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  For Max

  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.

  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 property, going to school, marrying a non-Jew, walking the streets in safety and were forced to carry a passport or identity card stamped with a large letter ‘J’. Jewish families had watched in horror during the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) of 9 October 1938, when more than 7,000 Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues were looted and burned down. Their terror spread across Europe while the onslaught of Nazi occupation led to the establishment of massive Jewish ghettos in Poland and the rest of eastern Europe alongside plans to ‘resettle’ European Jews in the lands of the east.

  Hitler’s aim to murder the Jews of Europe had never been particularly well hidden. In 1945, former journalist Major Josef Hell claimed that, as early as 1922, Hitler had told him:

  Once I am really in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows – at the Marienplatz in Munich for example – as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated.2

  Since the summer of 1941, the Nazis had been mulling over how to implement Hitler’s ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ and in August of that year they discovered a horrible possibility. When testing a delousing agent, Zyklon B gas, on Soviet prisoners of war at a prison camp in Silesia known as Auschwitz, they discovered that the noxious substance had the ability to kill all those who breathed in its fumes. In the winter of 1941, the chief of the German police and SS, Heinrich Himmler, summoned Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss to Berlin to answer what the Nazis considered to be the vital question of how best to achieve annihilation. On 20 January 1942, while newspapers focused on collecting woollen fabrics for the war effort and celebrating the successes of German engineering and the Autobahn, Himmler hosted the infamous Wannsee Conference. ‘Whatever Jews we can reach are to be eliminated,’ Himmler tells Höss, ‘without exception.’3

  The resolution the Nazis reach will require a cold-blooded alchemy of technical ingenuity and moral bankruptcy, and will be brought into being not in the cold swampy flatlands of Poland, but, in part, in a comfortable office in one of Germany’s most pleasant cities. An office with drawing boards and a view of the Ettersberg mountain – where middle-aged men wearing stiff white collars dream up horrors, each more demented than the last.

  These are the offices of Topf and Sons, a proud local company noted for expertise in producing agricultural equipment for brewing and malting. Topf and Sons has been working with the Nazis since 17 May 1939, when engineer Kurt Prüfer produces a drawing for a mobile, oil-heated Topf cremation oven, securing the company’s first commission with the SS. The mobile ovens will be used to incinerate the growing number of bodies at concentration camps, including the nearby camp at Buchenwald. Although the initial order is for only three mobile ovens, the company has crossed its first and most important moral line in producing them. For the ovens are based on Kurt Prüfer’s design for a mobile waste incinerator intended only for animal use and which does not meet the strict technical requirements necessary for human cremation chambers. According to German regulations, when incinerating a human body it should never come into direct contact with flames, it must instead be cremated in super-heated air. By late 1941, Topf and Sons have produced mobile and static single and double-muffle ovens for four Nazi concentration camps, and have designed a new series of triple-muffle ovens to meet the demands of the SS at Auschwitz, where Nazi administrators calculate that Soviet prisoners will die at a rate of 1,000 per day.

  (The muffle is the incineration chamber, a double-muffle oven would have a source of fire for each chamber, but Prüfer’s design for a triple-muffle oven broke convention by using only two sources of fire for the external chambers, and allowing the flames to burn the body in the central chamber by passing through gaps in the walls.)

  It is work that the company appears to be proud of: instead of recoiling from the immediately apparent nature of these horrors, company director Ernst Wolfgang Topf writes to the SS at Auschwitz on 4 November 1941 to explain that the new design will ‘improve effi
ciency’, even taking into account the higher fuel consumption of ‘frozen’ corpses. ‘Rest assured,’ Ernst Wolfgang writes, ‘we shall supply an appropriate and well-functioning system, and we commend ourselves to you with a Heil Hitler.’ So proud are they of their work that Kurt Prüfer takes the opportunity a month later, on 6 December, to write to Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig Topf demanding more money for his design: ‘It was I who worked out how to create the three- and eight-muffle cremation ovens, mostly in my free time,’ he boasts, ‘These ovens are truly ground-breaking, and may I assume that you will grant me a bonus for the work I have done.’4

  This staggeringly inhumane debate seems a far cry from the origins of J. A. Topf and Sons, founded in Erfurt sixty years earlier, in 1878, by master brewer Johann Andreas Topf. Yet the company was marked from the beginning with some of the same characteristics of technical innovation, unsteady business fortunes, and a strain of mental instability in its founders.

  Johann Andreas (J. A.) Topf was born in Erfurt in 1816, the eldest son of farmer Johann Sebastian Topf and his wife Maria Magdalena, who was part of the town’s Schlegel brewing family.

  Alongside glassblowing, brewing was one of Germany’s few growth industries at the time. Nevertheless, to live in Erfurt, or in fact almost anywhere in Germany, was to live in a small world. Erfurt was a ‘working town’ that had become wealthy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries due to the trade in woad, a yellow-flowered plant used in blue dye. In comparison to its close rivals, Erfurt had neither the cultural and literary delights of Weimar, which still gloried in its golden age of being home to Goethe and Schiller, nor the university tradition of Jena. The term ‘working town’ was relative, however, and a visitor would have encountered small handicraft businesses, crooked streets and livelihoods controlled by strict guilds all conducting local commerce. Germany itself (still a loose assortment of states just beginning to map out some of the bureaucratic processes it would become known for) was considered by fellow Europeans to be a slumbering, ‘quaint, half-timbered land’ of poets and dreamers, and ‘a country whose industrial goods were still regarded, even in the 1870s, as cheap and nasty’.5