Architects of Death

by Karen Bartlett

  Prüfer was not only responsible for innovative designs, he was also the figurehead of the company’s innovation in this area, promoting the work of Topf and Sons to the wider industry and crematoria movement. He kept abreast of debates about cremation, and was a member of the Erfurt People’s Cremation Society. In 1931 he wrote to Flame magazine, published by the Berlin cremation society, explaining why Topf avoided the methods used by Hamburg designers Volkmann and Ludwig in which a gas pipe was directly placed near parts of a human body that were more difficult to incinerate, blowing compressed air directly over the body. Within the company, he clearly distinguished between his work for human cremation ovens, calling them ‘cremation systems’ and other animal and waste incinerators, which he termed ‘elimination ovens’. These distinctions would later prove crucial in evaluating the role Topf and Sons played in the Holocaust.

  When Ludwig Sr’s sons, Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang, took control of Topf and Sons in the early 1930s they inherited a company that was established as an international leader in the malting industry, with a small but technologically advanced sideline in cremation technology. Their inheritance, however, came about only as a result of a bitter court battle they waged against their own mother and the other Topf and Sons company directors.

  After the death of their father in 1914, Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang endured a peripatetic and patchy upbringing. Their mother gave up the family home, and sent both sons away to boarding school in the Thuringian town of Gumperda. Although the brothers were close, the differences between them became apparent even at an early age. By the time the boys took their Reifeprufung, the equivalent of a high school diploma or leaving certificate, it seems Ludwig was already falling behind. Although he was a year older than his brother Ernst Wolfgang, the boys took their examination together, indicating that Ludwig had already taken a break from education. Indeed, it was Ludwig Topf who became the first of his siblings to fall out with his mother, when, upon leaving schoool, she refused to give him any more financial support.

  In the following twelve years, Ludwig unsuccessfully embarked upon, and then discarded, a bewildering array of studies and possible careers. After leaving school he first set out to study mechanical engineering in Hannover, paying his way by working as a coal trimmer, tutor and bank assistant. Soon, however, he collapsed, suffering from gall bladder problems and the psychological strain of his estrangement from his mother. Leaving Hannover in bad health, Ludwig then attempted to continue his education elsewhere – trying out a range of courses in economics, business, sociology, law and journalism at universities in Berlin, Leipzig and Rostock. By the time he eventually joined Topf and Sons, Ludwig was supposedly studying for a PhD in malt production – but the truth was that in his many years of study Ludwig Topf never achieved a single qualification in any subject, nor did he successfully pursue an alternative career.

  While Ludwig acted out the role of family playboy, who ‘looked and behaved like a film star’,9 the burden of plodding productivity fell to his younger brother, Ernst Wolfgang, who was described as having the ‘pedantic, grudge-bearing’ countenance of an office worker. After taking his Abitur, Ernst Wolfgang undertook and completed training to become a merchant with Oskar Winter Ironwear Wholesalers in Hannover, and then added to his commercial understanding by completing six months of work experience, first at a bank in Erfurt and then at a malting company in Arnstadt. With solid experience under his belt, Ernst Wolfgang joined Ludwig in Leipzig, and graduated from commercial college with a business diploma in 1929.

  Superficially, the two brothers could not have been more different, but their fraternal bond was strong. At every stage of their early education and career they invariably chose to move to the same city, and would sometimes share the same lodgings. Once they were ensconced as the directors of Topf and Sons, they lived separately – with Ernst Wolfgang moving into a rented apartment while Ludwig chose the more glamorous setting of a house in the Topf family park. At work, however, they fell back into their earlier pattern – choosing to share an office with desks that faced each other (perhaps also because neither entirely trusted the other.)

  Ernst Wolfgang Topf was the first of the brothers to take up an official role with the company, joining the business at the end of 1929. His appointment came only after the death of Felix Paul – the last remaining director from Ludwig Topf Sr’s time in control. After the war, Ernst Wolfgang would claim that the strong dislike which existed between Felix Paul and the Topf brothers was caused by Paul’s anti-Semitism and the Topf brothers’ friendships with Jewish families; however, this was part of a larger narrative concocted by Ernst Wolfgang Topf to try and persuade the Soviet authorities that he was not guilty of Nazi war crimes. It is true, though, that Felix Paul disapproved of both brothers and did not speak to them or acknowledge them for years. Paul went out of his way to make sure that Topf and Sons did not come under the brothers’ control.

  With Paul out of the way, however, Ernst Wolfgang Topf caved in under pressure from his mother to join the company – with Ludwig following in late 1931. Now aged twenty-eight, Ludwig Topf swapped his status of perpetual student for that of wealthy playboy industrialist, but he chose not to work in the area in which he was supposedly pursuing a PhD – malt production. Instead he focused on furnace construction, specifically, crematoria furnaces, working with Kurt Prüfer to associate the name of Topf and Sons with advanced cremation technology and dignity after death.

  As the familial heirs of Ludwig Topf Sr it appeared that both brothers had finally taken up senior roles in the business, but they would have to overcome another significant hurdle to make sure that the spoils were theirs.

  By the early 1930s, Germany was deep in recession. The German economy had enjoyed what seemed to be a brief period of stability in the mid-1920s after overcoming the economic crisis and hyperinflation of 1923. Paper money had been rendered worthless, employer–employee relations had broken down, France occupied large parts of Germany’s industrial heartland, and crime and unemployment rose dramatically. The agreement by the Weimar government to settle the question of reparations (effectively admitting that Germany had lost the First World War) ushered in a new era of foreign, notably American, investment – along with state intervention in public building projects and a social welfare state. Rising living standards went hand in hand with political support for parties that occupied the centre ground. However, the number of people now financially dependent on the government for welfare payments and war pensions meant that the Weimar Republic was, in fact, desperately overstretched and unable to cope with the advent of the Great Depression.

  In March 1929, Germany was plunged into deflationary crisis with prices and output falling by one-fifth. When the government proved reluctant to implement economic measures out of fear of causing a ‘second great inflation’, the economic situation worsened with wages falling and unemployment rising until by the summer of 1932, 45 per cent of German trade union members were considered to be out of work.

  Faced with such bleak circumstances, Topf and Sons, like many other businesses in Germany, found short-term remedies in cutting salaries and laying off staff, but it still struggled to pay its bills. As early as December 1930, Else Topf instituted the first pay-cut, slashing directors’ salaries by 17.5 per cent. Those earning more than 500 RM a month had their earnings reduced by 10 per cent. Only the lowest strata of workers, who earned less than 300 Reichsmarks a month, were left untouched. For the next three years salaries would be cut further while productivity dropped by a quarter – down from 4 million Reichsmarks in 1930 to only 1 million Reichsmarks in 1933.

  Ernst Wolfgang had only joined the business at the end of 1929, but by April 1932 he and his mother, Else, had become estranged, with Else choosing to side with the company directors when they moved to dismiss both brothers from Topf and Sons by the end of that year. Although their departure took place during the worst of the economic turmoil, the reasons were less financial, than political. In the e
lection of July 1932 the Nazis won 230 seats, making them the largest party in the Reichstag, which began a complicated series of negotiations that culminated in Hitler being named German Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

  Ernst Wolfgang Topf would later point out that with trade debts of 98,000 RM there was no reason to stop paying creditors – instead Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig had been ousted in a plot engineered by the Nazis and senior members of the company, under the leadership of authorised company officer and senior engineer Dr Edmund Spindler, to take control of the business themselves and set up a new company – Topf Furnace Construction, which they would control.

  At first the plot appeared to be successful. Spindler and his associates told both the Chamber of Industry and the Bankruptcy Court that the losses incurred by the brothers at the company were unsustainable and that the company was unable to meet its debts. At the same time, Dr Edmund Spindler, a senior engineer and authorised officer of Topf and Sons (and a Nazi) spoke at a company meeting to denounce both brothers for ‘associating with Jews’ and inform the workers that the Topfs had lost their right to run the company.

  Banned from the company premises, without resources, and estranged from their own mother who had, astonishingly, sided against them, Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig decided to fight back and reclaim what they believed was rightfully theirs. Their battle to win back the company in 1933 would take on enormous importance in their own minds and they would be prepared to do anything to ensure that they took back their inheritance.

  In the case of the Topf brothers the reality of ‘doing anything’ meant only one thing – becoming members of the Nazi Party. A leading Thuringia Nazi, Friedrich Triebel, informed the brothers that, given their relatively young ages, there was nothing to prevent them from ‘retraining’ as party members and regaining control of the firm. Even Jewish friends and business acquaintances agreed that this seemed to be the only solution, and so without having shown any prior political interest, both Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig became National Socialist Party members in April 1933. Kurt Prüfer and other senior Topf officials followed suit.

  Now the Topf brothers were granted a hearing at the Board of Creditors and their dismissal from Topf was overturned; reinstated, the brothers then sacked the acting Topf board of directors. By July 1933, the battle for Topf and Sons was over. Ernst Wolfgang Topf was listed as commercial director with Ludwig Topf named technical director. The brothers were finally in control of their father’s company, but their deal with the Nazis would prove costly. Ultimately, they would pay by sacrificing every shred of moral decency and humanity they possessed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

  Honour your work! It confers dignity

  And with confidence in your own strength

  Life’s burdens become light

  When you work cheerfully and with firm purpose

  The company’s management

  Along with the band of workers

  Will gladly proclaim

  That our loyalty was always true

  It has been even more beautiful in Germany’s regions

  Since the coming of the Third Reich

  It is splendid to behold

  The way Hitler has united us

  Status and castes have gone

  Unity reigns everywhere

  Poverty and distress have been overcome

  After a painful fall, came Germany’s rise

  POEM TO COMMEMORATE SIXTY YEARS OF TOPF AND SONS PUBLISHED IN A COMPANY BOOKLET 193810

  By 1938, Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig Topf felt they had much to celebrate – and celebrate they did. An elaborate ceremony was held to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the re-founding of Topf and Sons with a party in the Topf family park on 28 August, a commemorative booklet full of cartoons, witty epithets and poems was published, and an ambitious plan to rebuild the company’s administration building launched (the plan was to erect a company sign with the logo and the words ‘Topf and Sons 1878’ to fit on a new, more impressive, and steeply pitched roof). The Topf brothers had been in full control of the family firm for five years and they were starting to enjoy the prosperous upturn in their fortunes.

  For the moment, the dominating presence of their mother continued to restrain any impulse the brothers had towards luxury. Else maintained control over the company as a majority shareholder, even after the appointment of her sons as directors in 1933. In the most crucial matters, Else’s decisions were all important: she held a veto over large investments, property purchases or sales and investment in other companies; she stipulated that all profits should be ploughed back into company development for ten years. Knowing, perhaps, her sons’ true characters, she also kept their salaries at a moderate sum of 700 RM a month. Only her death in 1941 would finally set them free, and one of the Topf brothers’ first acts, as their mother had feared, was to award themselves a massive pay rise and start spending their company dividends.

  However, even before their mother’s death, the Topf boys had started to enjoy the good life. Although Ludwig used the opening of the new administration building to remind staff to be as careful with their coffee cups and cigarette ends as they were in their own home, by the time that the brothers were using the sixtieth anniversary of Topf and Sons to celebrate their father’s wisdom as a thrifty businessman, they had acquired no fewer than fourteen luxury cars, including an Adler-Diploma Horch V-8 and a limousine with a rolling roof, all of which sat gleaming in the parking lot.

  While Ernst Wolfgang lived with his wife and two children in a rented apartment, Ludwig endeavoured to live up to his reputation as the family playboy by building a modernist villa for himself in the Topf family park, and resisted any pressure to marry and settle down. In 1936, he took the opportunity of writing a will to exhort his more staid married siblings to ‘rise above the messiness of life’ as he claimed to do, ‘stay healthy, and don’t get worked up about things, and do drink and smoke mightily’.

  Ludwig claimed the Topf family villa (which he also decorated with the company logo) was a suitable ‘expression of the prosperity of the company proprietors to the very numerous visitors and customers from abroad’. In the spirit of expressing his prosperity to the fullest, he installed two bathtubs, one black and one white, for use respectively by the brunettes and blondes he entertained. Outside the front door he built a swimming pool, enjoyed mainly by his cousin Agnes, who would come over in the morning for a dip before starting work at the famous kindergarten she had founded in a neighbouring street.

  After the shocking suicide of their father, and the lost and lonely years of their youth, it must have seemed to the Topf brothers that the good times had finally arrived. There was no doubt that the company was doing well or that the decision by Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig to join the Nazi Party was a fortuitous one, at least economically. Topf and Sons owed its financial success to the fact that the Third Reich was investing heavily in military preparations. With decades of expertise, Topf and Sons was the ideal supplier for the four-year militarisation plan announced by the German Reich in 1936, and the company had in fact begun producing large storage tanks for grain as early as 1934. The purpose of these tanks was to provide food for an army and civilian population in the event of war, and supplying them would come to dominate production at Topf and Sons. Storage tank production, now housed in its separate department in the company, would become the largest source of income for the company during the second half of the 1930s and drove the increase in the company’s turnover from 1 million RM in 1933 to 7 million RM in 1940. In July of that year, Topf and Sons received 6.3 million RM for producing forty-six military storage tanks and twenty-seven for other purposes. Storage construction work was not only the backbone of the company’s financial success, but also played another key role, too – it allowed Topf and Sons to petition the Reich to classify a large proportion of company employees as ‘Uk’ workers (those in occupations deemed indispensable for military or civilian life, and thus exempt from arm
y service).

  Like many German companies, Topf and Sons was clearly profiting enormously from its collaboration with the Third Reich in war preparations (a staggeringly inept economic strategy, supported by Hitler, which meant that the country was mortgaging its future assets and racking up unsustainable levels of debt) but there remained little sign that either Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig were any more ideologically in tune with the Nazis than they had been when they conveniently joined the party in 1933.

  Neither brother displayed any signs of anti-Semitism and the Topf family had a long history of business dealings with Jewish families who had been allowed to resettle in Erfurt since the early nineteenth century, and were now intertwined with business and cultural life.

  Examples of prominent Jewish businesses included the hugely popular Römishcer Kaiser department store, which was launched by Siegfried Pinthus and Arthur Solms Arndtheim and, at its height in the late 1920s and early 1930s, employed 450 people, before it was forcibly ‘Aryanised’ and appropriated in a compulsory sale to non-Jewish owners in 1936 (or ‘fell under new management’ as the newspaper advertisements stated). The Römischer Kaiser brought a touch of glamour to Erfurt that included a large lounge to host fashion shows, a lending library with 5,000 volumes and a company crèche.

  Both Topf brothers had grown up in close proximity to Jewish families after their father moved them to 29 Neuwerkstrasse in 1909. Two of the three other families living at this address were Jewish: the Hess family and the Nussbaum family. The history and fate of the Nussbaums remains unknown, but the Hess family were important shoe manufacturers in the town (the other important shoe company was Eduard Lingel AG which popularised ‘German’ shoes and boots during the Third Reich era). Although Adolf Hess was seventeen years younger than Ludwig Topf Sr, their wives and children were of a similar age – and both men shared the fact that they were prominent town citizens who had assumed responsibility for their companies at an early age. Like the Topfs, Adolf Hess had architectural aspirations and commissioned local architect Max Brockert to build a large neo-classical villa for his family that has now been turned into a youth hostel. Adolf managed his business with his cousin Alfred Hess, who was also a local political for the German Democratic Party during the Weimar Republic and a major collector of modern art. The Hess family escaped from Germany before the Holocaust.