On a grey day in April 2017, Hartmut Topf revisits the place where his father died. The remains of the Soviet camp are further back from the main camp, which is now a memorial for the victims of the Nazis. Hartmut acknowledges it is difficult to know how to appropriately remember the German Nazi prisoners who died in Soviet camps which had previously been Nazi concentration camps. ‘Not all victims are equal,’ Hartmut says, ‘but all suffering is equal.’ He bypasses a large monolithic monument constructed in the Soviet era, and chooses instead to visit a small museum erected to house the story and artefacts of German prisoners at the Soviet camp. He seems to struggle to explain his feelings for the man who was, in many ways, a very traditional German father:
If you ask me were we close, I can’t say. He taught me to do things, like how to skin one of the rabbits we fattened up in the back garden and ate on special occasions. And, of course, my father was the person who introduced me to puppet theatre. He put a blanket into a doorframe, and we had funny shadow puppet shows with classical texts and music from a guitar. My father would be filming with his camera and we would be watching through the window. It was magical. People are wrong when they say that puppet theatre is an imitation of life. It’s not an imitation of life, it’s a different life.
Both Albert and Hans Topf died in Sachsenhausen, but years later Hartmut discovered that Uncle Hans had withheld from them the biggest secret of all.
Hans’s wife, Tante Berta, and her daughter, Hanni, emigrated to Brazil in 1948 and we would get small parcels from them with coffee, chocolate and soap. My mother was mystified by the address on the envelopes, because they were from a Jewish family. One day she blurted out – ‘But we don’t know any Jewish families!’ and Uncle Kurt, our neighbour in Falkensee, shrugged and said that Tante Berta was not quite ‘so Aryan’ after all. So Uncle Hans must have known this, but he showed off: ‘I’m a Nazi.’
As the remaining male heir of one branch of a ‘beautiful’ family, Hartmut was astonished and horrified to sit in a darkened Falkensee cinema and see the Topf name branded above the ovens of the Nazi concentration camps in post-war newsreels. ‘I had many questions that I would have liked to ask my father: why was he a Nazi? Did he know what was happening?’ Hartmut says. However, with his father and Uncle Hans gone there was no one left to ask – and it would take decades for him to unravel the truth about his family legacy.
CHAPTER FOUR
BUCHENWALD
‘Between us and Weimar lies Buchenwald. There’s no way we can get around that.’ 18
Deep within the grounds of Buchenwald concentration camp lie the remains of an oak tree. This broadened, flattened stump is no ordinary tree; it symbolises the last vestiges of the beautiful old oak where connoisseurs of German literature believe Goethe once met with Frau von Stein, sat on the banks of the Ettersberg hill and carved inscriptions. The Ettersberg dominates the otherwise flat Thuringian farmland and looks down on one sunny side to Weimar, and on the other colder side to Erfurt. This divide speaks much about the common distinction held about the two cities, and is reflected in the fact that the camp was built so that the prisoners faced down to Erfurt, while the SS officers were housed across the ridge, gazing down every morning across the green forests into Weimar, the mythical city of Goethe, Schiller and Liszt.
Ettersberg concentration camp, as it was originally known as, was rather urgently renamed when the Nazi cultural organisation complained about any link between this golden age of German history and the outcasts and enemies of the Third Reich. Although it was officially known as KL Buchenwald/Post Weimar from then on, the farmers of Thuringia called it by another name: The Lighthouse.
Every night the searchlights of Buchenwald would illuminate the top of the Ettersberg and flood the surrounding landscape with their glare – so that no one could ignore the presence of this place. By morning another group of local residents would turn their faces from their drawing boards and look up at the Ettersberg through their office windows. These would be the furnace engineers of Topf and Sons who, sitting in their third-floor offices in the administration building, not only knew of the presence of Buchenwald, but also understood its true meaning. Kurt Prüfer’s desk gave perhaps the clearest view of all.
Working in front of this window, on 17 May 1939, a whole four months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Kurt Prüfer produced his first drawing for a ‘mobile oil-heated cremation oven’ with muffle. To distinguish this from his work in civil crematoria Prüfer carefully labelled it an ‘incineration chamber’ not a ‘cremation chamber’. This conveniently spirited away, in two words, the normal requirements for ‘human reverence’, which required bodies to be cremated in super-heated air. From this point on they could be disposed of in the same way as animal carcasses or garbage.
By October, Topf and Sons were ready to demonstrate their invention; they set up their mobile incineration chamber just outside the gates of Buchenwald so that they could trial it. Prisoner Max Mayr later reported that ‘a mobile incineration oven was tried out in front of the camp gate’.19 Other prisoners told him it was supplied by Topf and Sons. Another prisoner, architect Franz Ehrlich, who was forced to work in the SS construction management unit after his release on October 24 1939, made a note that at the time of
test buildings for a mobile crematorium by the Erfurt company Topf and Sons, all leading engineers and technicians of the company were involved. Crematorium taken over by representatives of the Chancellery of the Führer in the presence of company representatives. The Topf and Sons representatives are aware that these drivable crematoria are intended for the liquidation of whole municipalities in Poland. They performed the capacity calculations.
From their establishment in 1933, the death rate in concentration camps was always much higher than in ordinary life, or even in normal prisons – and the work of the directors and engineers of Topf and Sons would be to immerse themselves in finding technical solutions to this horror.
Although local residents would later say: ‘We didn’t know,’ when shown evidence of the years or torture and mass murder that occurred at the camp, the life of Weimar, Erfurt and hundreds of local businesses was inexorably intertwined with the camp from the very beginning.
Since the nineteenth century, Weimar had been a hotbed of anti-Semitism. It was ‘the centre for gravity for the most Germanic Germany and for the most German of Germans’,20 serving as home to Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche’s cerebral anti-Semitism, and a group of semi-intellectuals including Ernst Wachler, Friedrich Lienhard and newspaper art critic Mathilde Freiin von Freytag-Loringhoven who focused on the idea of the German volk as defined by a racist perspective.
It was also home to Adolf Bartels, a torridly prolific writer based in Weimar, and a vicious anti-Semite. It was Bartels who introduced the idea that Jews were biologically inferior, as well as suggesting the resettlement of the eastern European Slavs with racially pure Germans.
This ideology overlapped with another group of thinkers in Weimar – exemplified by Johannes Schlaf, who adopted a theory of biological inequalities through which people could redeem themselves by eugenic self-selection, the most ideal genotype being Nordic man. Schlaf had welcomed First World War believing it a good chance for cleansing Europe of decadent French and English culture and letting German customs and culture triumph throughout Europe. For these men Weimar was a ‘healing antidote to the intellectual urbanity and attendant perversions of the capital’.21
As Michael Kater writes in his book on the town, ‘Weimar became a hunting ground for anti-urbanists, eugenicists, befuddled German history memorialists all buttressed by anti-Semitism of various shades.’22
Weimar of course also had a very different legacy during this time – being the home to both the Bauhaus movement, which attracted possibly the biggest collection of artistic geniuses of the twentieth century, including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and sculptor Gerhard Marcks – and giving its name, through hosting the country’s firs
t national assembly in 1919, to the Weimar Republic, Germany’s ill-fated attempt at social democracy which ended with Nazi rule.
Yet such strong countervailing trends did not stop Weimar becoming an early base of the Nazi movement, and the town proved so sympathetic to Hitler he visited more than thirty-five times before he became Chancellor, enjoying, in particular, the Hotel Elephant in the main market square. In 1926, the Nazis felt the town was a safe haven for their first party rally (a role subsequently taken up by Nuremberg). Hitler was unaware that Rosa Schmidt, the wife of the owner of the downmarket Hotel Hohenzollern, which served as the organisational headquarters for the rally, and the site of his first speech in Weimar in 1925, was in fact Jewish. The Nazis would catch up with Frau Schmidt eventually; she died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Thuringia and Weimar always had a higher percentage of Nazi Party members than the Reich as a whole (14.3 per cent versus 11.7 per cent nationally) – as well as a higher number of Nazis represented in individual professions, like medicine. In 1930, Wilhelm Frick became the first Nazi minister in Germany, taking up the post of Minister for Internal Affairs and Education for Thuringia. By 1932, Thuringia had a Nazi First Minister, Fritz Sauckel, and in the elections of that year more than half of Weimar’s citizens voted for Hitler, in comparison to 37.3 per cent nationally (a figure that was 10 per cent lower again in most of the big cities).
Weimar had no synagogue and the town’s Jewish population, which had never been large, had dwindled to forty-three families by 1933. Five years later and only one Jewish business remained, a doll shop run by a widow called Hedwig Hetteman. On Kristallnacht the shop was destroyed, the front display window smashed and the dolls, which the children of Weimar had loved, were thrown out on to the road. After being driven from their homes into ‘Jew Houses’, Hedwig Hetteman joined Weimar’s last remaining Jews on one of the three transports between April and September 1942 to the death camps of the east. She died in the ‘liquidation camp’ at Majdanek in Poland (where all victims were sent immediately to their deaths).
‘Weimar is a centre of Hitlerdom,’ wrote Thomas Mann who visited the town in 1932, and was unnerved by the strange mixture of Nazis and Goethe. ‘Everywhere you could see Hitler’s picture etc. in the National Socialist newspapers on exhibit. The town was dominated by the type of young person who walks through the streets vaguely determined, offering the Roman salute, one to the other.’23
The region’s deep links to the Nazi Party were symbolised by the founding of the very first concentration camp in Germany near the Thuringian village of Nohra in early March 1933, which lay a few miles west of Weimar on the road to Erfurt. As the concentration camp system became more organised and established, a larger, permanent concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, was opened on 22 March 1933. This was followed by a large network of up to 150 smaller camps within Germany, which were then consolidated by Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler. The camp at Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin, was opened in July 1936 – and Buchenwald followed in July 1937.
From the first, Buchenwald aimed to be a proto-type concentration camp and in early 1945 it was still the largest concentration camp in existence. The formal history of the camp states that ‘all of the system’s functional expansions found concrete realisation here. Buchenwald was the camp for the isolation of “community enemies” and for the repression of resistance in Germany and the occupied countries. Furthermore, with its total of 136 sub-camps, it was part of the SS’s vast forced labour emporium.’24 In other words, it would combine the political and economic interests of the SS in one vast complex.
The SS had ambitious plans for concentration camps and Weimar had ambitious plans to be at the heart of Nazi Germany. Buchenwald, constructed in a spot of great meaning in Germany history, and, until then, a popular local destination for day trips, represented the apex of such designs.
Buchenwald inmate, and later historian of the camp, Eugen Kogon wrote:
The choice of the site was symbolic in a higher sense: Weimar, the national centre of German culture, formerly the city of German classical writers who had given German emotion and intellect their highest expression, and Buchenwald, a raw piece of land on which the new German emotion was to flower. Together a sentimentally cultivated museum culture and the unscrupulous, brutal will for power thus created the typical new connection Weimar-Buchenwald.25
Plans to build the camp were initiated in May 1936 by Inspector of the Concentration Camps and Chief of the SS Totenkopf Squadrons, Theodor Eicke, and the Reich leader of Thuringia Fritz Sauckel. The chief of the Thuringian police department for the Ministry of the Interior Hellmuth Gommlich, a longstanding Nazi and anti-Semite, was charged with finding the site for the camp and its establishment. After considering several alternatives, Gommlich and Eicke decided on a wooded limestone ridge on the north slope of the Ettersberg – a decision much welcomed by the local farmers, according to a letter from Gommlich to Eicke: ‘At a joint meeting the local farmers’ association submitted a declaration to me to the effect that the establishment of a camp at the site I have proposed meets with their fullest approval. The association urgently requests the realisation of the plan as quickly as possible.’26
The SS constructed the first barracks on the north side of the camp before the inmates arrived, and on 15 July 1937 the first lorries pulled up with 149 inmates from Sachsenhausen, followed in subsequent weeks by transports from newly closed concentration camps at Sachsenburg near Chemnitz, and Lichtenburg.
Helmut Thiermann described his transport from Sachsenburg on 27 July:
The lorries were covered with tarps and it was only through the noise on the roads and the ventilation flaps in the tarps that we could guess more than witness the course of the journey … when we drove into a densely wooded area [on the far side of Weimar] we knew that we had reached our destination.
Thiermann goes on to describe his first night at Buchenwald:
On the first night we shared the barracks with the SS and the next day we moved to the actual camp, Block 7. Following our arrival we received red cloth triangles and two long canvas strips with numbers which we had to sew to our jackets and trousers in precisely designated places. I received number 318. From now on we were mere numbers and nameless beings. We completed the construction of a partially built barrack, Block 7, and moved into this block the same day.’27 The red triangle denoted that Thiermann was a political prisoner.
During the 1930s, concentration camps accommodated the victims of the Nazis’ progressively more extreme racial and social persecution. The Nazi vision of a society in which ‘natural simplicity of the German people’ would unite with ‘energy strength and assertiveness’28 first focused on disabled people – leading to their forced sterilisation ‘for the prevention of genetically ill offspring’ in 1933, and their eventual murder under the Nazi euthanasia programme during the war.
In addition, the Nazis tightened their grip on ‘asocials’, a category of ‘national vermin’ that included convicted criminals and homosexuals. In 1935, increasingly the police began using ‘preventive police detention’ as a way of ‘cleansing’ society. Aimed initially at criminals and gay men, in February 1937, Himmler ordered the rounding up of 2,000 of those who ‘endanger society through their asocial behaviour’. Many of the victims of these mass arrests found themselves transported to the gates of Buchenwald. By December of that year 7,746 people were held as prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
Five miles of wooded road separate Buchenwald from Weimar, but ‘blood road’, as it was known by the inmates who built it and often died doing so, created a symbiotic connection between the life of town and camp.
‘There existed many everyday connections between Weimar and the camp, from the beginning to the end.’ Michael Kater notes, ‘Many of these were part of a tight administrative, commercial and human-relations network. There was no escape from this.’29
Buchenwald became an incorporated part of the town of Weimar on 1 April 1938, six months
after the town council had filed an application to bring the two together, expecting it to be a union of great financial benefit. From this point on Buchenwald had a Weimar telephone code, and soon its own suburban post office. Weimar supplied both a water supply, and firefighters responsible for the camp until 1942, as well as convening a special Nazi court in the town when two inmates murdered an SS guard and were subsequently recaptured and executed. A municipal bus service connected the two locations, six times a day for a thirty-minute ride that cost 40 pfennig.
SS officers were a common presence on the streets of Weimar; attending the opera, giving free music recitals in town squares, entering their German Shepherds in dog shows and playing in SS football teams against neighbouring sides. Children of SS officers often attended local schools, and one theatre even offered a special SS subscription rate. In August 1939, the SS organised a huge summer festival in Weimar, on land near the camp, where they laid on sausage stands, coloured balloons, games booths and much singing and dancing. ‘Everywhere something was frying and steaming,’ wrote one happy local participant. ‘Two huge oxen were grilled on spits.’30
The presence and movements of the SS regiments up at the camp were frequently reported in the local newspapers and ordinary town people often saw the inmates of Buchenwald for themselves; marching past in labour detachments, or employed in local businesses like wholesalers, or in construction teams on prominent sites, including the Hotel Elephant. When the SS feared that potential bombing raids could destroy historic Weimar sites – like Goethe or Schiller’s houses, former craftsmen now incarcerated in the camp were forced to make replicate furniture to be displayed in the houses until the end of the war while the real furniture was safely stored elsewhere.
Architects of Death Page 7
