Henryk Tauber, a prisoner in the special unit, described what happened next: ‘Once the committee had arrived, we were ordered to fetch bodies from the morgue and throw them in the [muffle ovens].’ In the morgue Tauber found the bodies of a large group of well-fed men, who had been gassed earlier in Bunker II. These men, with a higher proportion of body fat, had been specially requested by Prüfer to test the operating performance of the crematorium. ‘Once all the bodies had been distributed across all the chambers of the five ovens, the committee members observed the process, holding their watches in their hands. They opened doors, looked at their watches, talked among themselves and expressed surprise that the cremation had taken so long.’91
Prüfer and his colleagues from Topf and Sons were surprised and dismayed. But these emotions were not provoked by the fact they had just witnessed such a horrific event; rather they were disappointed that the ovens, which had been heated since early morning, still had not reached the optimal temperature, and the cremation of one load of bodies had taken forty minutes. Initially, Prüfer had estimated that two full loads could be cremated every hour. Tauber added that ‘senior overseer August told us that the calculations and plans for the crematorium had allowed 5–7 minutes per corpse.’
Annegret Schüle estimates that at the rate of three bodies per muffle every half hour, Crematoria II and III would have been able to cremate a maximum of 2,160 bodies per day, a figure that roughly tallies with one given by Rudolf Höss (the total cremation capacity across all of Auschwitz-Birkenau was 8,000 bodies over twenty-four hours). The SS was initially delighted with the ‘highly efficient’ running of the new crematorium, and commented on the reduction in coke consumption as a result of the continual use of the ovens. ‘These are outstanding figures!’ wrote one civilian working for the SS in March 1943.92
In reality, the ‘efficiency’ of the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau was often derailed by a combination of unrealistic demands from Berlin, and the reliability of the people who worked in the crematoria on a day-to-day basis. These prisoners from the special unit had two compelling motivations: to keep themselves alive and make that life as bearable as possible. One way to do this was to shove four or five bodies into a single muffle to give themselves a break between cremations – but this increased the wear and tear on the ovens and led to repeated breakdowns, something that would strain the relationship between Topf and Sons and the SS.
Another strain was that while the ovens at Crematorium II had now been completed, work on the gas chamber had fallen behind schedule.
Topf fitter Heinrich Messing accumulated thirty-five hours of carefully recorded overtime, during the week beginning Monday 8 March 1943. Messing’s job was to install the ventilation technology for the gas chamber and the undressing room in the cellar of Crematorium II. Although these were referred to officially by the SS as morgues I and II, Messing preferred to use the term ‘undressing room’ in his own notes, demonstrating that he understood the process, and the true nature, of the crimes planned for that location. As Annegret Schüle puts it, he was installing technology that would facilitate the ‘speedy suffocation of hundreds of thousands of people’.93 Topf’s ventilation expert, Karl Schultze, was also working at Auschwitz during that same week, and tested the blower (the forced draught system) for the ovens on Crematorium II on Wednesday 10 March.
On Saturday 13 March, it was time to test the blower and the ventilation system for the gas chamber itself. On that day 1,492 Jews from the Kraków ghetto were transported to Birkenau to be murdered. The SS had recommended that the ovens should be working when the blower system was tested, as this was when temperatures were at their highest. That evening when the group arrived, the SS then selected between 150 and 300 men, women and children, and gassed them to death. The bodies were then moved upstairs to be burned in the ovens. During his interrogation by the Soviets, Karl Schultze disclosed the details of what happened:
At the moment when the SS people drove them into the gas chamber, I was in the crematorium, in the vicinity of the crematorium ovens. The bodies of these prisoners were burned in my presence. Once the killing of these prisoners in the gas chambers had been completed (which took no longer than fifty minutes) an SS man switched on the ventilation systems, with the help of which the contaminated air was extracted and fresh air blown in.94
This test showed that the ventilation system and blower were ‘working perfectly’, according to Schultze, and he returned immediately to Erfurt. Upon his return to Topf and Sons, Schultze ‘gave Ludwig Topf a report on the work I had done in connection with the testing of the blower and ventilation systems in the second crematorium. As an aside, I informed him that the SS people had killed a group of prisoners in the gas chambers and that their bodies were then burned in the cremation ovens. L. Topf did not react to this.’95
Schultze’s factual and emotionless account can be read in conjunction with another account, given by special prisoner Henryk Tauber, who also witnessed the gassing. In May 1945, Tauber recounted the scene to a Polish Commission of Inquiry. ‘Once dusk had fallen, the first vehicles carrying people of various ages and sexes drove up. These included old men, women and several children. For about an hour these vehicles drove backwards and forwards between the crematorium and the railway station, bringing more and more people.’
Tauber and the other members of the special unit were locked in the doctors’ room at the back of the building, from where they could hear people ‘crying and screaming’. After two hours Tauber and his team were let out and ordered into the gas chamber.
In this chamber we found piles of standing naked bodies, all collapsed into each other. The bodies were reddish in colour, in places a very pronounced red, in other places they were covered with greenish marks. They had foam round their mouths, some of them had blood coming out of their noses, and most had soiled themselves. I remember that many had their eyes open; lots of the bodies were hunched up together and most of them were huddled together around the door.
Tauber explained that it was clear people had tried to get away from the columns through which the gas had been introduced.
We later realised that a lot of people in the gas chambers died of suffocation due to the lack of air, even before the gas had time to work. These bodies were the ones lying right on the bottom, right on the floor; the others had to run over them … Before the Zyklon was poured in, the air was sucked out – that’s what the ventilation in the chamber was for.96
Once the special unit had removed the bodies, they started to load them onto iron gurneys ready for the Topf ovens:
Two prisoners put the bodies on them. They placed them so that the first body was lying on its back with its legs towards the oven and its face pointing upwards. A second body was put on top of the first, also on its back, but this time with its head towards the oven … Once the bodies were inside the cremation chamber; the sixth prisoner would hold them in place using an iron rod while the fourth prisoner would pull the gurney out from under them.97
The prisoners would then have to open the doors to each cremation chamber so that an SS officer could check it had been loaded properly. This was the unvarnished truth of Topf and Sons’ technology in action.
Innovator that he was, Prüfer suggested a further improvement to the murder process: piping off some of the heat from the forced draught unit Topf had installed in the crematorium to warm the gas chambers, and speeding up the diffusion of the Zyklon B. Although this idea was seized upon by the SS, the heat from the continual use of the crematorium was so great that the forced draught unit did not work, and it was eventually dismantled. Neither Prüfer, nor Karl Schultze, who attended a meeting with the SS at Auschwitz to discuss the problem, were in any doubt about what ‘constant and without interruption’ use of the ovens meant. Schultze wrote: ‘While we were with Prüfer in the crematorium, the bodies of sixty dead prisoners were lying near the cremation oven; I assumed they had been killed in the gas chamber. Approximately twenty-five of
these prisoner corpses were cremated in our presence.’98
Despite the competition within Topf and Sons to provide the SS with more efficient methods of murder, the building of the crematoria and the gas chambers were not progressing smoothly. In March 1943, fissures appeared in the eight-muffle oven in Crematorium IV after only two weeks. Ernst Wolfgang Topf replied to the SS that repairing this would only be under warranty ‘if the alleged damage was the result of faulty workmanship and not, for example, the oven being overheated, or metal tools being poked into the inner brickwork’. Although Topf found a temporary fix for the problem, it seemed that the cause of the problem was a design fault – the generator was too close to one of the muffles. This put the ovens of Crematorium IV permanently out of use, and meant the ovens of Crematorium V could only be used with cool-down periods every four to six weeks.
Two months later, the SS was communicating its dissatisfaction once again. Crematorium III was still not ready, Crematorium IV and V were faulty, and Crematorium II (the only fully functioning crematorium) had broken down due to a faulty chimney lining. On 20 May, Kurt Prüfer visited Auschwitz and was asked to find a solution to the chimney lining, which had been installed by a different company. Although he was accused by the SS of procrastinating, Prüfer eventually did this, but not in time to stop large parts of the lining collapsing into the flue.
In July, Prüfer contacted the SS with yet another complaint. Upset by the demands, Karl Bischoff, a member of the construction management unit at Auschwitz, demanded Topf and Sons repair the faulty lift in Crematorium II. Prüfer fumed in a letter: ‘This lift was not built by us, but was assembled and installed by your own staff. We are therefore unable to understand why you are trying to make us responsible for a system that was not supplied by us.’99
Prüfer appeared to have no fear in dealing with the SS, or negotiating his way out of an unfavourable deal when it suited him. The issue of the faulty chimney was finally resolved when the SS was reluctantly forced to agree that the problem had been caused by overheating (i.e. overuse). A file note referring to a meeting with the chimney builder and Kurt Prüfer at Auschwitz on 10 September 1943 states:
It has been brought to senior engineer Prüfer’s attention that [the chimney builder] has come up with a different excuse for the collapse of the chimney casing each time he has visited. At his last-but-one visit he claimed in the presence of the commandant that the collapse was due to the high stresses caused by the over-heating of individual ovens.100
The chimney manufacturer, Robert Kohler; Topf and Sons; and the SS each agreed to each pay a third of the costs of the repair, with Ernst Wolfgang Topf concluding that the company was paying although ‘our acceptance of the above-mentioned sum in no way constitutes an acknowledgement of a legal claim to do so. We simply agree to the payment as a result of our current shortage of staff, which makes it impossible for us to enter into further correspondence on the matter.’101
This neatly worded compromise by Ernst Wolfang Topf raises another question in considering those responsible for Topf’s role in the Holocaust – the men and women who typed every letter, saw every order and recorded every phone call.
At the junior end of the scale was typist Annelise Hessler, who worked in the furnace construction division under Fritz Sander and Paul Erdmann. Hessler’s initials appear on many of Kurt Prüfer’s documents relating to his communication with the SS. A little higher up the pecking order were the technical draughtsmen who worked for Prüfer and Karl Schultze. Annegret Schüle names them as Hans Kohler, Walter Reinhardt and Sauerland from Department D, and Erich Krone and Horst Scharnweber from Department B (the ventilation department). Heading up the department were Fritz Sander and Paul Erdmann, who reviewed every order and often signed off on tricky correspondence. All of these people would have seen the design sketches, read the references to gas cellars, cremation capacities and corpse lifts. Overseeing all of Topf and Sons’ business was the main administration office, run by the manager of the commercial department, Max Machemehl, who oversaw the invoices that were sent to the SS, as well as chasing up any overdue payments (a significant task, as the SS were often very late in paying their bills).
Max Machemehl was born in 1891 in Erfurt and, like Kurt Prüfer, had served in the First World War (though not on the Western Front). After leaving junior school, Machemehl joined Topf and Sons, where he would continue to work for the rest of his career, and was promoted to authorised representative in 1935. Like Prüfer, Machemehl was married without children. Also like Prüfer, Machemehl joined the Nazi Party at the end of April 1933. Both Prüfer and Machemehl held Nazi positions within the company during the Third Reich. Prüfer represented the German Labour Front within the company; Machemehl reported to the Security Services and the Gestapo on the mood and activities inside Topf and Sons. Gustav Braun reported that in 1944 Machemehl had approached him twice wanting to discuss production and the mood among the workers. When Braun questioned him, Machemehl produced a letter from the head of the Erfurt Gestapo, Reinhard Wolff, stating that Machemehl was required to submit reports about the situation at Topf and Sons. Wolff later explained that the Gestapo had spies inside every Erfurt factory – at Topf and Sons it was Max Machemehl.
The SS were late in paying more than half of their invoices, and in some cases they would delay payments by more than a year. In those instances, it was up to Max Machemehl to pen repeated reminders. On 2 July 1943, he wrote this letter in relation to late payment for the lifts at Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz, the fumigator for the ‘sauna’ and the waste incinerator: ‘We hereby take the liberty of again sending you a list of the sums that still remain open on your account, from which you will see that the amount owing to us at this time comes to 32,732 RM. We have already written to you repeatedly about these outstanding sums on 16 April, 25 May, and 11 June 1943…’
Machemehl continues that he has been informed by Kurt Prüfer that these invoices have already been authorised and passed on to Berlin for payment. ‘Since we are dependent on our accounts receivable, and the sums have now been overdue for some considerable time, despite our repeated requests for payment, we hope it will not be necessary to contact you again concerning this matter.’102
This letter had little effect apparently: the SS paid part of the invoices two months later, and the remaining part only in the summer of 1944.
Despite his involvement in all of Topf and Sons’ deals with the SS, Machemehl insisted that his work at the concentration camps involved ‘perfectly ordinary business’ deals, and he moved seamlessly to forge a new career after the war in communist-controlled East Germany. His slipperiness is alluded to in a staff poem from the sixtieth anniversary commemorative booklet published in 1938:
There, where the wax floor makes things slippy,
On the first floor, sits Mache-Max
Neatly behind glass and frame
With his slim ladies…
The door is never still here
The telephone rings constantly
This is where all the money decisions are made.103
Of course, Topf and Sons never made more than 2 per cent of its earnings from Kurt Prüfer’s work with the concentration camps. At its peak in 1943, the annual earnings from Auschwitz never went above 1.85 per cent. Translated into today’s money, Topf and Sons made only €30,600 per year in profit from developing the technology of the Holocaust.
The company had sold its soul for such little financial gain, hastening, in the case of Auschwitz, nearly 1 million people to their deaths in the gas chambers.
A large number of these people were murdered in the summer of 1944, when the arrival of Hungarian Jews pushed Topf technology to the limits. An agreement between the German-allied government of the Hungarian chief of state, Regent Miklós Horthy, and the Third Reich had kept Hungarian Jews just beyond Hitler’s reach, until the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944.
The Hungarian government was itself one of the most anti-Semitic in Euro
pe, and had passed hundreds of anti-Jewish laws in the 1930s. In November 1940, Hungarian Prime Minister Pál Teleki had advocated to Hitler that all Jews should be expelled from Europe, and the Hungarian government had murdered Jews on several occasions before the German occupation. In the summer of 1941, 18,000 Jews were deported to German-occupied Ukraine, with full knowledge that only death awaited them, and in January 1942, a further 1,000 Jews were murdered by the Hungarian military in Újvidék.
Despite this, the remaining presence of nearly 800,000 Jews in Hungary loomed large in Hitler’s mind, and the German invasion of 1944, which aimed to keep Hungary loyal to the Third Reich by force, was followed by a Sonderkommando unit headed by Adolf Eichmann who was charged with implementing the Final Solution in Hungary. New anti-Jewish decrees were quickly passed: Hungarian Jews were forced to wear the yellow star, Jewish businesses and properties were seized, and Jews were forced into ghettos. These ghettos, however, were short-lived ones, and between 15 May and 9 July 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported – mostly to Auschwitz.
More Hungarian Jews were murdered in those two shorts months at Birkenau than in the previous two years. An average of 3,300 people were transported every day, rising to 4,300 on some days – and three quarters of those people were sent straight to the gas chambers. Eva Schloss, who arrived from the Netherlands that same summer remembered: ‘The flames from the crematoria burned brightly, night after night, and all night long, but now everyone was dead – and we had sorted out the belongings that they had been forced to leave behind.’104
In total, nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, and on some days as many as 10,000 bodies were burned in either Crematoria II, III and IV or in open-air pits. These people were murdered and incinerated using the technology that Topf and Sons were so proud of developing.
Architects of Death Page 15
