Architects of Death Read online

  J. A. Topf lived with his parents and five siblings at 34–35 Krämpferstrasse, where the family continued to run their farm. When he was fourteen he left school and undertook military service. He then began training as a brewer with his uncle, Johann Caspar Schlegel and, after serving his apprenticeship, J. A. Topf struck out on his own – moving to Stolberg in Saxony to set up his own brewery. By the age of thirty-six he was ready to marry, and chose the daughter of a local master baker, who was nine years his junior, Johanne Caroline Auguste Reidemeister. Together they moved back to the Topf family home in Erfurt and had five sons, four of whom lived to adulthood. Gustav was born in 1853, Albert in 1857, Max Julius Ernst in 1859 and Wilhelm Louis, known as Ludwig, in 1863.

  Back in Erfurt J. A. Topf began brewing beer on the family farm, but he proved to be a poor businessman. Topf’s first attempt to establish a brewery on the property met with disaster when his business partner turned out to be a crook, according to Topf’s son Julius, and the family lost both their property and all of their funds, including Johanne Topf’s dowry. Remembering the ‘great hardship in the house’,6 Julius Topf said the family’s poverty had made a lasting impression on the four sons, especially by comparison to some of their rich relations. The situation was so dire that even the baker refused to give the Topfs credit to buy bread.

  After the loss of their home, the family moved to another address while J. A. Topf tried his hand at cultivating vegetable seeds and earning money as a self-employed firing technician. Although his business skills were always limited, Topf had discovered that his real talent lay in invention and innovation. In 1867, he began advertising his boiler and oven optimisation services and two years later persuaded the well-known Erfurt food manufacturer, Casar Teichmann, that they could produce a high-quality beer together using Topf’s brewing methods. The beer, which was called Nestor, was indeed so successful that Teichmann acquired the old Topf family property in Krämpferstrasse and established his own brewery there, with J. A. Topf in place as master brewer. Once again, however, the partnership foundered when Teichmann asked Topf to work for half his previous salary due to his increasing age. Julius Topf would later claim that Teichmann had not appreciated his father’s ‘mightily forward-striving spirit’, and the two parted company – with Topf choosing to try again to capitalise on his own technical expertise.

  At the age of sixty-two it was a bold move, and one his children did not agree with. Despite their opposition, by July 1878 J. A. Topf had moved the family again, to 10b Johannesflur, and restarted the business using his patent for the firing system used in the brewing process. In the brewing process malt was ground and then cooked in the brew pan along with water and hops. The Topf-controlled firing system was innovative and more efficient, as it led to less burning on the base of the brew pans and used less coal. Future generations of the family would consider 1878 the official founding of Topf and Sons, but despite winning a few contracts in the Thuringia region, the company was still struggling.

  In 1884 J. A. Topf’s second youngest son, Julius, joined the business. Julius, who would become Hartmut Topf’s grandfather, had given up training for the civil service and also a prospective career as a fruit farmer and gardener to become a furnace technician. A year later, his youngest brother, Ludwig, joined him in the firm and in 1885 they refounded J. A. Topf and Sons as specialists in heating systems and brewery and malting installations, employing a draughtsman and moving the business out of the family home and into rented office space.

  Julius felt he had relieved his parents of a burden by taking over the business, particularly as his father was now mentally unstable. Julius said the ‘hard times’ and worries his father had endured had sapped his spirit, later writing to his wife that while his father was no longer ‘au fait’ enough to work, when left to his own thoughts he ‘quickly turns almost crazy’ and that he suffered from an ‘enormous vanity’ bordering on megalomania.

  When he died in 1891, J. A. Topf left behind little in the way of business success, but he had founded a company and his technological innovations would outlive him. During his troubled lifetime, Germany had undergone the most profound transformation. Moving from a country which had, at the time of his birth, resembled a Grimms brothers’ fairy tale (a place of dark woods, wolves and bereavement, where people were often poor and hungry and suffered random cruelties) to become a fully-fledged nation. Although it was a unification led throughout the 1860s by the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, it was driven in part by the underlying forces of social and economic dynamism emerging from a new, confident and wealthy class of businessmen, bankers and manufacturers. Men who were similar to, but more successful than, J. A. Topf.

  These were the years of Germany’s explosive industrialisation and the development of a bourgeois middle class, in love with the idea of technology and progress. In Prussia, coal production increased fourfold between 1849 and 1875, raw iron output increased fourteenfold and steel output increased 54-fold. Firms which would become synonymous with German technology and manufacturing, including Hoechst, Bayer and BASF, were founded and flourished – while the workforce employed by industrialist Alfred Krupp rose from sixty men in 1836 to 16,000 in 1873.

  Essayist Otto Gildemeister wrote in 1873: ‘It is not exaggeration to say that when it comes to trade and communications and industry, the gulf that separates 1877 and 1773 is greater than the gulf separating 1773 and the Phoenicians.’7

  Historian David Blackbourn claims that while this is an exaggeration, it is one that sums up the spirit of the time. In the towns and provinces across Germany, small businessmen were buoyed by a ‘mushroom-like growth’ of factories, gasworks, waterworks and railways. A particular area of prosperity related to food production and milling and brewing – fortuitously for Topf and Sons, as this was their line of business.

  While J. A. Topf had not been able to seize these advantages himself, the years between 1885, when the Topf brothers refounded the business, and the turn of the twentieth century would lay the foundations for its future commercial success. Two other brothers, Albert and Gustav, joined the firm, strengthening its prestige in the case of Gustav who, as a chemist and biologist, set up an on-site laboratory to test innovative machinery. The company would also enter into a series of successful business partnerships that would enable it to expand and prosper. The first of these saw Erfurt’s oldest metal processing firm, J. A. John and Company, take over the processing, invoicing and supply for all Topf products. Within the course of a few years, commercial success meant that Topf and Sons expanded, adding malt kilns to their range, and moving premises four times before finally building their own works and administration building outside the town near the railway station.

  From 1889 onwards, this site in Daberstedter Feld (now called Sorbenweg) was the seat of the company – and it was where Topf would continue to operate from until the end of the Second World War. At first the administration building held an office on the ground floor, and accommodation for the Topf family above. The site also contained production facilities, a goods shed and a place for workers to wash and change. The Topf brothers had chosen well; Erfurt had been defortified since the founding of the German Reich in 1873, opening up new areas of land and increasing industrial development. During these decades, the population of Erfurt doubled and the town was given city status in 1906.

  The deaths of Albert and Gustav Topf, in 1893 and 1896 respectively, meant that Julius and Ludwig Topf would co-run the company for the next eight years. Within three years the company had started producing its own equipment, and formed a new manufacturing partnership with master mill builder Reinhold Matthias, which it would later take over in its entirety, and Beyer and Co., a machine factory that concentrated on steam driven machines. Topf and Sons also bought into, and later took over, a relative’s company, Topf and Stahl, which sold malting and ventilation equipment. Internally J. A. Topf and Sons was now divided into a malting division and a boiler equipment division, and employed fif
ty fitters. This period of rapid expansion, consolidation and success was symbolised by the decision in 1899 to register a trademark in which the letters of the name Topf formed a pot (Topf means pot in German). In time, of course, this trademark would become infamous.

  After several successful years, Julius Topf decided to step down from his role in the business on 1 January 1904. Citing ‘ill-health’ he dedicated his remaining time to his love for fruit tree cultivation, and his work on the city council and as a freemason. By now he had had nine children with his wife Babette, including his son Albert, who would become Hartmut Topf’s father. The family had now moved from the Topf site to their own home at 4 Nonnerain, where they would play only a peripheral role in the history of the company.

  As of 1904, Topf and Sons was now under the sole control of Julius’s brother Ludwig Topf Sr – and eventually his heirs. Julius’s decision to step down from the business coincided with the birth of Ludwig Sr’s first son, who was christened Viktor but always known by his third given name, Ludwig. In 1901, the then 38-year-old Ludwig Sr married a woman nineteen years his junior, Pauline Else Getrud Kuhnlenz, known as Else. They celebrated their wedding with a company party and a newsletter that showed the couple surrounded by flaming hearts on one side and pictures of the Topf and Sons works on the other. Their first child, Johanna, was born the following year in 1902, followed by Viktor Karl Ludwig in 1903 and then Ernst Wolfgang in 1904.

  As the wedding/works party demonstrated, the lives of the Topf family were now bound up with the success and prestige of the company, and the new generation of Topf children began their lives in the accommodation quarters of the Topf administration building. Ernst Wolfgang would later say that he had been born and bred at ‘J. A. and Topf’s machinery factory’. By now, however, Ludwig Sr had become one of the seven wealthiest businessmen in Erfurt, earning a salary of 10,000 Reichsmark per annum (more than ten times what a working-class carpenter or miner would have made at the time) as well as a share of the company profits. By 1909, the family had moved out of the administration building into a rented apartment in the city centre, but Ludwig Sr was determined that his children would not be spoilt by wealth, and insisted that they visit workers’ homes and hospitals – dispatching the young Ludwig to spend his summer holidays with a worker’s family where he even had to share a bed with a boy the same age.

  Ludwig Sr’s one extravagance was to establish a ‘summer residence’ – on an area of parkland only a ten-minute walk from the factory. Topf built a house on the land between Hirnzigenweg, Rubensstrasse and Wilhelm-Busch-Strasse, and then created a string of allotments around the edge of the park to be used by Topf and Sons’ workers. The allotments were in keeping with a movement of the time where workers were encouraged to cultivate small plots of land, grow their own vegetables and relax. It also shows a strong bond between the Topf family and their workers that extended far beyond the work of the factory floor. Ludwig Sr set up a staff pension fund, introduced Christmas bonuses and built a non-profit housing cooperative. At the firm’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in 1903, he announced that he considered himself, and his brothers, to be ‘the company’s first workers’ and, in response, Topf furnace builders presented Ludwig Sr with a silver goblet with depictions of the Topf family and their workers. At the presentation one worker recited a poem he had written, proclaiming that he hoped both the tankard and Topf and Sons would survive for 1,000 years.

  For the next decade Ludwig Sr fully lived the life of a prosperous early twentieth-century businessman: he was both a board member of the Thuringian Industrialists Society and vice-president of the Erfurt chamber of commerce. His company, Topf and Sons was able to take advantage of a stable political climate and a boom in German beer brewing, and grew to become a mid-sized business of 517 employees by 1914. Topf and Sons was now the global leader in producing malting systems, selling high-quality patented products through an international sales network that stretched to fifty countries, and with technical offices across Germany and in Poland, Austria and Belgium.

  This golden era for Topf and Sons reflected a spirit of natural optimism, urban vigour and nationhood that had emerged more widely in Germany. An ‘optimism about mechanical civilisation, pride in German culture, the importance of mobilising civic energies and belief in social and moral improvement’8 went hand in hand with a second industrial revolution focused on chemicals, electronics, precision instruments and optics. Germany was now a world leader in technology, philosophy, law, medicine, biology, chemistry and physics. It was a revolution driven by a growing class of salaried workers who went to work in modern offices every day, like those in the administration building at Topf and Sons, and who spent their wages on better food and drink.

  Then, on 15 February 1914, Ludwig Sr committed suicide. It was a shocking end to a seemingly successful life. In one generation, he had taken his company from shaky beginnings to an established international business, and had cemented his own role as an Erfurt civic leader. Local newspapers proclaimed that he was the epitome of the ‘city’s industrial magnates’, yet at the age of fifty-one he had taken his own life while suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’ at a sanatorium in the Harz Mountains. Like his father before him, it appeared that the strain of running Topf and Sons had proved too much for him, and he had long talked about selling off one of the company’s two divisions. Although the company remained on a sound commercial footing, Ludwig Sr left behind a wife and three young children, who were fractured by his death and the sudden change in their family life. Both his sons would mythologise his memory, while trying, and often failing, to live up to his legacy.

  In the aftermath of his death, control of the company passed to Ludwig’s widow Else Topf with the expectation that it would then eventually be handed on to the Topf sons. The unfolding of tortured family relationships between Else Topf and her children, and the rise of other powerful forces within the company, would make this far from certain, however.

  Unwittingly, Ludwig had chosen to commit suicide only a few months before the outbreak of First World War – an event which would fundamentally transform the nature of both his country and his company. During the war itself, Topf and Sons expanded its areas of production to include war vehicles and grenades. After the war, the Treaty of Versailles demanded that Germany pay huge reparations to France and Europe via its coal supplies (some local German currency at the time showed enormous coal trains snaking across Germany, heading for Paris) – forcing German industry to turn from coal to lignite. The ever innovative Topf and Sons responded to this by developing lignite furnaces, expanding their chimney construction business, and then, from 1925, producing ventilation systems.

  The year of Ludwig’s suicide would become a significant one for Topf and Sons for another reason, too – it was also the year that the company began producing furnaces for crematoria. Rising urban populations in the nineteenth century and concerns about hygiene and lack of space in graveyards had given rise to a new European movement in favour of human cremation.

  Despite religious objections and a ban by the Catholic Church that remained until 1963, a social movement, ‘the cremationists’, sprang up in Germany to advocate a more modern and technologically advanced way of disposing of human remains. Although cremation had long been practiced in other parts of the world, it was an idea that required a huge shift in European culture, essentially away from Christianity and the belief in life after death and resurrection.

  The debate about the nature of cremation, and the rules it must adhere to, still shape the practice today. For example, before cremation can take place the body must be examined by two people to ensure that the person is dead, and that they have not been killed by unnatural means. Furthermore, the European Cremation Congress of Dresden in 1876 ruled that cremation should be carried out quickly and be completely odourless in furnaces used exclusively by humans. A person should be cremated alone, and their ashes collected together. Two years later, German crematoria had taken
this reverence for the human body a stage further, opening a crematorium in Gotha that used super-heated air – meaning that the body never came into contact with the fire. The Siemens-Schneider regenerative furnace was pre-heated with coke for four hours to reach a temperature of 1000°C. After that it was forbidden to add any further fuel, and the cremation itself took place solely in the hot air and gasses that surrounded the body.

  The years of the Weimar Republic, and its emphasis on secular modernism, saw an enormous increase in cremation rather than burial – with the number rising from 630 cremations in five crematoria in 1900 to more than 50,000 in 103 different crematoria in 1930. Such prospects for a profitable industry meant that not all companies agreed with the stringent requirements for human cremation. Notably, Heinrich Kori from Berlin opposed the ‘sacred cow’ of human cremation in favour of his already commercially successful methods for animal incineration. He opposed the Prussian Cremation Act of 1911 and argued in favour of replacing cremation by hot air in favour of burning bodies using direct burning gasses. When Kori and Topf went head to head in competition to supply the crematorium at Arnstadt in 1924, Kori’s ‘furnaces for wastes of all kinds’ lost out to Topf because of Kori’s disregard for the human reverence regulations.

  Topf and Sons complied with the spirit, as well as the letter of the law, meaning that by the mid-1920s they were national and international leaders in supplying technologically advanced cremation solutions. Not only did they support the regulations surrounding ‘reverence’, they created ingenious solutions to make human cremation even more dignified. Under the supervision of engineer Kurt Prüfer, who ran the furnace construction department at Topf and Sons, the company developed what was known as a ‘muffle’ – a slider between the coke generator and oven chamber that meant the oven could be sealed before the coffin was in place. The company introduced the first gas-heated oven in 1927, followed by the first electric oven in 1933.