In business, Ludwig Sr came into frequent contact with trading company Henry Pels & Co., which produced the machine tools used by Topf’s then business partner J. A. John. The Pels company had been founded by Jewish businessman Henry Pels, who was a leading metal manufacturer in Erfurt, although the family lived in Berlin. Pels and his wife both died in the early 1930s, leaving their daughter, Johanna, the sole heir. In 1937, Henry Pels & Co. was sold for far less than it was worth as part of the Nazis’ forced sale of Jewish businesses; it became part of the Aryanised ‘German Weapons and Ammunitions Factories AG’. Johanna Pels and her husband both died in 1941 after being deported from Berlin to Lodz. Their two children escaped from Germany and survived.
Ludwig Sr was also closely involved with the Benary family in Erfurt, serving for seventeen years on the Erfurt Chamber of Commerce with Friedrich Benary, the son of Ernst Benary, founder of Erfurt’s major florist and seed cultivation business. Although Ernst Benary was Jewish, Friedrich converted to Christianity. This meant that, despite the business being labelled ‘mixed-blood grade two’ and included on a list of ‘non-Aryan’ firms drawn up by the Nazis, it remained in family ownership. Friedrich Benary attended Ludwig’s funeral in 1914, and praised him in the death notice as ‘a man distinguished by rich commercial knowledge and experience who worked for the public good’.
What these specific examples show is that the Topf family were interlinked with Jewish families in a web of business and personal relationships quite typical for middle-class German life at the time. Those same relationships would continue to touch on the lives of the two younger Topf brothers as they went about establishing themselves in the Erfurt business world. Ernst Wolfgang undertook his first work-experience placement in 1925 at the Adolph Sturcke Bank, where one of the co-owners, Max Sturcke, was married to a member of the Benary family. His second work-experience stint was with H&S Windesheim Malting plant, and he remained friends with the notary Hans Windesheim, one of the sons of the family until Windesheim emigrated to the US in the 1930s. It was the Windesheims who, Ernst Wolfgang later claimed, suggested that the Topf brothers join the Nazi Party as a means of regaining control of their company.
‘A family with the qualities of humanity was especially chosen to protect its persecuted Jewish fellow-citizens and colleagues to the very best of its ability, and that we demonstrably did, to the point of self-sacrifice, right up to the end of the war.’11
Given that it spared no effort in technologically advancing the Holocaust, it is hard to imagine a more breathtaking lie than Ernst Wolfgang’s claim that Topf and Sons was, in fact, a friend to the Jews.
Neither Topf brother could have been under any illusions about the fate of Erfurt’s Jews. In the early 1930s, people shopping in Jewish stores emerged to find that they had been secretly photographed and were publicly shamed. From 1936 onwards, Jewish businesses were appropriated and sold for knock-down prices. Jewish doctors were struck off; Jewish teachers banned from their profession. Businessmen like Carl Ludwig Spier, a director of the Lingel shoe factory, was forced from his job, before dying at the end of the war on a death march to Buchenwald. In 1938, the Great Synagogue was burned to the ground. After ‘Aryanisation’, the imposing front of the Römischer Kaiser department store now sported flags emblazoned with large Swastikas. On 9 May 1942, the first mass transit from Thuringia took 101 Jews from Erfurt to the ghettos and concentration camps – where no one from the transport survived. Among the victims was four-year-old Gunther Beer, the youngest Erfurt resident to be deported.
In his own mind, however, Ernst Wolfgang no doubt believed that he was a ‘friend to the Jews’ due to the fact that his company was offering a safe haven to some opponents of the regime – even though Topf and Sons was also conspiring with the Nazis in their plan to wipe-out the Jewish race.
Ernst Wolfgang would later claim that the company had kept four ‘half-Jews’ as part of their workforce, protecting them from persecution, although only two archive records for ‘half-Jewish’ employees exist – Willy Wiemokli and Hans Fels. Employing a ‘half-Jew’ (someone with one Jewish parent) was not illegal in the Third Reich, and posed no official risk to Topf and Sons. Nonetheless, it was hardly encouraged, and the Topf brothers demonstrated that they were prepared to personally intervene on their employees’ behalf.
At the end of the Second World War, Willy Wiemokli gave a sworn statement in support of Ernst Wolfgang Topf to the occupying authorities, stating that Topf had ‘done everything he could’ to have Wiemokli released when he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, and had then intervened again when Wiemokli was sent to a forced labour camp in 1944. ‘Then, too, Herr Ernst Wolfgang Topf did everything in his power to prevent it happening, using all of his personal contacts on my behalf.’
Wiemokli was born in Halle in 1908 to a protestant mother and a Jewish father. Although he had been baptised a Protestant, he was arrested for the first time on the night of 9 November 1938, Kristallnacht, and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp with his father. Following his release from Buchenwald, Wiemokli discovered that he had lost his job as a trader in Erfurt and could no longer support his father. Soon after, however, he found a new job with Topf and Sons, and an ally in Ernst Wolfgang Topf, who had attended high school with him.
After the war, Willy Wiemokli submitted this resumé of his life and career to the socialist government:
Willy Wiemokli
Erfurt
Gustav Adolfstr. 2a
RÉSUMÉ
I was born on 5 December 1908 in Halle/Saale to David Wiemokli, commercial employee and Anna Wiemokli, née Kaufmann. I attended secondary school in Erfurt and, in 1925, started a traineeship with the Römischer Kaiser department store. After I finished my training, I worked in the commercial departments of several different firms.
In 1938 my father and I were put in the Buchenwald concentration camp, since my father was Jewish and I was half-Jewish.
After I’d been released from Buchenwald, my employer, Herr Hans Türck dismissed me on the grounds of my imprisonment. My father had been without work or a means of supporting himself since 1933. In 1939, however, I managed to get a job at the Topf and Sons machine factory. Between 1939 and 1944, I was arrested by the Gestapo three times on suspicion of having failed to comply with the Race Laws.
However, nothing could be proven against me. At work, too, I suffered a great deal of nastiness from my colleagues.
In 1943, my father was imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he must have died shortly after his arrival. My father’s prisoner number was: 119684. My mother had died of a stroke in 1942, a result of all the stress.
In 1944, the Gestapo put me in a forced labour camp near Suhl, where, along with numerous other half-Jews from Erfurt, I was made to do extremely hard labour in a stone quarry. After the Allied troops liberated the camp, I returned to Erfurt.
Immediately after my return I returned to my previous company. I was one of the staff elected to the works council, and later I was appointed sequestrator of the Topf and Sons Machine Factory in Erfurt. Following the lifting of the sequestration, I worked there as departmental manager and am now head bookkeeper.
I swear on oath that the above details are true.
Erfurt, 13 October 194912
Not only did Ernst Wolfgang Topf protect Wiemokli from the Gestapo, he also protected him from other opponents within Topf and Sons, going as far as to sack four members of the accounts department who had denounced him. Wiemokli’s particular nemesis was Wilhelm Behnke, a colleague in the same department and an ardent Nazi, who reported Wiemokli to the Gestapo for breaking the Race Laws and having a relationship with a non-Jewish woman at work. ‘Herr Topf protected me in every respect and in some cases even sacked people who tried to act against me,’ Wiemokli noted. Wiemokli was arrested and released three times on suspicion of breaking the Race Laws between 1939 and 1944 (he was, in fact, in a secret relationship with Erika Glass for the entire duration, and married
her in September 1945). On each occasion Ernst Wolfgang came to his aid, even, according to Topf’s secretary Ingeborg Prior, intervening to stop Wiemokli being called up for forced labour.
After the war, Ernst Wolfgang would claim that he had himself been denounced to the Gestapo for his actions in defence of Wiemokli, a claim impossible to verify as Gestapo files were destroyed after the war. Yet, while some of Ernst Wolfgang’s actions were self-serving (he may have wanted to sack Behnke and the others for his own reasons), there is no doubt that he defended Wiemokli to the best of his ability, and also tried to help another half-Jewish employee, Hans Fels, who was a commercial apprentice. Fels later recalled that Ernst Wolfgang had intervened with all possible offices to stop his call-up for forced labour in the autumn of 1944.
Wiemokli’s gratitude seems even more mystifying when we learn that not only did he experience the horrors of Buchenwald himself – but that his father died at Auschwitz, and therefore almost certainly ended up being incinerated in a Topf oven.
Topf and Sons not only provided protection for a small number of employees vulnerable to persecution under the Race Laws, it also sheltered a number of political opponents of the Nazi regime, including communists.
One example was Georg Reinl, who was prepared to join Willy Wiemokli in making a post-war statement in defence of Ernst Wolfgang, claiming that Topf had employed him, protected him from the Gestapo and had been complicit in his determination never to manufacture so much as a screw or a rivet for ‘Hitler’s war’. Reinl was an engineer from the Sudetenland whose democratic views and ‘political unreliability’ had already led to him being imprisoned several times by the Nazis and sacked by defence companies Messerschmitt and Junkers. Yet, despite his lengthy record of dissent, Topf and Sons respected his wish not to take part in any military work, such as making aircraft parts, and employed him in the malting and grain storage construction division to work on grain conveyors – a protected ‘Uk’ position that meant that he was exempt from call-up to the army. Reinl stated that on several occasions Ernst Wolfgang had ‘protected [him] from the Gestapo, and from serious reprimands from the political shop steward,’ and also allowed Reinl to take an ‘illegal holiday’ to visit his father who was imprisoned by the Gestapo in the Sudetenland.
As well as acting as a haven for a small number of those persecuted by the Nazis, Topf and Sons was also a hotbed of communist resistance – with a strong network of highly organised communist workers, many of whom had been imprisoned and then released from concentration camps. One worker and KPD (German Communist Party) member, Bernhard Bredehorn, claimed the reason for this was that Topf and Sons undertook no armaments work so metal workers from concentration camps could be sent there without fear that they would steal or sabotage arms work. Another reason, later offered up by one of Bredehorn’s comrades, was that the Gestapo sent political prisoners to Topf and Sons because the hard work they endured at the company tired them out and kept them under control.
Whatever the reason, the communist workers would later claim that, once there, they immediately banded together and operated as an active political resistance throughout the war. Bernhard Bredehorn was an Erfurt native and former employee of the town’s shoe industry who had spent a year and a half incarcerated in various concentration camps before retraining as a welder and joining Topf and Sons. In the 1950s, Bredehorn described how he had worked with well-known communist resistance figures during his time at Topf and Sons. Among these were Hermann Jahn, who became the first mayor of Erfurt when the city was part of East Germany, as well as Magnus Poser, who died in Buchenwald in 1944, and Theodor Neubauer, who was executed by the Nazis in 1945.
‘Throughout the entire Nazi regime I always maintained contact with known Erfurt comrades and stayed in constant touch with them … Since the top priority was the organisation of steadfast political cadres, I was given the task of building up the organisation in the company again.’13 Bredehorn goes on to describe how this ‘illegal factory cell’ at Topf and Sons distributed pamphlets to forced workers and prisoners of war in the company and smuggled Soviet forced labourers into the homes of communist sympathisers so that they could listen to banned radio broadcasts from the Soviet Union.
There was also some suggestion that communist leader Hermann Jahn was also employed at Topf and Sons during this time, working directly with Heinrich Messing who was the ventilation mechanic for the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
These statements, however, must also be examined in the context of workers trying to impress their new post-war socialist masters with their own resistance credentials. Historian, Ronald Hirte from Buchenwald Memorial believes that communists were sent to Topf and Sons as the SS considered the company completely reliable, and knew that the resistance there posed very little threat.
There was a communist resistance at Topf and Sons, but there was also communist resistance even within Buchenwald camp itself. No action was taken against it because it was known that it posed no real threat. In the case of Topf and Sons there is little evidence about what real actions the resistance there ever undertook.
Speaking after the war, when Erfurt was in the Soviet occupation zone and then part of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), none of the communist workers from Topf and Sons referred to a personal relationship with either of the Topf brothers (they remained the ‘enemies’ in the class struggle), but company records show that all of the communist employees of Topf and Sons, with the exception of two, were kept on the list of ‘Uk’ protected workers.
This was a deliberate attempt to protect them, Ernst Wolfgang Topf would claim in 1946 as part of his own defence and efforts to keep control of the company.
As self-serving as this explanation is (not to mention horrifyingly hypocritical given the wider context of the work undertaken at Topf and Sons), there is some truth in the fact that Nazi opponents, or victims of persecution, were singled out for protection within the company, and that Ernst Wolfgang himself publicly spoke out against Nazi propaganda at several company meetings.
In a company training course on 27 January 1942, long-term member of staff and Nazi supporter Eduard Pudenz began outlining why unity and support for the Nazis was essential among workers to prevent ‘England the Jew’ from ‘exterminating all Germans’. Yet, in response, Ernst Wolfgang replied that
We are duty bound to see the individual in every person … Everyone wants to be treated decently. We are a company and not a barracks. Some people have seen that as a weakness in us. Others, however, have recognised that in a somewhat more relaxed working community the individual people within it bond together into a whole – provided that any unsuitable ones, of whom there are always a few, are swiftly removed. In 1942 more than ever, now that the Front is calling again, we must relinquish any individual who personally invoked Adolf Hitler but positions himself outside our community.
That sense of the Topf community mattered more than anything else to Ernst Wolfgang. In the commemorative company brochure of 1938, the Topf brothers devote the first few pages to praising the ‘far-sighted genius’ of their father, the achievements of the ‘corporate community of J. A. Topf and Sons’ and the endeavours of employer and employee in the sixty years of ‘shared work in the service of a shared goal’. Only on the last page do they include the words of the German nineteenth-century folk song, reworked in tribute to Hitler.
Yet, however much Ernst Wolfgang and his brother Ludwig liked to sup from the Nazi cup with a long spoon, their work for the Third Reich was the black heart of their business.
Not only was Topf and Sons creating and building the technology of the Holocaust, the company would also become actively involved in armaments work and employ hundreds of forced labourers – who were essentially slaves.
At Topf and Sons, forced labour would at one point account for 40 per cent of the workforce and total more than 600 people. Although these workers were supposed to replace Topf and Sons employees who had been called up for military serv
ice, their lives differed greatly from those of ordinary Germans. They were confined to a guarded barracks on the southern edge of Topf and Sons land, known as the ‘prison camp’, where they lived in one of six huts each housing fifty-two labourers in a shared sleeping area, living area and washroom. Once installed at Topf and Sons they would have longer working hours than German employees (fifty-six hours per week rather than forty-two) and were paid 25–50 per cent less. Almost all of their wages were actually retained by the company for ‘board and other services’ so that these workers would receive virtually nothing. The first forced labourers at Topf and Sons were thirty French prisoners of war, followed by Ukrainians, forced workers from lands to the east known as Ostarbeiters, as well as Soviet prisoners and people from Belgium, the Netherlands, Croatia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Although some were women, most workers were men and consisted of a mixture of captured soldiers and civilians.
Like forced labourers in most other locations, there were widespread reports of abuse and mistreatment – with one camp leader at Topf and Sons, Wilhelm Buchroder, being dismissed in 1944 for assaulting workers, who retaliated by refusing to work for him. Most of these workers were assigned directly to war work for the Third Reich, including the special production unit at Topf and Sons which produced grenades, or repairing or building new aircraft parts for the Luftwaffe.
Architects of Death Page 4
