Hartmut says. But Hans came from a partly Jewish family – and
one day he vanished. As a boy, Hartmut understood the silent complicity of
asking no questions, but as an adult he would seek to find out what had
happened to his friend Hans, just as he would unravel the truth about Topf and
Sons. In doing so, he would discover that his family firm had played an
integral and crucial role in the murder of millions.
Notes
1 Author interview with Hartmut Topf.
CHAPTER ONE
BORN AND BRED AT J. A. TOPF
ERFURT. WINTER, 1941.
Two years after Germany launched the vast territorial land-grab across Europe
that had spurred the start of the Second World War, the citizens of Erfurt, a
small city near Weimar in central Germany, still convinced themselves that
they were winning. France was conquered. Swathes of eastern Europe lay
‘reunited’ under Nazi control. Britain had been beaten back to its own shores.
Local articles in the Thüringer Allgemeine still confidently reported cultural
snippets and details of mundane daily life – wives of German soldiers
holidaying in Italy, who were enjoying spending time on sunny beaches with
their children; allotments that needed to be prepared for winter; the mayor of
Erfurt warning its citizens to maintain the good name of the town by keeping
the streets clean.
Nonetheless, even the most complacent and dedicated Nazis were
beginning to feel a twinge of unease. In early December, Hitler announced
that Germany would also be waging war on the United States, following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the dead of winter in Russia, German
forces gathered for a perilous and unprecedented march towards Moscow. The
Thüringer Allgemeine began to use photo-reporting from the Eastern Front,
dedicating endless front-page articles to news about the fighting. ‘Heroic’ and
‘victorious’ as it all appeared to be – the scale of the war was now vast.
Stories about success in the Crimea, the sinking of British ships, enormous
Soviet losses were churned out daily, followed by maps of Asia, illustrating
the sweeping Japanese advance. No ordinary citizen can escape the reality
that, just as it had done since taking power in 1933, the Nazi regime continued
to raise the stakes, increment by increment, restlessly and insatiably moving
towards a final goal.
For the Jews of Europe, the horror of that goal was becoming clearer: from
1933 to 1939 German Jews had been systematically stripped of every human
and civil right, banned from working in almost any profession, owning