Their clients and partners, the SS, were also pleased with the advances they had overseen in the more efficient murder of millions. Upon completion of the new extermination facilities, SS officer Perry Broad recalled that the SS had organised a photo exhibition of the new crematoria to be displayed in the entrance hall of the main building at Auschwitz. ‘They forgot that when civilians were coming and going and they saw a large picture of the fifteen neatly set-out crematorium ovens, their reaction would be less likely to be admiration for the construction manager’s technical skills than horror at the extremely dubious installations of the Third Reich.’105
CHAPTER NINE
TRIALS AND RETRIBUTION
With the Soviet forces closing in, the SS at Auschwitz realised that the end was near. In those final months they had murdered with a frenzy, sifting out those who could be sent on the ‘death marches’ back to Germany where they would be labourers, and dispatching those who remained: the young, the sick and the elderly. In just two weeks in October 1944, roughly 40,000 people were killed in the Birkenau gas chambers.
Then the gassing and burning of Auschwitz-Birkenau was over. On 25 November 1944, work started on dismantling Crematorium II and Crematorium III, but the Third Reich, aided by Topf and Sons, had still not given up on its dream of the total eradication of all Jews and prisoners. A member of the special unit notes that the following day, on 26 November:
It is strange that it is especially the counter-ventilation motor and its pipe that are being dismantled and sent to other camps – Mauthausen and Gross-Rosen. Since these are required for the gassing of large numbers of people and there was never any such mechanism in Crematoria IV and V, it seems that they are planning to recreate these facilities for the extermination of the Jews elsewhere.106
Since the autumn of 1944 the SS had been looking for a suitable site to reconstruct the extermination facilities of Birkenau at the camp at Mauthausen – which was deep inside Austria, and much further from the Soviet advance. Even as late as early 1945, when Auschwitz itself had been liberated and Soviet troops were marching on Berlin, Kurt Prüfer, on behalf of himself and Schultze’s ventilation department, was writing a detailed memo to the construction management unit at Mauthausen:
REF: CONSTRUCTION OF CREMATORIUM (SPECIAL INSTALLATION).
Please find enclosed our drawing, reference D 61 654, showing half of the total site area. The main building in the middle will have five three-muffle cremation ovens, connected to two three-pipe chimneys. The external side of the middle building contains the supervisors’ room. The coal store is on the opposite side. To the right and left are the rooms for the waste incinerators with flue gas preheater. We have connected a three-muffle cremation oven and the waste incinerator to this flue gas preheater, which means that the waste gases from the two ovens are fed through the flue gas preheater. The draft of the detailed design will follow as soon as you have confirmed your agreement to the set-up.
Enclosed you will find a list of the terminology used in the naming of the individual rooms. In the event of query, we request that you simply give us the room number. In designing the facilities we have assumed that all components from the concentration camp Auschwitz should be reused.
This applies both to the iron components for the ovens and to the individual inward and outward ventilation systems. New pipework will be required; we will send you a quote for this once we have received your agreement to the construction of the new facilities. We have not included windows or how they should be distributed, since we do not know what will be sent to Mauthausen from A. The same applies to the roof trusses. A further on-site meeting with one of our team may be required before work on the new facilities can begin. If so, you would need to show the priority level on the contract, so that we can obtain the necessary travel permission. Possibly you would prefer to send us Wehrmacht tickets, second class, which you will obtain without difficulty from the Central Administration in Berlin.107
As this memo shows, Topf and Sons were now entirely used to planning gas chambers, in addition to crematoria, and were prepared to take on responsibility for constructing an entire extermination centre (an extension of their work at Auschwitz, where they had gone beyond their initial remit of ovens, to repairing chimneys, providing ventilation systems and sourcing ‘corpse lifts’). Now all of this could come within Kurt Prüfer’s orbit – and he could even resurrect his idea of using the heat from the ovens to preheat the gas chambers.
Although becoming chief architect of an entire extermination centre appeared to be a role that Prüfer tackled with some relish, his plans came to naught. Topf’s chief fitter, Wilhelm Koch, was sent to Mauthausen to oversee the project, but the planned centre was never built and within weeks the war in Europe was over.
On 7 May 1945 Germany surrendered to the Allies, and by 31 May Ludwig Topf was dead by his own hand. In the course of those few short weeks, the fortunes of Topf and Sons had collapsed, and those who had supported or played a role in the Holocaust were facing the bleak reality that they would have to answer for what they had always maintained were justifiable business decisions – but what others perceived to be heinous crimes.
American troops had reached the concentration camp at Buchenwald one month earlier on 11 April, and were shocked by the appalling conditions. Two months earlier, the camp had run out of coke supplies for the crematorium, which had resulted in several thousand bodies being hastily buried on the southern slope of the Ettersberg mountain, while piles of unburied corpses lay in the yard of the crematorium and rats ran wild throughout the camp. The last days of mass transports of prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen meant that the death rate at Buchenwald had soared, once again, in its final weeks of operation. In the last three months of operation, 6,000 people had died of starvation or disease; several hundred more died in the days after liberation. When American soldiers opened the Topf-branded ovens in the crematorium they found partially burned bones still inside.
One day after the liberation of Buchenwald, the US Army marched into the Erfurt offices of Topf and Sons and began a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) investigation into the company. Ernst Wolfgang Topf later gave his own account of what happened:
They had photographed the installations in the crematorium, together with our company signs. It was only a few days before we had a committee from the military government on the premises. Thorough and detailed investigations were carried out. They reassured themselves that all the files, drawings, parts lists, calculations etc. were all present. Nothing was missing, since every single document proved the only thing it could prove: that so far as we were concerned it had been just another perfectly ordinary business arrangement.108
To back this up, Topf representative Kurt Schmidt claimed that when shown a comparison between the oven doors at Buchenwald and the oven doors of a Topf civil crematorium, US Army Captain Faber could see that they were identical. (Of course, this was completely untrue. As Ernst Wolfgang Topf was well aware, every aspect of a Topf oven supplied to the concentration camps differed to those supplied to civil crematoria.)
Yet things were evidently not as cut and dried as Ernst Wolfgang sought to portray. Two weeks after the investigation began, Ludwig Topf met with the company’s now communist-controlled works council to discuss Topf and Sons’ contracts with the SS and address ‘the rumours circulating about the Topf ovens’. In this meeting Ludwig attempted to agree a shared narrative for the company’s involvement in engineering the extermination centres of the Holocaust – and to provide the most innocuous and benign justifications for their actions.
Ludwig begins by stating that the previous day he had spoken to Kurt Prüfer and Karl Schultze about the matter, and he was now talking to the works council in case they too were questioned as part of the investigation. Firstly, Ludwig explains, both the Kori company and the Didier company from Stettin also supplied ovens to the camps – the implication clearly being that Topf’s role was not unique, or special, and that if they
had not provided the ovens, another company would have. Moving on, Ludwig describes the origins of Topf and Sons’ relationship with the SS:
Several years ago the city of Weimar commissioned us to repair one of its crematorium ovens. Our senior engineer, Prüfer, travelled to Weimar to look at it. A typhus epidemic [it was actually dysentery] had broken out in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and the number of deaths was rising by the day. At the time, the dead of Buchenwald were still being sent to the Weimar crematorium. The epidemic naturally made the transportation of the bodies problematic, and so it was decided to install a cremation oven right there in the camp – which was absolutely the right thing to do from a hygiene perspective.109
The minutes of the meeting conclude that other contracts then followed from other camps, but that ‘all members of the works council were completely clear about this sequence of events and all agreed that we had nothing to worry about’.
In this meeting Ludwig Topf followed the tried and tested formula, developed by the Nazis, of describing the most atrocious acts in the blandest possible terms – and it seems that the works council was perfectly willing to collude with him on this point. In a works council resolution they stated that:
Neither of the Herr Topfs were Nazis … We have no complaints against the two gentlemen for the way they continued to run the business, and we are convinced that cooperating with them will be a good thing. Even in a communist-oriented economy, businessmen like these continue to have a place.110
Annegret Schüle writes that, ‘Ludwig Topf took SS terror and extermination, and the Topf company’s own willingness to act as eager accomplices to them, and made them sound like a logical, virtually inevitable and utterly innocent sequence of events.’111 Yet both brothers knew that what they’d done was far from innocent, and that the investigation into their activities was closing in.
When the Allied forces arrived in Erfurt they evicted Ludwig from his luxurious villa, which they used as a base for themselves. Ludwig moved next door into a smaller wooden house, still in the grounds of the Topf family park. It was here that American army officers found him on the evening of 30 May, and broke the news that Kurt Prüfer had been arrested earlier that day. Ludwig was told that he could expect to be picked up for questioning the following morning at 10 a.m. A calmer man might have taken this, perhaps, as a warning to escape, or a chance to prepare for the day ahead. But in the final months of the war the Topf brothers had not been calm. Just as they had spent the war years engaged in paranoid company squabbles, the strain of knowing that the tide had turned, irrevocably, against the Third Reich, drove Ernst Wolfgang, Ludwig and their sister, Hanna, into an emotional, bitter dispute with each other.
Rather than attempt to escape, Ludwig went to one of Erfurt’s oldest pharmacies, located on the corner of the cathedral square, and bought potassium cyanide. That night he used it to commit suicide. Before doing so he wrote a dramatic letter, steeped in self-pity, that captured his final thoughts:
If I have decided to avoid arrest, then it is for this reason: I no longer believe there is any justice in this world, after all the injustice and viciousness I have experienced at the hands of my family and everyone else. If I am arrested, gross injustice will befall me. I never did anything consciously and deliberately bad, but people have acted this way towards me. I was never cowardly – but I was proud. To put myself at the mercy of a foreign power is impossible for me, because I have learned the hard way that there is no longer any justice, any decency in this world. Therefore, as a decent man myself, I now have the opportunity to do with myself as I see fit. That means: to depart this world that has become generally unbearable and, that has persecuted me and been unjust to me in particular.
If I could believe that my innocence in the business with the crematoria – which is my brother’s innocence, too – would be acknowledged and respected, then I would go on fighting for my vindication, as I have hitherto. But it is my belief that the Volk wants its victims. And so I would prefer to take care of this matter myself. I was ever decent – the very opposite of a Nazi – the whole world knows that. If I could still feel peaceful in the bosom of my family, then the fight would be worthwhile – but the Topf family does not exist anymore, the Topf attitude, essence and self-respect are all gone. In these respects, I was always its lone representative. I am so alone that there isn’t even anyone I need to beg for forgiveness for my suicide.
In his new, and final, will, also composed that night, Ludwig explains why he has chosen to disinherit his siblings and make his lover Ursula Albrecht, company secretary Max Machemehl and the city of Erfurt his heirs: ‘My two siblings have grossly misunderstood and insulted me, and it took infinite goodness and brotherly love and strength of mind on my part to be able to deal with the appalling injustice I have suffered at the hands of my relatives.’112
It was true that the Topf family had long been riven with petty infighting, dysfunction and mistrust (in his penultimate will, written in April 1941, Ludwig refused Ernst Wolfgang’s pregnant wife, Erika, the right of residence in his home – and urged his brother to leave her). In the final year of the war, Ernst Wolfgang told company workers that the relationship between the two brothers had broken down to such an extent that Ernst Wolfgang stopped working in the office they shared in the administration building and withdrew from their joint partnership. From that point on, Ernst Wolfgang worked in a separate office some distance from Topf and Sons and acted as the company’s commercial director while Ludwig now sat opposite executive secretary Johanna Büschleb – who took Ernst Wolfgang’s side in the dispute, calling Ludwig short-tempered patronising and fault finding. ‘In the last fifteen months or so, something became apparent in my brother that went far beyond any earlier differences and arguments … namely, that he quite specifically couldn’t work with me any longer,’ Ernst Wolfgang told workers. ‘It is too much if two people fail over a small issue, if they simply cannot agree, then the company needs them to decide that one of the two will leave the company, but in such a way that the company is not convulsed as a result.’113
It appears that the brothers had fallen out over their limited-partnership agreement, with Ludwig wanting to disinherit his sister Hanna and her children. But Ernst Wolfgang’s account makes no mention of Ludwig’s fears of the ‘unjust retribution’ he feared he would face for Topf and Sons’ activities on behalf of the SS.
Of the two brothers Ludwig had taken the lead in developing the crematorium business for Topf and Sons, and when the Nazis came to power he had worked closely with his brother and Kurt Prüfer to ensure that every demand of the SS was met. He had involved himself in every intricate detail of the horrors of the Holocaust and the concentration camps, and for five years he had lived the blissful life of a playboy, all the while knowing that his technology was sending millions of terrified people to their deaths. Facing up to his actions would have required a maturity and composure that Ludwig did not possess, and choosing the coward’s way out was a final testament to his character.
At 5.30 a.m. on the morning of 31 May, Ludwig’s lover Ursula Albrecht woke Max Machemehl (who was also living in a house in the Topf family park) to tell him that ‘Ludwig has gone!’ Albrecht was overcome with emotion and proceeded to run around the park crying. In the midst of all the chaos, Machemehl got dressed and drove over to tell Ernst Wolfgang Topf the news. He recalled that ‘shortly afterwards, Fräulein Albrecht arrived in the Daberstedt Strasse in the CIC [American Counter Intelligence Corps] car and screamed that L. had been found dead near the roofing felt store.’114 Max Machemehl found Ludwig’s farewell letter and passed it to the CIC. In keeping with Ernst Wolfgang’s narrative that Ludwig’s death was due to a personal matter, family doctor, Dr Karle, ruled that it was a case of suicide ‘brought on by war-induced nervous shock’.
Above all, Ernst Wolfgang was determined to protect the family business, and his own fortune, by ensuring that Topf and Sons resumed production. In the early days of the American occ
upation, this seemed quite plausible. As far as Topf could see, the American investigation was going nowhere and the CIC seemed to accept the company line that Topf and Sons had spent the war conducting ‘perfectly ordinary business’. Even Ludwig Topf’s suicide appeared hasty when Kurt Prüfer was released from arrest on 13 June 1945, and went back to work at Topf and Sons. Those responsible, however, would have much more to fear from the Soviet forces, who would assume control of Erfurt and the surrounding area as part of the Soviet zone of occupied Germany.
With production at standstill, and the company still owed large amounts of money for aircraft parts it had produced for the Luftwaffe, Ernst Wolfgang Topf’s most pressing problem was how to get his hands on a large life insurance policy for 300,000 RM which he could now claim after his brother’s death. To do this, however, he had to travel to the Allianz insurance company in Stuttgart – something which required permission from the occupying government. On 13 June Ernst Wolfgang and his newly appointed deputy, Kurt Schmidt (formerly head of Department E for silo and storage construction) were granted permission to travel. Topf left Erfurt with his wife and daughter on 21 June and headed first to Wiesbaden, where his son was living with his in-laws. Once there, however, he was refused permission into the French occupied zone around Stuttgart. He then fell ill.
While Ernst Wolfgang was away, there was tumultuous change at Topf and Sons, as well as in Erfurt itself. One day after his departure, the American military informed Topf and Sons that they could resume production for systems related to foodstuffs and were allowed to employ fifty people – an announcement greeted with joy at the company, as a note in the file reflects: ‘Sender: Military Government Erfurt. Content: Permission to resume Production. GREAT JOY!!!!!!!!!!!!’115 Although furnace construction was excluded from the notice, the first order was for a crematorium oven for the city of Erfurt.
Architects of Death Page 16
