Prüfer also filed an insurance claim for a new suit after snagging his jacket on a filing cabinet (the claim was rejected). Sander’s distaste for his colleague, and his attitudes, was reflected in a disparaging poem about Prüfer that was published in the 1938 commemorative booklet, which referenced Prüfer’s lack of enthusiasm for his work.
Realising that he had little room for advancement in a company that neither liked nor respected him, Prüfer ruthlessly pursued what he considered to be the most effective way forward: developing a successful cremation oven production unit from which he initially took a commission, and cementing a strong personal bond with the SS which he could use as leverage with regards to his employers.
His professional partner in crime would be the dilettante Ludwig Topf, self-styled cremation expert and supposed author of a 1934 Topf advertising brochure, lauding the ‘modern process of cremation’ used by Topf – and calling the Topf technique ‘the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology’.
Together Ludwig Topf and Kurt Prüfer had worked hard to associate Topf and Sons with technologically advanced cremation that fully supported human dignity in death, and had put the company in pole position when the Cremation Act of May 1934 made cremation legal throughout Germany. Now they would also be fully prepared to take advantage of economic opportunities that arose from the mass murders committed by their new political masters.
Ludwig believed that his faith in Topf and Sons was in fact very similar to faith in National Socialism. ‘Just as with the war in which we currently find ourselves,’ he expounded, ‘we must not count the cost but must simply believe, and when we believe then we achieve. The political example of our Führer proves this. He started with just a very small number of men. People back then could have said he was crazy, but he did it.’
CHAPTER THREE
A BEAUTIFUL NAME
Hartmut Topf did not know his father’s cousins, Ludwig or Ernst Wolfgang. As a child he never enjoyed the opulence of the family park, and never saw the famous company letters spelled out on the steep roof of the administration building. All that Hartmut knew was that he was from a famous family, a family that had built a business that could make him proud of the Topf name.
I knew that we were the Topf family, and that Topf was known all over the world for their big factories and chimneys and ovens. I knew I had this beautiful name, and that I belonged to some sort of a dynasty. I still have the contract, written in original handwriting, from when my grandfather decided to leave the business – and the brothers promised each other mutual help.
Hartmut’s father, Albert, was the son of Julius Topf, who had dissolved his partnership with Ludwig Sr to concentrate on market gardening.
We all knew that that my great-grandfather founded J. A. Topf and Sons, and that his two sons, my grandfather Julius and his brother Ludwig Sr, took over the company. My grandfather left the company in 1904 and died of sepsis in 1914. Ludwig Sr committed suicide in the same year. I never knew them.
Hartmut’s one remaining link to his grandfather Julius is a copy of Julius’s curriculum vitae. In a later version, typed up by Hartmut’s Uncle Heinz during the Third Reich, all references to being a Freemason have been removed. ‘He omitted all signs and secret hints of Masonry, because under the Nazis it was forbidden.’ Despite the dangers, however, Hartmut’s father, Albert, would always keep the last vestiges of Julius’s history as a Mason. ‘My father, Albert, lost his own father when he was fourteen,’ Hartmut says. ‘He was always longing for a father.’
As the youngest of the nine siblings, Albert Topf was the baby of the family. Hartmut says: ‘Everybody loved him because he was the youngest. His older sisters all took care of him wherever they could. My father was sort of a pet child for the whole family, and he was helpful to everybody.’ Albert grew up and lived in Erfurt until he was twenty-eight. After completing a compulsory year of military service, he graduated from the engineering school at Ilmenau and then worked in a factory before moving to Berlin. By this stage Julius’s widow and children were no longer on speaking terms with Else Topf or her two sons, Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang so, despite Albert’s inclination towards science and engineering, there was no possibility of a career at the family firm. Instead Albert took a job with electrical giant Siemens and moved to a wooden hut in Siemensstadt a town close to the factory near Spandau, on the outskirts of Berlin. Returning to Erfurt to see his family, he would meet and then marry a local girl, Irmgard, who was working at his sister Agnes’s kindergarten – just across the street from the Topf family park.
Part of Albert’s work involved developing 16 mm film and film cameras for Siemens and he often took home movies of his new wife and young family. One silent reel shows Irmgard sitting in the back garden of the kindergarten singing with her colleagues; another shows their new baby Hartmut being spoon-fed dinner by his grandmother. ‘I was born and baptised in Siemensstadt,’ says Hartmut. ‘Berlin was a booming industrial town and Siemens had a huge factory. I spent the first year of my life in that wooden cabin, and my father would add on to it every year, making it very comfortable and well fitted out.’ Although Siemensstadt was his father’s world, Hartmut would occasionally visit the homes of some of the men Albert worked with, and come away with the odd present, like a toy train.
Hartmut’s most vivid memories of his childhood begin, however, when the family bought a parcel of land in the then almost rural suburb of Falkensee, where they built their own home. Albert’s brother Karl, an architect who had also built the Erfurt kindergarten, helped design a large modern house with two rooms downstairs, three rooms upstairs and a central heating system: ‘There was a bathroom with an oven that you could heat with coal or wood and once a week on the weekend everybody got a warm bath,’ Hartmut remembers. It was a major step up for the family who had received no notable upturn in their finances – Albert Topf cycled the two miles to the station every day for his train ride to Siemens where he worked at the same engineering job.
At Falkensee, Hartmut, his parents and his two sisters, Elke and Karin, settled into a happy family life.
‘I saw our house being built as a small child,’ Hartmut says. ‘I remember some of the craftspeople working there, like the bricklayers. I grew up in that house and in that garden. We had a piano, a very important thing in those early years.’
Hartmut’s father could be taciturn and quiet: ‘He was sometimes a bit blunt and he could be very short with you. He had a strange sense of humour. He was not a big speaker.’ At home Albert would work away on a big table, making progress on his latest film project, or his glass photography negatives.
We did have some books in the house, like an encyclopaedia and books about the Masons and the Nazis, but really my father was a very good craftsman.
He was interested in the development of film and photography from an engineering point of view, not an artistic point of view. My Uncle Heinz in Erfurt was a stamp collector and he tried to interest me in that – but my father always made it clear that he thought stamp collecting was a waste of time, even though he often had to buy the latest stamps and seals and send them back to Erfurt.
Yet, for a German family of the time, Hartmut remembers his parents were also unusually open people – leaving their desk open with their chequebook and bank statements for Hartmut to look at.
Despite living in Berlin, the family made frequent trips back to Erfurt where they saw Hartmut’s grandmother Topf for the remaining few years of her life, as well as his mother’s parents who were originally from poor village families, but who had come to town to be tailors. Hartmut remembers his father adopting the role of little diplomat and peacemaker among his brother and sisters.