When Hartmut’s mother once questioned what was happening to the Jews, Uncle Hans told her: ‘Don’t ask questions like that. You might end up in a concentration camp.’ Hartmut says:
I heard that people disappeared, but we did not live in a neighbourhood with communists or Jewish people. In his party function, my father had to collect for winter relief, and there were some people he did not like because they didn’t want to give. That was their tiny bit of resistance; we don’t want to give. They were well-off people but simply didn’t give their two or three marks. My father was angry about that.
Although Hartmut describes his father as a rather naïve Nazi, haplessly collecting fur coats and skis to send to the German troops on the front line at Stalingrad, Albert was committed enough to send ten-year-old Hartmut for a trial at a Nazi boarding school near the town of Ballenstedt on the edge of the Harz mountains. Wearing his Hitler Youth shirt, Hartmut was ushered into a room with another boy who immediately told him that he was hungry.
I think that was a test. It felt like they wanted to find out whether I would share what I had. I had some sandwiches and I shared them with this boy and I passed the test. Then I was taken to the dormitory with twenty beds, and for two weeks we had classes and exercises and very hard things to do, things that would really test your courage. There were many things I did not like and which I did not do well in.
Hartmut cemented his disappointing record as a young Nazi on the last night when the boys were roused from their beds with the threat of an air raid.
We got dressed and had to queue up in a big square where some officers in uniform started speaking to us. ‘Boys,’ they told us. ‘American parachutists have landed and they are stealing our firewood, but we’ll get them!’ We had no guns, only stones and sticks and we started running through the forest. The moon was shining, the wind was blowing. It was a very magical night and there were a lot of explosives going off. We would run this way and that and then behind us a big bang would go off.
Eventually Hartmut got separated from the group, and made his way back to the dormitory alone.
One of the young officers, about fourteen or fifteen years old, came in with a list and he told us that one boy had died in his arms by the creek – and he wanted to know how many we had captured or even killed or beaten. I spoke up and I said it was all organised by them, and that they had used explosives. As boys we had already learned how to open unexploded bombs and grenades. It was very risky to play with those, but I was from the city and knew all about it. The other boys at the school were country boys, and this was their big adventure. Now their heroic fight had been ruined by this big mouth from Berlin who had told them it was all fake. Everyone was very angry with me.
The next morning was Hartmut’s tenth birthday and when he went down to breakfast he found his place at the long table decorated with apples and treats. He was told, however, that he had failed the entrance requirements to become a pupil and his father had arrived to take him home.
They felt that I was too weak for them, and I was lucky to be weak. Because these schools were breeding institutes for the next generation of leaders and those leaders had to be, as the Nazis put it, ‘quick as wind, as hard as Krupp’s steel and as enduring as leather’. Those were the phrases they coined for their future leaders. I failed the test.
Later Hartmut’s father told him that when he arrived at the school to collect him, he had passed the sick bay that was full of those supposed ‘American parachutists’ – who were really older boys in the school who had been badly beaten by Hartmut’s young classmates.
German fears about American parachutists and invasion were far from baseless, though. Despite newspapers continuing to speak of German successes and claim victory as the only possible conclusion, defeat at Stalingrad had turned the tide against the Nazis. The war was going badly for Germany and Albert Topf and his brother Hans knew it.
I remember my father was very nervous, pacing up and down. When the news came in about Stalingrad, he literally had a heart attack. They could feel that it was to be the beginning of the end, and I listened to conversations about the Eastern Front moving closer and closer towards us in Berlin. A few weeks before the end of the war I heard the adults in the family talking and they were saying – should we commit suicide or not? I heard this and even as a child I was very much aware of the possibility that a person could kill themselves. I knew that, and I think the will to survive and not to commit suicide is a testimony to freedom of decision. I think the definition of freedom to me is that I accept my life, and that was something I learned as a child.
More than seventy years later, the conversation remains vivid: ‘I remember it so clearly,’ Hartmut says. ‘My Uncle Hans was so preoccupied he burned the skin on my hand with his cigarette.’ Yet, despite their role as active members of the Nazi Party, Hartmut says his family’s discussion about suicide came about due to fear of the Russians, not because of guilt over any wrongdoing.
My father and Uncle Hans were afraid of revenge from the other side, nothing else. They didn’t feel guilty. They wanted to escape punishment and revenge from the Allies, mainly from the Russians. The Russians were still big monsters in our imagination, and when they came of course there were a lot of assaults and rapes. But the propaganda made them seem even worse – man-eaters who would come and burn everything and kill everybody. As far as I remember, there was no discussion about guilt. They had not denounced anybody; they had not punished anybody. They had not stolen anything from anyone, not consciously. Of course, the Nazis had stolen from the Jews on a big scale, the state had stolen. But my father and uncle did not take part.
On Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1945, Hartmut watched his father sling a small Italian gun over his back and set off on his bicycle to fight as part of the Volkssturm, men forming the last defence of Berlin. Albert Topf and Hans headed towards a part of the suburb where there was heavy bombardment and, at first, Hartmut would go out to meet them with supplies of food until his mother told him it was too dangerous to continue. After a few days word reached them that the Russian army was coming.
Hartmut was playing outside, wearing his cap which he’d adorned with an aluminium badge from the SS. One of his neighbours told him: ‘Take that badge off; they’ll kill you.’
There they were. The Russians. Many of them were drunk and they were already celebrating a great victory. We were astonished that they were so different from the German soldiers. They would not even stand up to salute an officer – they’d say ‘hello, yeah…’ They had a rough style. They came with little horses and very small trucks, and some of them would occasionally give something to the children like a piece of bread. They were simple fellows, and they saw home comforts they had never seen in their lives. Most of them had never used a toilet before.
As the Russians came closer the children ran in off the streets and families locked their doors. Hartmut’s father had not returned from the fighting, and when the Russians went house to house in Falkensee, it was Hartmut’s responsibility as the man of the family to let them in.
I opened the old door to the basement and they came in; men, men, men, and they also said ‘uri, uri’, that was their word for watches. They had five wristwatches or ten spread out on their arms. They were so proud to have them all. We only had a very old-fashioned clock somewhere, no wristwatches at all. So they went through all the rooms, ‘look, look, are there any soldiers?’ Nothing. They opened the cupboards, and then they left. They didn’t steal. My main feeling was not fear, but excitement – they were not so dangerous.