On the last day of fighting a car pulled up and Uncle Hans fell out, bleeding profusely after having been shot through the neck, but there was still no sign of Hartmut’s father. ‘Some neighbours who returned said that he had never been able to fire a shot, he was probably dead.’ Instead Albert Topf had been captured, but had managed to talk his way out of being sent to Russia to work as an engineer. Some weeks later he returned to the family home, but he was soon summoned for further questioning by the Russians.
‘He went there one evening without any force,’ Hartmut says. ‘I met him in the street when he was on his way there and he sent me back home. That was the last time I ever saw him. He did not come back.’
The next day Hartmut took some bread and a razor, but the guard told him that the men had been rounded up and taken away in lorries.
‘Much later we got this secret smuggled note from my father saying: “I’m in Sachsenhausen, try to send me a pencil and a sweater.”’ Sachsenhausen was a former Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin in Oranienburg, which had been repurposed as a Soviet prison camp for holding German prisoners. Renamed Special Camp No. 7, the Soviet camp at Sachsenhausen housed as many as 16,000 prisoners in 1946 and the Sachsenhausen memorial records the following information about conditions there:
Hunger and cold prevailed in the Special Camp. The inadequate sanitary conditions and insufficient nourishment led to disease epidemics. Usually the barracks were overcrowded; the prisoners had to sleep on the bare-wood frames until 1947, when the Soviet camp administration distributed blankets and bags of straw. The only clothing which the prisoners had during their imprisonment was what they were wearing at the time of their arrest. The possession of personal items, particularly books and writing material, was strictly forbidden. Violations of these rigid camp regulations, which were for the most part unknown to most of the prisoners, resulted in harsh punishment imposed by the Soviet guard personnel or the German prisoners who held special functions.
Unlike camps within the Soviet Union, however, Special Camp No. 7 was not a work camp, and prisoners endured a life of enforced idleness.
‘I went with my mother and we stood outside and tried to get a glimpse of him, but we could see nothing,’ Hartmut says. Years passed with no news, until a former German officer knocked on Irmgard Topf’s door and told her that her husband had died, at least two years earlier, on 27 March 1947. ‘Death certificates would always attribute the cause of death to pneumonia, a lung infection or a heart attack, but prisoners were really dying of starvation. I was sorry when I heard the news.’
On a grey day in April 2017, Hartmut Topf revisits the place where his father died. The remains of the Soviet camp are further back from the main camp, which is now a memorial for the victims of the Nazis. Hartmut acknowledges it is difficult to know how to appropriately remember the German Nazi prisoners who died in Soviet camps which had previously been Nazi concentration camps. ‘Not all victims are equal,’ Hartmut says, ‘but all suffering is equal.’ He bypasses a large monolithic monument constructed in the Soviet era, and chooses instead to visit a small museum erected to house the story and artefacts of German prisoners at the Soviet camp. He seems to struggle to explain his feelings for the man who was, in many ways, a very traditional German father:
If you ask me were we close, I can’t say. He taught me to do things, like how to skin one of the rabbits we fattened up in the back garden and ate on special occasions. And, of course, my father was the person who introduced me to puppet theatre. He put a blanket into a doorframe, and we had funny shadow puppet shows with classical texts and music from a guitar. My father would be filming with his camera and we would be watching through the window. It was magical. People are wrong when they say that puppet theatre is an imitation of life. It’s not an imitation of life, it’s a different life.
Both Albert and Hans Topf died in Sachsenhausen, but years later Hartmut discovered that Uncle Hans had withheld from them the biggest secret of all.
Hans’s wife, Tante Berta, and her daughter, Hanni, emigrated to Brazil in 1948 and we would get small parcels from them with coffee, chocolate and soap. My mother was mystified by the address on the envelopes, because they were from a Jewish family. One day she blurted out – ‘But we don’t know any Jewish families!’ and Uncle Kurt, our neighbour in Falkensee, shrugged and said that Tante Berta was not quite ‘so Aryan’ after all. So Uncle Hans must have known this, but he showed off: ‘I’m a Nazi.’[18]
As the remaining male heir of one branch of a ‘beautiful’ family, Hartmut was astonished and horrified to sit in a darkened Falkensee cinema and see the Topf name branded above the ovens of the Nazi concentration camps in post-war newsreels. ‘I had many questions that I would have liked to ask my father: why was he a Nazi? Did he know what was happening?’ Hartmut says. However, with his father and Uncle Hans gone there was no one left to ask – and it would take decades for him to unravel the truth about his family legacy.
CHAPTER FOUR
BUCHENWALD
Deep within the grounds of Buchenwald concentration camp lie the remains of an oak tree. This broadened, flattened stump is no ordinary tree; it symbolises the last vestiges of the beautiful old oak where connoisseurs of German literature believe Goethe once met with Frau von Stein, sat on the banks of the Ettersberg hill and carved inscriptions. The Ettersberg dominates the otherwise flat Thuringian farmland and looks down on one sunny side to Weimar, and on the other colder side to Erfurt. This divide speaks much about the common distinction held about the two cities, and is reflected in the fact that the camp was built so that the prisoners faced down to Erfurt, while the SS officers were housed across the ridge, gazing down every morning across the green forests into Weimar, the mythical city of Goethe, Schiller and Liszt.
Ettersberg concentration camp, as it was originally known as, was rather urgently renamed when the Nazi cultural organisation complained about any link between this golden age of German history and the outcasts and enemies of the Third Reich. Although it was officially known as KL Buchenwald/Post Weimar from then on, the farmers of Thuringia called it by another name: The Lighthouse.
Every night the searchlights of Buchenwald would illuminate the top of the Ettersberg and flood the surrounding landscape with their glare – so that no one could ignore the presence of this place. By morning another group of local residents would turn their faces from their drawing boards and look up at the Ettersberg through their office windows. These would be the furnace engineers of Topf and Sons who, sitting in their third-floor offices in the administration building, not only knew of the presence of Buchenwald, but also understood its true meaning. Kurt Prüfer’s desk gave perhaps the clearest view of all.
Working in front of this window, on 17 May 1939, a whole four months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Kurt Prüfer produced his first drawing for a ‘mobile oil-heated cremation oven’ with muffle. To distinguish this from his work in civil crematoria Prüfer carefully labelled it an ‘incineration chamber’ not a ‘cremation chamber’. This conveniently spirited away, in two words, the normal requirements for ‘human reverence’, which required bodies to be cremated in super-heated air. From this point on they could be disposed of in the same way as animal carcasses or garbage.
18
All quotes used in this chapter have been taken from an author interview with Hartmut Topf.
19
Richard Alewyn quoted in Michael H. Kater,