By Alexandra Hudson
BERLIN (Reuters) – Hartmut Topf has spent a lifetime trying
to comprehend why family firm Topf & Soehne agreed 64 years ago
to build crematoria for Auschwitz and enable industrialized
mass murder.
He knows there can be no satisfactory answer.
A new Berlin exhibition sheds light on Topf, one of
countless largely forgotten small firms to provide the
technical know-how for the Holocaust. It tries to trace why
this eastern German furnace maker became entangled with the
Nazis, despite sensing what the ovens were being used for.
Fresh archive evidence shows the brothers who ran Topf,
cousins of Hartmut’s father, were not fanatic Nazis and faced
no personal risk for declining orders for furnaces from
Hitler’s elite SS guards.
Nor were they in it for the money. Crematoria and
ventilation systems for the concentration camps comprised only
2 percent of their turnover, and the SS paid late.
Rather a picture emerges of a firm of meticulous
technocrats, motivated by the “challenge” of perfecting and
installing incinerators capable of burning thousands of corpses
daily, and blinded by the detail to their moral crime.
“It is unthinkable,” says 70-year-old Hartmut Topf.
“It makes me furious that these were my relatives… they
were no anti-Semites, no evil Nazis. They were normal people,
in a completely normal firm, which only makes it harder to
understand,” he adds.
A fifth of the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust
were killed at Auschwitz, along with homosexuals, Gypsies,
Polish political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war.
The Nazi death camps employed hundreds of contractors to
provide equipment and expertise for the “Final Solution.”
While the collaboration of German industrial giants such as
IG Farben, which provided deadly Zyklon B for the gas chambers,
is well documented, the role of smaller firms and the extent to
which they escaped unpunished after World War II has faded from
view.
LOADED NAME
“I was proud as a child because Topf was a successful,
world-renowned firm,” Hartmut Topf explains.
This pride evaporated when as an 11-year-old he watched
footage of the camps in cinema newsreels, and saw the “Topf”
name plaque, borne by all the firm’s products, on the
crematoria of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Later Topf determined to establish the details and atone
for the past.
“I went to Auschwitz and greeted an old man there, telling
him my name was Topf. ‘Your name has a bad ring here,’ he told
me. ‘I know. That is why I am here,’ I answered.”
Topf & Sons was founded by Hartmut’s great-grandfather in
1878, in Erfurt, as a customized incinerator and malting
equipment manufacturer. The firm was close to the Ettersberg
hill, later the site of Buchenwald concentration camp.
With the expansion of cremation in Germany as a burial rite
in the 1920s, the firm’s ambitious chief engineer Kurt Pruefer
pioneered furnaces which complied with strict regulations on
preserving the dignity of the body.
Naked flame could not come in contact with the coffin, and
cremation was to be smoke and odor free.
Aware of the firm’s reputation, the SS approached Pruefer
in 1939, with an order for a crematorium for Buchenwald after
an epidemic killed hundreds of prisoners.
Pruefer designed crematoria resembling incinerators for
animal carcasses, knowing the dead were not to be burned
individually or in coffins, nor were ashes to be separated.
The orders came rolling in, as Pruefer strived to create
more efficient furnaces. Firm documents in the exhibition prove
he visited Auschwitz several times and saw his ovens close to
“the bathhouses for special operations.”
Rather than feel disgust, Pruefer merely deliberated the
practical problems of extermination. Transcripts of his 1948
interrogations by Russian forces show he never felt remorse.
“Pruefer threatened to resign at one point over lack of
salary, they (Ernst-Wolfang and Ludwig Topf) should have let
him go… but they didn’t. They continued to show this stupid
loyalty to the regime,” Topf says.
After the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz in 1945 Pruefer even
suggested to the SS they could reassemble parts of the furnaces
in Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
“It sends shivers down my spine,” Topf adds.
AFTERMATH
Topf name plates on the ovens couldn’t have made it easier
for the Allies to trace the firm.
The Americans released Pruefer after a few weeks, but once
the Soviets arrived in Erfurt he was sentenced to 25 years and
died in 1952 in a Russian gulag.
Ludwig Topf killed himself in May 1945, claiming his
innocence in a jumble of excuses left in a suicide note.
His brother Ernst-Wolfgang fled to western Germany and was
put on trial by the Americans. He talked his way out of the
charges, maintaining the ovens were “innocent,” and founded a
new incinerator business, operating until bankruptcy in 1963.
He even tried unsuccessfully to secure a patent for a
“monster four-story” furnace designed during the war, Hartmut
Topf explains.
“There was no historical insight at the time. Only excuses
and pleas that people could have done nothing else. It makes me
sick.”
Today, Topf & Sons former Erfurt premises stand empty and
dilapidated. The firm was nationalized by the communists and
survived until 1996. Authorities plan to buy the site and set
up a permanent exhibition and memorial.
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