‘They gave me eight months to find an investor in Germany who would be willing to buy Topf and Sons,’ Udo Braun says.
I accepted and did my best, because I didn’t want the company to die and people to lose their jobs. Lots had to leave anyway. Of the 700 employees only 100 stayed. Since I had spent my entire working life there, my heart was also in it. The company was bought. The new owner got 70 per cent, I got 10 per cent – that’s what they wanted – and there were two other partners. That went on for two or three years. We then found out that we didn’t have enough money to construct new premises since we were not allowed to sell land that we owned in order to finance it. So the inevitable happened. The investor had difficulties of his own and in 1996 a liquidator took over and filed for bankruptcy. That was the worst day for me, when I had to go to the court. But I had to do it. I had to take care of everything.148
The administration building where the Topf brothers and their engineers had plotted how to build the technology for mass murder fell into decay, the family park slipped into leafy ruin. In its final company history, written in the 1990s, EMS had not mentioned the period of the Second World War at all – but still some important documents remained in the company archives, including Fritz Sander’s memo about his patent application, and the note about the dispute with the SS over the missing blower. Other documents had been retained by the former East German state archive in the Document Centre for the Prosecution of Nazi and War Crimes where Western researchers could look at them under Stasi supervision. These papers formed the basis of a file that was used at one stage to try to persuade Hartmut Topf to become a Stasi agent – an offer he refused.
Hartmut had been visiting Erfurt and staying with his cousin Dietrich since the 1970s. During one of these visits he visited the concentration camp at Buchenwald for the first time:
I wanted to see what was left of the camp. That was the first time that I walked through the small crematorium building that Topf and Sons had built. It was a shocking encounter. You walk through a very sad environment, and I found it hard to digest. I think I was speechless for a while. I saw things that I’d only seen before in photographs or in the newsreels. Then I wanted to know more, but at that time there was nobody to ask, not in Erfurt and not anywhere else.149
Hartmut began piecing together his family history, discovering the Topf and Sons commemorative brochure and old letters, while at the same time reconciling his much more immediate relationship with his father.
I grew into researching and asking questions slowly, step by step. I knew that the Nazis had killed so many people and that Topf had played a part in building the machinery. And of course they earned a lot of money from the Nazis, and my first thought was that they should not have touched this dirty money.
I was good friends with Jewish people over the years in Berlin, and I read all the important books, and I wanted to understand when people told me their stories. I wanted to know the whole system and framework, and the framework of the dictatorship too. I felt obliged to warn people who follow ideology, because I had the example of my own ‘good’ father, who also believed in Nazi ideology.
I loved my father, and I felt so sorry that he had served the Nazi movement with all of his good manners and his devotion to social tasks and neighbours. He was a naïve believer perhaps. I wanted to discuss all these questions with him: why did you join this movement? Perhaps you did it to help your brother, to protect his half-Jewish wife? In my father’s case, I think he was partly convinced that this really was a way of national socialism, of building a community for all. He must have believed that. That was his profound error. As a boy, these were the questions I wanted to ask him, but he wasn’t there so I could only dream of how he might have responded.
My aim is not to blame people, or to put them in jail or punish them, but to understand how it happened, why it happened, the road to this disaster. And, of course, within that at least name who was responsible, and make people liable for whatever they did.
So back then my priority was not so much the concentration camps, my first task was to warn people to look at the motives of those ‘bag-pipers’ who led you to catastrophe, and into an abyss, because you believed them and supported them. That was my first course of action. Later, of course, I got into the precise and exact story of the Topfs in Erfurt, and this crystallised as the main topic.
Two events in the early 1990s forced Hartmut into taking a more active and public role in discussions about Topf and Sons: the fall of the Eastern bloc and the reunification of Germany meant that many former residents and business owners were seeking to reclaim the homes and businesses they had been forced to abandon during East Germany’s communist era. More than 2.5 million claims were filed, one of which was registered by members of the Topf family, who were seeking ownership and financial restitution for the company of Topf and Sons and the Topf family park in Erfurt.
At the same time, more information about the company’s role in the Holocaust was coming to the attention of the international media due to the publication of a book by Jean-Claude Pressac on the crematoria of Auschwitz, detailing the SS’s relationship with Topf and Sons, and the discovery by historian Gerald Fleming of the Soviet interrogation records for Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander, Gustav Braun and Karl Schultze.
Jean-Claude Pressac was a French pharmacist, and a former Holocaust denier who spent years compiling an archive of sources relating to Topf and Sons. Pressac had started investigating the SS construction management files from Auschwitz in the 1970s, when he was collaborating with French revisionist Robert Faurisson who believed the Holocaust was Allied propaganda. Holocaust deniers claimed that technical information from Auschwitz proved that the gas chambers never existed and that far fewer people died there than is claimed. At first, Pressac believed this too, and set out to prove it. His own investigation, however, forced him to change his mind. His 1989 book, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, was the first to publish documents from the SS construction management office, and was used by those who sought to counter revisionist history. In 1993, Pressac published his second book in France called Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz.
Many historians, including those based at the Buchenwald memorial, and Annegret Schüle, had profound reservations concerning Pressac’s approach, including his demands for payment before allowing other historians access to the archive material (part of which was Topf and Sons’s company material he had been loaned by Udo Braun, who was by then running the renamed company) and his strange obsession with military paraphernalia.
Ronald Hirte, a key member of the team at the Buchenwald Memorial, explains:
Pressac has always been an issue when dealing with Holocaust denial and revisionism. He wanted to become a military officer, but that didn’t happen. In the ’60s and ’70s he started studying the feasibility of the cremations of so many people being killed in the gas chambers. He was at first what we would describe today as a ‘revisionist’. This was a very strong movement in France up to the 1980s. They maintained that the Holocaust could not have taken place, because it was technically impossible to commit such a crime in Auschwitz. Pressac stood out among the revisionists, as he came to the realisation that he had been propagating false information all those years. His conscience did not allow him to continue to deny the crimes that had happened. This would be contrary to his ideology and his political actions. So he had to say ‘No! These crimes happened, the mass murders and the mass cremations took place.’ This made him very unusual and distinguished him from the other historical revisionists. His colleagues dropped him. So he had a very strange life – he was a right-wing, nationalist hardliner who then became a reformed autodidactic historian and author, publishing his two main books in France.150
Ronald Hirte and Annegret Schüle, who was about to embark on her research into Topf and Sons, travelled to Paris to meet Pressac in 2002, so that they could examine some of his documents at first hand, and also discuss access to the mat
erial. Hirte recalls:
It was a very unpleasant meeting and I didn’t think that he was a very nice person. He liked to point out that he knew much more and that we were kind of ignorant in the matter. He also collected uniforms and arms, he had a huge collection, almost like a museum, and wanted us to put on the uniforms as a kind of a fancy dress and then take pictures of us. I refused. It was a really weird meeting. He was an embittered old man who felt he had not received enough recognition during his lifetime.
After Pressac’s death in 2003, Hirte drove to Paris with Dr Bernhard Post, now the director of the Thuringia State Archive, to retrieve Pressac’s material:
We travelled to Paris overnight. We only had hours to get the files from Jean-Claude Pressac’s house before they disappeared, or any kind of argument started. The files had disappeared before and the way in which they had arrived in Paris had been illegal. So Bernhard Post and I drove off to Paris without stopping on the way, and arrived in time to meet a colleague there. We got all the material that we already knew about out of the flat and took it back to the archive in Weimar.
Regardless of whether or not Jean-Claude Pressac was a troubling and unpleasant character, he undeniably unearthed much material about Topf and Sons and played an important role in bringing it to light. Despite the flaws in his work, Hartmut Topf was armed with this new material when he heard about the Topf family claim for restitution.
Descendants of the Topf family, who were living abroad, had applied to have the company reassigned to them, but their claim was rejected in 1992 after being called an ‘obscenity’ by the World Jewish Congress and condemned by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Another claim by the Topf family, to reclaim the Topf family park, was still under consideration, however, and Ernst Wolfgang Topf’s daughter-in-law Dagmar Topf, visited Erfurt, to speak on behalf of her claim. She encountered tremendous hostility. The legal ownership of the park was a matter of dispute, as it had never been formally expropriated by the East German government, however Dagmar Topf’s efforts to reclaim it seemed morally indefensible to most ordinary Erfurt citizens. Hartmut Topf was made aware of her efforts by Jean-Claude Pressac.
I heard about the Topf claim from local newspaper reports and from Jean-Claude Pressac. Pressac called me because he knew that I spoke in public about Topf and Sons. He asked me if I knew Dagmar Topf and the other relatives, and I said I did not. There had already been negative articles about them, and he told me I should get in touch with her. I made an appointment with Dagmar and went to see her. I came to terms with Dagmar. She understood that I wasn’t her enemy. And I understood that she had been unjustly attacked by the media and that public opinion in Erfurt was very hostile towards her. She had been portrayed as a lady from the West who wanted Topf property and was a Nazi. She had a hard time in Erfurt. She doesn’t like to go back there, even today.151
Although Hartmut believed Dagmar Topf had been subjected to an unfair personal attack, he was equally determined that no Topf should receive any financial benefit from Topf and Sons or the Topf family park.
‘I spoke out in Erfurt and said that if there is any money it should be given to victims’ organisations – or it should be put into political education. Local people responded very positively to the fact there was a Topf who spoke up against the relatives.’
Dagmar Topf and the other Topf relatives lost their claim to the Topf family land in 1994, but Hartmut was emboldened by the public response to his speech and decided to bring together a society of supporters to find a suitable way to remember and reflect on the atrocities that Topf and Sons had participated in.
The first thing I said was: we must do something to stop a general forgetting of the past. We have to mark the place. We have to leave a sign to tell people – it was here in the middle of our society. I asked the people of Erfurt to help us to preserve the memory, a memory of an average German company, an average wealthy German family, who helped the system commit this huge crime. I did not want a memorial for victims, because we have those in other places; I wanted a place of reflection and learning.
Other people joined the movement to memorialise Topf and Sons, and Hartmut began working with a diverse group that included representatives from the Green Party, the Protestant Church, the European Cultural Centre, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and trade unions. The then president of the Jewish community in Thuringia, Wolfgang Nossen, worked with Hartmut in setting up the Topf and Sons memorial. Nossen had escaped from the Breslau ghetto, and was outraged by Dagmar Topf’s claim for family restitution:
It was the typical insolence. They were all ‘innocent’. Zero morality. I would have changed my name if it had been Topf. But it is good that Hartmut kept his … Ludwig Topf showed character when he killed himself. As much as the Germans would like to, you cannot forget history. It was very difficult to establish the memorial and I was part of those who helped and encouraged it.
While the society of supporters were rallying support for a memorial, a group of left-wing, radical squatters had taken over one of the Topf and Sons buildings, where they ran their own series of social and cultural projects to remind people about the company. The occupation by the squatters lasted for eight years, until they were evicted in 2009, and became a well-known example of anti-establishment and anti-Nazi resistance in Germany.
While Hartmut Topf, and others in the society of supporters, offered encouragement to the squatters, they also continued to work towards a permanent memorial on the site – something that was actively opposed by the Mayor of Erfurt, Manfred Ruge, and some former Topf and Sons’ workers.
Wolfgang Nossen remembers:
I went to an event and there was a person who had worked for Topf and Sons who said that if Topf and Sons hadn’t manufactured the ovens, someone else would have. That is a wonderful excuse. But it would be better for Erfurt, if they hadn’t done it. They were guilty to a very high degree, because they offered their own services. They invented new machinery so that even more people could be burned in a more economical way. For me, their behaviour cannot be excused. It is not only the two brothers who are guilty, but also the engineers who went to Auschwitz when the Topf brothers did not.152
Nossen also had a confrontation with Mayor Ruge, who had stated in a Radio F.R.E.I. interview, in December 2002, that he saw no need for a Topf and Sons memorial.
Asked if he could continue to ignore the memorial services and action groups working to draw attention to the Nazi past of the Topf and Sons site, Ruge said:
What do you mean by ‘ignore’? Then I’d ask, to put it quite plainly, where are the memorial services at the bakers and butchers who delivered their bread rolls and sausages to Buchenwald? And where are the memorial services at the dairy that provided Buchenwald with milk? Or where are the memorial services where lemonade or other drinks were produced? Or where are the memorial services in the pharmaceutical company that made the aspirin or other tablets used at the camp? This is a social question that we need to ask … But here, for this location, the question is bundled together. And I am of the view, and I’ve always said as much, that we should name this place, name what went on here, but that’s where our responsibility ends.
The interviewer presses him further: why does the city not mention Topf and Sons’s history on its homepage?
‘Why should we put it on our homepage?’ Ruge responds.
There are many aspects of the city’s history that we don’t publicise. I don’t see any reason to, and I don’t see anything to find fault with in Erfurt’s conduct. A place is named here, this is where industrial things were manufactured for the destruction of people, questionable, abhorrent things, but many other things connected to Buchenwald were made in the surrounding area, too … We will ultimately ensure that it isn’t only named but is also documented, but nothing more is necessary.153
Wolfgang Nossen says: ‘In the end, everything happened the way we wanted but it was a disgrace how they opposed it.’ Hartmut Topf agrees: ‘We had to be very stubbor
n to pursue our goal.’ The society of supporters had to convince more and more people. ‘We wanted to create a sense of responsibility, to signpost that this was the Topf company. To indicate that this was the place and cement it in the public consciousness. The authorities put up a lot of obstacles, the mayor found stupid excuses. But our small movement grew.’154
In 2003, the Topf and Sons site was listed as a protected historical monument by the state of Thuringia, and a memorial and education centre about Topf and Sons opened in the main administration building on Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2011. Director Annegret Schüle explains why the site is a memorial rather than a museum:
The main difference between us as a memorial and other museums is that we are about the history of a crime, and there have always been victims. We are not describing history in a neutral way, and we always mention the victims. We honour their memory. We cannot just say that Topf and Sons did this and that, we always have to take into account that people suffered from the business of Topf and Sons … There are memorials where the victims are the centre of the attention. Nobody died here, but the deaths were the object of the planning and manufacturing.
The Topf and Sons memorial is unique in being the only Holocaust memorial on the historic site of a company. ‘This place has a special aura,’ Schüle says.
We can show here how easy it is for a human being to ignore his responsibility towards his fellow human beings in his daily work. If I go to the memorial in Buchenwald I cannot identify myself with the SS, because I would never have become a member. But I can relate to people who harm other people by doing their normal jobs. This is happening all the time. Visitors are motivated to think about this. Processes that are completely normal within any companies have led to atrocities.155
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