Architects of Death

by Karen Bartlett

  Together with Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau, the concentration camp at Mauthausen would make up a quartet of Prüfer’s major SS clients and would play an important part in his plans right up until Germany’s final moment of surrender. Mauthausen had been conceived as a ‘Grade 3’ camp for prisoners the Nazis considered impossible to ‘rehabilitate’ – and conditions were especially brutal. With an extremely high death rate, approximately half of the 200,000 people incarcerated there were murdered. Chosen for its proximity to several granite quarries, prisoners were often assigned to a ‘penal company’ for a trivial, or non-existent, reason and forced to carry 50 kg stone blocks on a wooden frame attached to their backs up the ‘stairs of death’ – while being beaten by guards. Many were pushed to their deaths over the top of the cliff, a practice known as ‘parachuting’ by the SS. The death rate at the sub-camp Gusen, which had three stone quarries and several industrial plants including one for Messerschmitt aircraft parts, was even worse. Mauthausen’s commandant, Franz Ziereis, conducted the first experiments in gassing prisoners by driving a converted lorry, disguised as transport for sick prisoners, between the two camps. Thirty sick prisoners would be loaded inside at Mauthausen. Ziereis would then drive to Gusen, and the prisoners would be gassed with Zyklon B en route. Upon arrival at Gusen the dead bodies would be removed, and thirty more sick prisoners would be loaded and murdered on the return drive to Mauthausen. By the autumn of 1941, Mauthausen began building a static gas chamber and started gassing Soviet prisoners of war in the spring of 1942. Gusen never had a separate gas chamber, but gassed prisoners inside locked barracks.

  Auschwitz was, therefore, far from being the only concentration camp where Topf and Sons plied their horrible trade – and, at first, it was probably not obviously different to other camps that Topf and Sons had secured contracts with. Annegret Schüle reminds us:

  In 1941–1942 nearly 4 million Jewish men, women and children, mainly from eastern Europe, were murdered in places other than Auschwitz. All the same, Auschwitz was the apogee of extermination by the million, a place where the SS was constantly looking for ways to simplify the murder method, speed up the murder, and perfect the technical methods for hiding the evidence.76

  Auschwitz evolved from a backwater camp for Polish prisoners to a site for Soviet prisoners of war and finally into a vast forced labour complex and the heart of the planned extermination of the Jewish race in Europe. And far from being mere ‘camp suppliers’, it was the innovation and flexibility of Topf and Sons that enabled this transformation.

  The first Topf and Sons double-muffle oven was installed at Auschwitz in August 1940. It was located in what was later called Crematorium I in the main camp, a former ammunition depot half-buried underground. The death toll at the camp rose quickly, however, and soon a second oven was required. As they would for the duration of the camp’s existence, the SS panicked when they realised their facilities could not cope with the ever-increasing number of corpses.

  ‘The SS new-build management has already informed you by telegram that the first oven installation has already developed faults owing to high use,’ SS Oberscharführer Walter Urbanczyk wrote to Topf and Sons on 8 January 1941. ‘It is therefore absolutely vital that work on extending the system is begun. The start of the work … must not under any circumstances be delayed.’77

  Topf and Sons installed a second double-muffle oven at the same site in February 1941, but, even with the extra capacity, it was not enough and Topf and Sons installed a third double-muffle oven in May 1942.

  These first ovens were intended for the Polish and Soviet victims of Auschwitz, who were often murdered, or had died of disease. By the autumn of 1941, however, Auschwitz was beginning the final stage of its transformation. Prisoners were now being gassed with Zyklon B in the corpse room of Crematorium I that had been sealed and turned into a gas chamber. At the same time the SS had ordered the expansion of the camp by building Birkenau.

  From the beginning, the SS assumed that high numbers of prisoners at Birkenau would die. The camp was originally intended for Soviet PoWs, and the Nazis had already drawn up plans that demonstrated killing millions of Soviet citizens would free up land and resources for German expansion. Therefore, following this rationale, these first Soviet prisoners of Birkenau could simply be worked to death – and disposed of in new Topf and Sons’ ovens ordered for the task. Ultimately, of course, the expansion of Birkenau did not proceed along these lines, and the camp instead became the final destination for Jewish families. But, in either case, the requirement for the mass disposal of bodies remained.

  On 4 November 1941, Ernst Wolfgang Topf signed a document confirming that Topf and Sons would supply ovens for the new camp. In this letter to the SS, quoted in Chapter Two, he explains that the oven chambers are larger – improving efficiency – and that the company has taken into account that ‘some of the bodies to be cremated will be frozen’, requiring more fuel and producing more ‘gaseous waste’. The SS should ‘rest assured’, he adds, ‘we shall supply an appropriate and well-functioning system’.78 Kurt Prüfer, who is no longer on commission, sees this opportunity to ask for a one-off bonus – pointing out that he worked on the ‘ground-breaking’ design in his own free time.

  By now Topf and Sons are well-known for supplying concentration camps with cremation ovens, with another contract in place. Just as before, though, the execution of that contract is fraught with delays, uncertainty and alterations.

  The SS originally plan to build the new crematorium behind Crematorium I in the Auschwitz main camp – even though that means transporting bodies two miles from Birkenau. By February 1942 it appears that Hans Kammler, the SS officer in charge of the new camp at Birkenau, has realised the problems this poses and decides instead to build the new crematorium at the end of a railway siding in the Birkenau camp itself. There is little urgency to actually begin work, as there are far fewer Soviet prisoners than expected. Within months, though, the plan has changed again. As outlined in the previous chapter, the Nazi regime is now committed to the total extermination of the Jews and 1942 will become the bloodiest year of the ‘Final Solution’.

  In a telex to the inspector of concentration camps, SS Brigadeführer Glucks, Heinrich Himmler writes: ‘Now that we are no longer expecting Russian prisoners of war in the immediate future, I shall send a large proportion of Jews and Jewesses who have been expelled from Germany to the camps.’79

  With only one crematorium in operation, however, Auschwitz-Birkenau is as yet unprepared to play a major role in the liquidation of the first Polish Jews – those mass murders will take place in the newly opened death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. The SS leaders at Auschwitz must now scramble, under high pressure, to prepare their camp to take up the mantle of killing. In the summer of 1942, plans for building the new crematorium begin at a frenzied pace.

  Although early gassing experiments at Auschwitz have been carried out in or near Crematorium I, this is quickly deemed an unsuitable site for a gas chamber, as the screams of the victims can be heard by other prisoners. Camp commandant Rudolf Höss finds a temporary solution to this by deciding to convert two farmhouses on the edge of the camp into makeshift gas chambers. In May 1942, the first farmhouse, known as ‘The Little White House’ goes into operation – it will be officially known as Bunker I. Bunker II, known as the ‘The Little Red House’, follows in June 1942. The SS estimates that 880 people can be murdered at one time in Bunker I, and 1,200 in Bunker II. With the bunkers now in operation, the mass transport of Jews to Auschwitz can begin and between May and December 1942 180,000 Jews from across Europe arrive at Auschwitz – more than 70 per cent of whom are immediately taken to the gas chambers.

  Laurence Rees writes: ‘During 1941 the majority of the killing had been committed by special mobile units in the occupied Soviet Union; in 1942 the Operation Reinhard camps dominated the process of mass murder; but now three years after it was opened, it was Auschwitz’s turn to assume a centr
al role.’80

  Yet, although Auschwitz is now ready to play a central role in the killing, it is still far from prepared for the disposal of the bodies of its victims. In July 1942, soon after the mass killings begin, the camp’s only working crematorium, Crematorium I, breaks down, with an SS report stating that the chimney is so badly damaged ‘due to constant overuse’ that it must be replaced. More people than ever are being murdered at Auschwitz, but cremation of their bodies is no longer possible. Under pressure, the only solution the SS can think of is to bury 50,000 victims in mass pits. This hastily thought up method is soon abandoned, however, as the decomposing bodies poison the groundwater for the surrounding area, and cause an overwhelming smell that sparks Himmler to personally order the pits to be reopened.

  In light of this, Höss and his top henchmen visit other extermination camps in the east to see how others are disposing of their victims. After some investigation, Höss orders that the bodies should be burned in enormous piles in the open air, stacked upon layers of wood and doused in methanol. This grim process takes two months to complete.

  As the SS are well aware, the only permanent solution to the new scaled-up system of mass murder is to urgently build new crematoria – and in the summer and autumn of 1942, Topf and Sons is undertaking this work as fast as possible under the leadership of Kurt Prüfer.

  An agreement has already been reached to supply a new crematorium, Crematorium II, with five three-muffle ovens – and the building commences in the summer of 1942. In August of that year, however, Prüfer attends a crucial meeting with the SS at Auschwitz to discuss plans to build a further series of Crematoria (III–V) and refurbish Crematorium I. The details of this meeting on 10 August, kept on file by the SS Construction Management Office, reveal just how confident Prüfer was in his dealings with the SS, and the extent to which he acted out his role as the man to whom they could turn to solve their technical problems.

  Prüfer meets with the deputy in charge, SS Untersturmführer Fritz Ertl, and two SS engineers Hand Kirschneck and Josef Janisch, as well as Robert Kohler who runs a local building company and has been commissioned to build the crematorium chimneys.

  The meeting first discusses the deployment of Topf and Sons fitters Martin Holick and Wilhelm Koch to the camp to start work on installing the ovens for Crematorium II. Holick has been working on installing the three-muffle oven at Buchenwald, but Prüfer agrees that he can leave for Auschwitz as soon as that project is complete. Koch already has experience of working in Auschwitz after installing the double-muffle oven in Crematorium I in July 1940.These two men will work in the camp on the construction of all four crematoria.

  The second item on the agenda picks up on discussions Prüfer has been having with chief of the SS Construction Office at Auschwitz, Karl Bischoff, about the ovens planned for the gas chambers at Bunker I and Bunker II. Prüfer has seen the technical drawings produced by the SS in which gas chambers are referred to as ‘special baths’ or ‘special cellars’. At the meeting he suggests that instead of installing two new three-muffle ovens, the camp could install an eight-muffle oven in each bunker from an unused order Topf and Sons had made for a camp at Mogilev in the Soviet Union. Prüfer is keen to get rid of unused stock that has been sitting in the Topf warehouse, but he justifies the sale on the basis that Auschwitz will be getting ‘the first large-scale oven’ produced by the company.81 Discussing this agenda item alone Prüfer reveals that he not only has knowledge of the gas chambers, but that he is an active and enthusiastic participant in the SS’s plans for an even greater extermination programme.

  The meeting then discusses the planned oven and ventilation system for Crematorium II, and concludes with Prüfer trying to persuade Auschwitz to keep an oven that has been shipped there mistakenly instead of to Mauthausen (the SS at Auschwitz decline to buy it).

  All things considered, Prüfer must have left Auschwitz satisfied with the result of his negotiations. Three weeks later he makes a note of a phone call he has conducted with Hans Kammler, the deputy responsible for the SS Main Office in Berlin, in which Prüfer reiterates the increased performance the new ovens at Auschwitz will provide – using technical language to obfuscate the fact that increasing capacity from 250 per day to 800 per day refers to the disposal of the bodies of murdered human beings.

  ‘Prüfer approached the problems of the SS as though they were his own,’ Annegret Schüle writes. He ‘willingly came up with innovative ideas for the disposal of the victims of camp conditions, murder operations and the increasing, systematic extermination of human beings; and the company management supported him in this’.82

  Indeed, not only did the company management support Prüfer’s department, Topf managers were even prepared to joke about it. With so much work outstanding at Auschwitz-Birkenau Prüfer calls a meeting with the head of the company’s planning department, Mersch, and the Topf and Sons operations director Gustav Braun. Prüfer later claimed that on the way to the meeting Braun had joked with him: ‘Boys, is there anyone left to burn there?’83

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  INNOVATORS UNTIL THE END

  Kurt Prüfer was nothing if not pushy with regards to his work – constantly reminding everyone about his role in the cremation department, his relationship with the SS and his innovation in developing an essential part of the technology for mass murder. Perhaps, given the lack of warmth towards him in the company, and his jostling for small financial rewards, he felt he had to be. Yet, much as he would have liked everyone to believe that he was the sole driver of innovation – the crucial role of Topf and Sons in devising the industrialisation of the Holocaust was very much a group effort. In this way, Topf and Sons was not just the provider of the ovens. It became something much more horrifying.

  Take Fritz Sander – a long-standing and highly respected Topf employee. Sander was now a man in his sixties; he had worked for Topf and Sons for decades, had risen to become the manager of the furnace construction division, DI, which produced steam-boiler systems, and was an authorised company representative. This was someone held in such high esteem that Ernst Wolfgang would later describe him as a ‘man of almost exaggerated integrity’.

  Such a man, one would think, would not need – or desire – to stoop to dealing with the dirty business of disposing of the bodies of the victims of the Nazis. But it seems that the day-to-day work of overseeing Kurt Prüfer’s oven designs, and signing new orders with the SS, convinced Sander that he had something to prove. Why should Prüfer, a man he disliked intensely, be forging ahead opening up new areas of business for the company and not him? Not only did Sander believe that he too could design an oven – something that was not even his area of technical expertise – but that it would be more brutally efficient than any other oven in operation in a concentration camp. And so Sander dreamt up the ‘corpse incineration oven for mass operation’, and applied for a patent.

  On 14 September 1942, Sander wrote to the Topf brothers explaining why his invention was necessary and how it would work: ‘The high demand for cremation ovens for concentration camps – which has recently become especially apparent at Auschwitz … led me to assess whether our present system with muffles is the best solution for the above-named locations.’84 In a later interrogation in the Soviet Union, Sander claimed that Prüfer had said that the crematoria at Auschwitz ‘could no longer cope with the number of corpses to be cremated,’ and that two or three bodies were being crammed into a single hatch at one time. Sander then described how, ‘as a specialist in firing technology, I decided on my own initiative to build crematoria with greater corpse-cremation capacity’. This, he explained, ‘would be designed on the conveyor-belt principle, with bodies carried into the ovens continuously by mechanical means’. What Sander had in mind was a conveyor belt, continuously loaded with corpses, with the bodies providing the fuel themselves to burn other bodies. ‘The bodies themselves served as additional combustion fuel.’85

  This would address the ‘basic problem’ of m
uffle ovens, as Sander explained it: the cost of the materials, the space required, the amount of fuel needed and the frequency with which the ovens broke down. To rectify this, Sander had sold his idea to the Topf brothers by telling them: ‘I propose an oven with constant feed and operation.’ (In this topsy-turvy moral world, no one questioned that the ‘basic problem’ might in fact be the regime that was killing millions of people)

  Referring to the bodies of the victims as ‘cremation objects’, Sander states: ‘It is perfectly clear to me that such an oven is to be regarded purely as an elimination system and that the concepts of reverence, ash separation and any other emotional factors are entirely disregarded. However, all this is already the case with cremation with multi-muffle ovens.’

  In one succinct paragraph, with a throwaway final sentence, Sander acknowledges that Topf and Sons have been openly flouting the law with regard to reverence in dealing with human remains in all of their work with the SS. He adds this statement to his patent application, dated 26 October 1942, first writing: ‘This method does not, of course, allow compliance with the Reich Cremation Law of 10 August 1938.’ (The statement was later amended to ‘This method does not, of course, allow compliance with the legal requirements in force across the area of the German Reich.’) In a triumph of Nazi administration-speak, Sander described his invention as a way of ‘restoring hygiene’ in ‘war-related conditions’.