Architects of Death

by Karen Bartlett

  ‘I was and am a German, who is loyal to the German government and its laws,’ Schultze replies. ‘That’s why I considered those who had fought against this government and its measures, including those in the German-occupied territories, to be criminals. They were condemned in line with German laws, because they had murdered representatives of German authorities and the German military.’ Although he was never a member of the Nazi Party, Schultze adds that he ‘believed it to be my duty to respect and obey the laws of my land’.

  The interrogator concludes by stating that Schultze had already confessed in 1946 to his role in building the gas chambers and crematoria, and he urges Schultze to ‘tell us what led you to pursue this criminal path?’ At this point Schultze diverges from the strict explanation of ‘wartime duty’ that his Topf colleagues have so far adhered to.

  I did not get involved in the building and equipping of crematoria in concentration camps and the gas chambers in Auschwitz on my own initiative, but did so on the orders of the boss of Topf and Sons, where I was employed. If I had refused to carry out this work, I could have been dismissed as a saboteur and been subjected to reprisals. It was out of fear of this that I never asked the company boss Ludwig Topf to refrain from using me for these projects.122

  This is the first time a Topf defendant has claimed that they carried out their work for the simple reason that they were afraid not to. If true, it might be a plausible justification – but all of the evidence demonstrates that this wasn’t the case. At no point did any senior member of staff at Topf and Sons, or either of the Topf brothers, appear to be afraid of the SS. To the contrary, they often expressed frustration and annoyance and were tardy when completing work if it suited them. As the previous chapter outlines, Topf and Sons would occasionally turn down SS commissions if the company was too overstretched to fulfil them – without any fear of reprisals.

  When interrogated Kurt Prüfer, the instigator and innovator for all of Topf and Sons’ work with the SS, attempts a similar blend of detailed fact and obfuscation, confusion over dates and lies about knowledge and motive.

  Prüfer begins by stating:

  Until 1943, I didn’t know anything about the real purpose of the crematoria in the concentration camps. I only found that out when I visited Auschwitz. Until then, the people from the SS construction management units who led the discussions with the Topf company had always said that the concentration camp crematoria were for the cremation of corpses of prisoners who had died a natural death as a result of epidemics.

  I only found out about the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz when I visited the camp in 1943. Until then I knew nothing about either their existence or their purpose.

  I would also like to emphasise that the Topf company never built any gas chambers in the concentration camps. I only know that the Topf company fitted two ventilation systems for the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

  The interrogator asks Prüfer what he specifically discovered about the nature of the gas chambers and crematoria during his visit to Auschwitz in 1943. Prüfer replies:

  I discovered that the mass murder of people, including women, children and the elderly, was taking place in the camp. Hitler’s people were bringing them to Auschwitz in transport trains from German-occupied European countries. The prisoners brought to Auschwitz were sent to the gas chamber by the SS, where they were killed. Their bodies were then incinerated in the crematoria and special fire pits.

  Asked if this implies that he was aware the crematoria he was building were for the disposal of the bodies of innocent people, Prüfer replies: ‘Yes, I knew that.’ Why, then, the interrogator queries, did he continue to work on their construction? This time Prüfer points the finger of blame at Ludwig Topf:

  After I’d discovered the real purpose of the crematoria in the Auschwitz concentration camp, I considered refusing any further involvement in their construction, and I said this to the company boss, Ludwig Topf.

  Ludwig Topf replied that the construction of the concentration camp cremation furnaces was a commission from the Reich HQ of the SS, and that if I refused to work on them, I could be arrested and sent to a concentration camp myself for sabotage.

  Prüfer adds that he feared losing his job and suffering reprisals from the Nazis. After a disagreement over the date upon which he became aware of the true nature of the gas chambers and crematoria, Prüfer explains that the conditions were first described to him on a visit to Auschwitz in 1942.

  Claiming to have come upon this revelation ‘by chance’, Prüfer says:

  In early 1942, the Auschwitz SS construction management unit asked me to go to the camp to assess a design for a new crematorium in the Auschwitz section of the camp and to view the proposed site for it.

  I viewed the proposed site with one of the SS men. As we drove past Crematorium I, I saw through the half-opened door a room with human corpses lying on the floor in various poses; there were more than ten of them. When I approached this room, someone quickly slammed the door shut from inside. Since I didn’t know what this room in Crematorium I was used for, I asked the SS man about it. He said that there was a gas chamber in there, where prisoners were gassed to death.

  In answer to my next question about how the gas chamber worked, the SS man answered evasively, claiming that he didn’t know anything about it, before telling me that he knew there were gas chambers in the city of Lodz, in which the SS had carried out gassings using vehicle exhaust fumes. At some point they had accelerated this process through the use of some kind of gas. The SS man said that the use of gas in the Lodz gas chambers had reduced the killing time from 10–15 minutes to 1–2 minutes.

  The SS man told me that the killings in the Lodz gas chamber went as follows: the prisoners were forced into the gas chambers, the doors were hermetically sealed, and then gas balloons were thrown in through special openings. On the basis of this description, I concluded that prisoners in the gas chamber that the SS had built in Crematorium I at Auschwitz were being killed in the same way.

  As the interrogation progresses, Prüfer admits that while he was not responsible for the installation of the ventilation systems, he did assist the SS in their attempts to source gas analysers that were used to measure the cyanide level in the chamber – something far beyond his remit as a furnace engineer.

  When Von Bischoff came to me with this request, he explained that hydrogen cyanide fumes still remained in the gas chambers after the prisoners had been gassed, even after ventilation, leading to the poisoning of people working there. Von Bischoff therefore asked me to find out which companies were producing gas analysers, with a view to using them to measure the concentration of the hydrogen cyanide fumes in the gas chambers and thereby avoid endangering the workers.

  Prüfer adds that, on this occasion, he was unable to help the SS, as he had struggled to find companies who produced gas analysers. The interrogator then asks if Prüfer himself was involved in testing the crematoria on site. Prüfer responds:

  No. That was done by fitters from the company who were carrying out building and assembly work in these crematoria under my direction. On my visits to Auschwitz I observed and checked the functioning of the cremation furnaces in operation. During this checking, bodies of prisoners killed in the gas chambers by the SS were incinerated in my presence.123

  Prüfer changed many details in his interrogation and obfuscated on many points – but he never deviated from his justification that he had only ever acted out of fear of reprisal. Yet his avid attempts over many years to cement himself as the key to Topf and Sons’ relationship with the SS proved otherwise. Extermination had become his life’s work, but Prüfer was shameless enough to claim that he had only ever acted out of fear of reprisal. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Kurt Prüfer, Karl Schultze and Gustav Braun confessed to the charges outlined against them in the indictments, and were found guilty without ever facing trial. Each was sentenced to twenty-five years hard labour.
Despite his attempts to cast his behaviour in a more favourable light – for Prüfer it was the end of the road. On 25 October 1952, he died of a stroke while still incarcerated in the USSR. But both Braun and Schultze were released from prison after nine years, in October 1955, as part of a prisoner amnesty between Germany and the Soviet Union. Schultze’s future and fate after this point are unknown – unlike Gustav Braun he left no family behind to cope with the aftermath of his actions. Gustav Braun returned to Germany where his son Udo picks up the story of his father’s last years.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A CHANGE OF SCENERY IN THE USSR

  The Soviet indictment against Gustav Braun read as follows:

  As operations director of the company of Topf and Sons, the accused Braun, Gustav sent installation teams and other specialists to the concentration camps to set up and install cremation furnaces and gas chambers. He ensured that the company took all necessary steps for the timely completion and dispatch of the SS’s orders for the production of equipment for the camp crematoria and gas chambers.

  From 1941 to the day of the German surrender, Braun was directly responsible for up to 300 ‘foreign workers’ who had been abducted by the Hitlerites from the occupied territories of the USSR and other countries to work in the production facilities of the company of Topf and Sons.

  Braun despised these workers, had them guarded in the company’s own camp and forced them into slave labour.

  From 1941 Braun was a deputy counter-intelligence officer in the company of Topf and Sons. He carried out counter-intelligence work against sabotage and diversion activity and informed the organs of the SD [intelligence agency of the SS and Nazi Party] about the various moods of the company’s workers and employees.124

  Gustav Braun never visited a concentration camp, nor did he oversee the work of any of the engineers, but his senior role in the company meant that the Soviet authorities were persistent in building a case against him.

  Braun was unusual among the senior management at Topf and Sons in that he had only joined the company in 1935. Recruited directly by Ludwig Topf, Braun was forty-five years old when he joined the company, and married with one older son. He was a highly qualified engineer who had spent eight years in the USA and South America and, in his years at Topf and Sons, he would demonstrate both his engineering and management skills.

  One of Braun’s sons, Udo, remembers how his father met Ludwig Topf:

  He was on his way back [to America] in 1934 or 1935 when he met Topf. According to my mum, he met him in Hamburg, just as he was about to emigrate for good. He wanted to go back to America, but when he met Ludwig Topf they started talking and he cancelled his departure and decided to take the job managing a building site associated with Topf and Sons. Apparently Topf suggested that once that job was finished, he should join the firm in Erfurt as plant manager. So he agreed, and turned down the job in America.125

  Braun had worked abroad due to the poor state of the German economy and the lack of opportunities – but he believed that the job with Topf and Sons would be advantageous. While working on the building site, Braun met the woman who would become his second wife – and Udo Braun’s mother.

  He was married to his first wife, but they got divorced. He met my mother up on the building site, where she worked. She was an office clerk and stenographer. My father was retained by Topf to finish the job. The building site was already in progress – and there was a lot of time off in the evenings, right? And in any case, my mother was a very positive person – and she was twenty years younger.

  Braun began working for Topf and Sons in the storage construction division, but was quickly promoted to operations manager, and then operations director in charge of managing and fulfilling all the orders. At the onset of the war, he was made responsible for ‘Uk’ matters – deciding which workers were indispensable, and should therefore be released from service in the army. He also took on the role of company defence officer, monitoring the workforce and reporting those findings to the Gestapo.

  Despite being promoted to such a senior position in such a short space of time, Braun’s tenure at Topf and Sons was marked by angry disputes and conflict – particularly with Ernst Wolfgang Topf.

  ‘My father had a very confrontational relationship with Ernst Wolfgang, but not with Ludwig,’ says Udo Braun.

  My parents talked about it, and later I found some documents from my father and read about it. Ernst Wolfgang Topf was a Korinthenkacker [a petty man] and my father had difficulties with him. Not with Ludwig. Ernst Wolfgang Topf was a nit-picker who mainly wanted to hurt and dominate others. Ludwig was a gentleman.

  To this day Udo still has fond memories of Ludwig Topf:

  As a little boy I was invited to the Topf family park and I went to their villa, holding my father’s hand. Naturally I was very impressed by the expensive furnishings and found it all very exciting. The gardener came along and brought some cherries. Ludwig Topf was very nice to me, and that is important for a little boy. My father was very strict and a bit old for a father. He was forty-seven when I was born in 1936. I like to think about Ludwig Topf; I remember him as a very nice man.

  Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Topf and Sons’ files document the tense relationship between Gustav Braun and Ernst Wolfgang Topf, which would often descend into outright hostility and name-calling.

  The first complaint in the Topf files about Gustav Braun appears in 1937:

  Report by Herr Machemehl

  Erfurt, 27 November 1937

  Re: Foreman Görlach’s complaint about Herr Braun, operations director.

  Foreman Görlach came to see me today to say that working practices in the company could not go on as they were. Although Herr Görlach didn’t want to go into too much detail and repeatedly stressed that he was telling me this in confidence, it was clear that his comments were directed towards Herr Braun. He criticised the fact that, among other things, Herr Braun had issued instructions behind his back that he really should have been aware of. He also complained that in some cases the formalities necessary for good order in the company were not being observed. For example, in agreement with Herr Braun he had instructed that the silo crew should work on Sundays, and had informed the gatekeeper and the crew leader of this in writing, naming the individuals concerned. But on another Sunday, Herr Braun issued a similar instruction and summoned the new foreman, without informing Herr Görlach.

  Herr Görlach repeatedly emphasised that he had only come because he was worried for the company and was afraid things would turn out badly if things carried on in this way. He even spoke of ‘bankruptcy’ in connection with Herr Braun.126

  As was common at Topf and Sons, the report contains long accounts of fairly trivial matters, undercut with an element of hysteria (the warning of ‘bankruptcy’).

  In October 1938, Ernst Wolfgang Topf composed another lengthy file note about a dispute between himself and Gustav Braun over the replacement of a technician. Topf wants to promote someone internally, a man named Habel, but immediately complains that ‘from the very first moment, Herr Braun took against the idea (facial expression, etc.)’. When Topf explains why he thinks an internal promotion will be quicker than advertising in the newspaper, he states: ‘This, too, [was] met with icy rejection. When I asked why he was opposed to the idea, and whether he was familiar with Herr Habel’s work, Herr Braun just replied, “I want to find someone myself!”’ Topf agrees to drop the matter – but then writes a further page-long note in the file about why he finds it impossible to work with Braun. Topf writes:

  I would like to add to this record that Herr Braun’s desire to put himself on a throne has been commented on many times before … Herr Braun still retains his character faults, and even displays them in his dealings with me. I must make it completely clear that I was as courteous as I could be. My behaviour was like that of a Pope blessing a supplicant. I didn’t make any demands at all – I just put the idea to him. I did, however, speak very clearly and concisely, an
d Herr Braun’s decision to send me away, as though I were some junior employee in my own company, just highlights his defective character.

  Ernst Wolfgang Topf’s complaint about Braun’s lack of respect, and his belief that Braun was his brother Ludwig’s ally, runs throughout the file references to Gustav Braun. When Braun is given an air defence position in the company in October 1940, Topf records another highly excitable memo about Braun’s supposed high-handedness in dealing with his staff. Ernst Wolfgang fumes:

  Herr Braun heartily dislikes order. He’s all for confusion and a totally subjective, impulsive style of management that is subject to neither order nor any kind of plan. Everything of an ordering or organising nature is wholly alien to him, for the simple reason that he can rule better in a state of disorder, disorganisation and chaos, and that a lot of things can be hushed up that way. When your operations management is based on shouting instructions without any order behind them, you can get away with almost anything and no one will ever be able to call you out.127

  Between the time of this letter in 1940 and the end of the war, Topf and Sons was embroiled in producing the machinery of the Holocaust (as well as overseeing a large slave labour force, and manufacturing aircraft parts – in addition to their main business matters). Yet, as ever, the leadership of the company was consumed by petty rivalries and disputes. As the records show, the enmity between Ernst Wolfgang Topf and Gustav Braun worsened as the years passed.

  On 30 January 1943 (while Topf and Sons are in the midst of constructing the crematorium at Birkenau), Ernst Wolfgang takes the time to write a two-page memo about Braun’s behaviour – this time in relation to the redundancy of someone called Röder. He sets the tone by marking the note ‘strictly confidential’ and then adds – ‘Theme: Only buffoons [Hanswürste] can co-exist as officers of the company alongside the operations director.’

  The memo outlines a farewell conversation between Topf and Röder, but as expected with Ernst Wolfgang, it quickly descends into gossip. ‘He is very depressed about his redundancy, since he has enjoyed working here. He lets it be known that this redundancy is just the last in a series of attempts by Braun to “neutralise him” and make him surplus to requirements.’ Röder then explains to Ernst Wolfgang why he believes his poor performance and redundancy is in fact the fault of his manager, Gustav Braun. Topf writes: