Architects of Death

by Karen Bartlett

  We did have some books in the house, like an encyclopaedia and books about the Masons and the Nazis, but really my father was a very good craftsman.

  He was interested in the development of film and photography from an engineering point of view, not an artistic point of view. My Uncle Heinz in Erfurt was a stamp collector and he tried to interest me in that – but my father always made it clear that he thought stamp collecting was a waste of time, even though he often had to buy the latest stamps and seals and send them back to Erfurt.

  Yet, for a German family of the time, Hartmut remembers his parents were also unusually open people – leaving their desk open with their chequebook and bank statements for Hartmut to look at.

  Despite living in Berlin, the family made frequent trips back to Erfurt where they saw Hartmut’s grandmother Topf for the remaining few years of her life, as well as his mother’s parents who were originally from poor village families, but who had come to town to be tailors. Hartmut remembers his father adopting the role of little diplomat and peacemaker among his brother and sisters.

  One of his sisters lived in the countryside where she had bought a strange house that looked a bit like a castle but was actually a folly built by a coffee importer. She lived with another woman, a painter. I think they were lesbians and sometimes they had terrible fights and my father would have to go down to help them get back together. My father was judge and jury in all the family quarrels.

  This tendency of subservience to his siblings would play out most notably in Albert Topf’s relationship with his older brother, Hans.

  Hans had been active in a German youth movement called Wandervogel, which translates as ‘wandering bird’. The aim of the group was to encourage young men and women to shake off the shackles of society and get back to nature and freedom. Unlike the boy scouts, the society had no uniform but encouraged hiking, playing folk songs and avoiding smoking or drinking. ‘I still have the songbook of this movement – the Zupfgeigenhansel,’ Hartmut says. ‘It was deeply rooted in German tradition, fairy tales and music, and they played the guitar and sang a fantastic collection of German songs.’ Hartmut’s father, Albert, also joined the Wandervogel, practising craftwork and making lamps and toys from plywood. ‘That was my father’s philosophical background. They were a bit nationalist but not too much.’ The Wandervogel certainly stressed the spirit of adventure and Germany’s ‘Teutonic roots’, but also had many Jewish members. It was outlawed by the Nazis in 1933, along with other youth groups that were not part of the Hitler Youth – and Wandervogel members became both prominent supporters and opponents of the Third Reich. In the case of the Topf brothers, both became Nazi Party members, with Albert following the ideological lead of Hans.

  My Uncle Hans was an engineer, a respected person – and a smoker. My parents did not smoke and my mother would always say: ‘Hans is smoking again!’ At Christmas he sang traditional Christmas songs, and my father, who thought religion was humbug, would mock him a bit behind his back. But Hans was the oldest brother and he liked to show off that he was a Nazi, and better than my father. He had children from his first marriage to the Reemtsma family, who were an established tobacco family, and then he’d married again to my Aunt Berta and had a step-daughter called Hanni who taught me piano.

  Vividly, Hartmut recalls that Hans liked to show off his Nazi uniform.

  My father didn’t have a uniform. Hans had a party uniform that he would wear at important events – he was silly like that – and he sometimes would tell me: ‘You don’t say “Guten Tag, Uncle Hans,” you say “Heil Hitler, Uncle Hans!”’ He showed off a bit about being a Nazi.

  Hartmut believes that Hans encouraged his brother to become a Nazi, and although the records show that both men were ‘cell leaders’ (leaders of several blocks), Hartmut recalls that his father only ever reached the lowest rank of block leader.

  Perhaps Hans encouraged my father to join the Nazi Party, because in Siemensstadt my father put a warning on his letterbox not to push in any newspapers or letters that would disturb the nesting birds. But in a letter that he wrote to my mother in Erfurt, my father complained that the Nazis were ‘so nasty’ they ignored his warning – and didn’t even care about the birds. That was my father’s reaction to the Nazis – they were nasty – yet later he became a member of the party. I don’t know exactly when he joined the party, but he did.

  After building the house in Falkensee, Albert and Hans Topf were closer in both proximity and ideology – living only a few houses apart and connected through a special telephone line. During the air raids in the war, one family would ring the other and make sure everything was alright.

  Uncle Hans had built his house earlier. It was a wooden house, and so the neighbours called us the ‘wooden Topf’ and the ‘stone Topf’, based on the type of house we lived in. In between us there was our Uncle Kurt, a friend of my father, who lived in his little house with his wife and son. So we were the children in the neighbourhood, and every family had a certain call or whistle in the evening when the children were supposed to come home. The Trumans simply shouted: ‘Doris! Gerda!’, when they wanted their girls to come home. An engineer whistled for his children, and they knew to listen out for that. My family had a tune that was whistled when it was time for us to come home. We were always playing outside and I remember my father would approach on his bicycle and ring his bell for us, which had two tones, bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong. That sound remains a vivid memory for me.

  Hartmut’s parents encouraged him to enjoy a carefree childhood; playing games and learning the piano with Hanni – but he was also a young boy growing up in the Third Reich and his adolescence would be shaped by the formative years he spent near wartime Berlin.

  Before the war we heard that Hitler was coming through our neighbourhood, and my father went to a furniture shop to buy a folding table that you could sit on top of so that we could all climb on and see the Führer. I was quite excited because normally the Führer did not come to a place like Falkensee – and we got a glimpse of this big, mysterious, figure.

  Once the war had started, like any young boy, Hartmut immersed himself in the adventures of battles and German heroes:

  We collected postcards of all the military heroes who had earned distinctions for their service in the air force or in submarines – and we saw the bombers flying in big formations, and then we saw the strikes. At night the pilots made light marks for where to bomb, red or green, and then the other planes came and bombed. In Falkensee itself there were only a few bombs: one that destroyed two houses and left a big crater in the street, and another one that hit the house of a neighbour. It blew her arm off, which was left behind in the kitchen.

  In the streets, Hartmut collected bomb splinters and traded them with his friends at school: ‘We’d say: “I’ve got a big one; this is a bronze one; this is only steel”, and so on.’

  At Christmas time, Hartmut noticed that their traditional glass and ceramic ornaments were replaced each year by something of poorer quality, either pieces of decorated metal or even badges with war slogans on them.

  While no one spoke openly about the dark side of life under the Nazis, ominous signs were there. Hartmut remembers that:

  There was a man called Uncle Max. He was actually the uncle of a neighbour and he was a member of a police guard of a military airport. He had this fancy uniform, not the regular uniform – he looked like a forester, actually – and he called himself a Luftwaffe inspector. But really he was just the night guard of an airport. One day a boy from the neighbourhood told me a funny story, but told me not to repeat the joke, as Uncle Max had told him it would land you in a concentration camp. Then this boy explained to me the little that he knew from Uncle Max about what a concentration camp was.

  The boy told Hartmut:

  It’s a prison camp for our enemies. These enemies could be brutal robbers, murderers, or communists. The boy didn’t really have more details, but he knew that at least there was a distinction
by the colour of their triangle, and they all had numbers like prisoners. That’s all he told me – but then I had an image that there are camps for those enemies that we don’t want to have with us.

  When Hartmut’s mother once questioned what was happening to the Jews, Uncle Hans told her: ‘Don’t ask questions like that. You might end up in a concentration camp.’ Hartmut says:

  I heard that people disappeared, but we did not live in a neighbourhood with communists or Jewish people. In his party function, my father had to collect for winter relief, and there were some people he did not like because they didn’t want to give. That was their tiny bit of resistance; we don’t want to give. They were well-off people but simply didn’t give their two or three marks. My father was angry about that.

  Although Hartmut describes his father as a rather naïve Nazi, haplessly collecting fur coats and skis to send to the German troops on the front line at Stalingrad, Albert was committed enough to send ten-year-old Hartmut for a trial at a Nazi boarding school near the town of Ballenstedt on the edge of the Harz mountains. Wearing his Hitler Youth shirt, Hartmut was ushered into a room with another boy who immediately told him that he was hungry.

  I think that was a test. It felt like they wanted to find out whether I would share what I had. I had some sandwiches and I shared them with this boy and I passed the test. Then I was taken to the dormitory with twenty beds, and for two weeks we had classes and exercises and very hard things to do, things that would really test your courage. There were many things I did not like and which I did not do well in.

  Hartmut cemented his disappointing record as a young Nazi on the last night when the boys were roused from their beds with the threat of an air raid.

  We got dressed and had to queue up in a big square where some officers in uniform started speaking to us. ‘Boys,’ they told us. ‘American parachutists have landed and they are stealing our firewood, but we’ll get them!’ We had no guns, only stones and sticks and we started running through the forest. The moon was shining, the wind was blowing. It was a very magical night and there were a lot of explosives going off. We would run this way and that and then behind us a big bang would go off.

  Eventually Hartmut got separated from the group, and made his way back to the dormitory alone.

  One of the young officers, about fourteen or fifteen years old, came in with a list and he told us that one boy had died in his arms by the creek – and he wanted to know how many we had captured or even killed or beaten. I spoke up and I said it was all organised by them, and that they had used explosives. As boys we had already learned how to open unexploded bombs and grenades. It was very risky to play with those, but I was from the city and knew all about it. The other boys at the school were country boys, and this was their big adventure. Now their heroic fight had been ruined by this big mouth from Berlin who had told them it was all fake. Everyone was very angry with me.

  The next morning was Hartmut’s tenth birthday and when he went down to breakfast he found his place at the long table decorated with apples and treats. He was told, however, that he had failed the entrance requirements to become a pupil and his father had arrived to take him home.

  They felt that I was too weak for them, and I was lucky to be weak. Because these schools were breeding institutes for the next generation of leaders and those leaders had to be, as the Nazis put it, ‘quick as wind, as hard as Krupp’s steel and as enduring as leather’. Those were the phrases they coined for their future leaders. I failed the test.

  Later Hartmut’s father told him that when he arrived at the school to collect him, he had passed the sick bay that was full of those supposed ‘American parachutists’ – who were really older boys in the school who had been badly beaten by Hartmut’s young classmates.

  German fears about American parachutists and invasion were far from baseless, though. Despite newspapers continuing to speak of German successes and claim victory as the only possible conclusion, defeat at Stalingrad had turned the tide against the Nazis. The war was going badly for Germany and Albert Topf and his brother Hans knew it.

  I remember my father was very nervous, pacing up and down. When the news came in about Stalingrad, he literally had a heart attack. They could feel that it was to be the beginning of the end, and I listened to conversations about the Eastern Front moving closer and closer towards us in Berlin. A few weeks before the end of the war I heard the adults in the family talking and they were saying – should we commit suicide or not? I heard this and even as a child I was very much aware of the possibility that a person could kill themselves. I knew that, and I think the will to survive and not to commit suicide is a testimony to freedom of decision. I think the definition of freedom to me is that I accept my life, and that was something I learned as a child.

  More than seventy years later, the conversation remains vivid: ‘I remember it so clearly,’ Hartmut says. ‘My Uncle Hans was so preoccupied he burned the skin on my hand with his cigarette.’ Yet, despite their role as active members of the Nazi Party, Hartmut says his family’s discussion about suicide came about due to fear of the Russians, not because of guilt over any wrongdoing.

  My father and Uncle Hans were afraid of revenge from the other side, nothing else. They didn’t feel guilty. They wanted to escape punishment and revenge from the Allies, mainly from the Russians. The Russians were still big monsters in our imagination, and when they came of course there were a lot of assaults and rapes. But the propaganda made them seem even worse – man-eaters who would come and burn everything and kill everybody. As far as I remember, there was no discussion about guilt. They had not denounced anybody; they had not punished anybody. They had not stolen anything from anyone, not consciously. Of course, the Nazis had stolen from the Jews on a big scale, the state had stolen. But my father and uncle did not take part.

  On Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1945, Hartmut watched his father sling a small Italian gun over his back and set off on his bicycle to fight as part of the Volkssturm, men forming the last defence of Berlin. Albert Topf and Hans headed towards a part of the suburb where there was heavy bombardment and, at first, Hartmut would go out to meet them with supplies of food until his mother told him it was too dangerous to continue. After a few days word reached them that the Russian army was coming.

  Hartmut was playing outside, wearing his cap which he’d adorned with an aluminium badge from the SS. One of his neighbours told him: ‘Take that badge off; they’ll kill you.’

  There they were. The Russians. Many of them were drunk and they were already celebrating a great victory. We were astonished that they were so different from the German soldiers. They would not even stand up to salute an officer – they’d say ‘hello, yeah…’ They had a rough style. They came with little horses and very small trucks, and some of them would occasionally give something to the children like a piece of bread. They were simple fellows, and they saw home comforts they had never seen in their lives. Most of them had never used a toilet before.

  As the Russians came closer the children ran in off the streets and families locked their doors. Hartmut’s father had not returned from the fighting, and when the Russians went house to house in Falkensee, it was Hartmut’s responsibility as the man of the family to let them in.

  I opened the old door to the basement and they came in; men, men, men, and they also said ‘uri, uri’, that was their word for watches. They had five wristwatches or ten spread out on their arms. They were so proud to have them all. We only had a very old-fashioned clock somewhere, no wristwatches at all. So they went through all the rooms, ‘look, look, are there any soldiers?’ Nothing. They opened the cupboards, and then they left. They didn’t steal. My main feeling was not fear, but excitement – they were not so dangerous.

  On the last day of fighting a car pulled up and Uncle Hans fell out, bleeding profusely after having been shot through the neck, but there was still no sign of Hartmut’s father. ‘Some neighbours who returned said that he had never been able to fi
re a shot, he was probably dead.’ Instead Albert Topf had been captured, but had managed to talk his way out of being sent to Russia to work as an engineer. Some weeks later he returned to the family home, but he was soon summoned for further questioning by the Russians.

  ‘He went there one evening without any force,’ Hartmut says. ‘I met him in the street when he was on his way there and he sent me back home. That was the last time I ever saw him. He did not come back.’

  The next day Hartmut took some bread and a razor, but the guard told him that the men had been rounded up and taken away in lorries.

  ‘Much later we got this secret smuggled note from my father saying: “I’m in Sachsenhausen, try to send me a pencil and a sweater.”’ Sachsenhausen was a former Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin in Oranienburg, which had been repurposed as a Soviet prison camp for holding German prisoners. Renamed Special Camp No. 7, the Soviet camp at Sachsenhausen housed as many as 16,000 prisoners in 1946 and the Sachsenhausen memorial records the following information about conditions there:

  Hunger and cold prevailed in the Special Camp. The inadequate sanitary conditions and insufficient nourishment led to disease epidemics. Usually the barracks were overcrowded; the prisoners had to sleep on the bare-wood frames until 1947, when the Soviet camp administration distributed blankets and bags of straw. The only clothing which the prisoners had during their imprisonment was what they were wearing at the time of their arrest. The possession of personal items, particularly books and writing material, was strictly forbidden. Violations of these rigid camp regulations, which were for the most part unknown to most of the prisoners, resulted in harsh punishment imposed by the Soviet guard personnel or the German prisoners who held special functions.

  Unlike camps within the Soviet Union, however, Special Camp No. 7 was not a work camp, and prisoners endured a life of enforced idleness.

  ‘I went with my mother and we stood outside and tried to get a glimpse of him, but we could see nothing,’ Hartmut says. Years passed with no news, until a former German officer knocked on Irmgard Topf’s door and told her that her husband had died, at least two years earlier, on 27 March 1947. ‘Death certificates would always attribute the cause of death to pneumonia, a lung infection or a heart attack, but prisoners were really dying of starvation. I was sorry when I heard the news.’