By October, Topf and Sons were ready to demonstrate their invention; they set up their mobile incineration chamber just outside the gates of Buchenwald so that they could trial it. Prisoner Max Mayr later reported that ‘a mobile incineration oven was tried out in front of the camp gate’.[20] Other prisoners told him it was supplied by Topf and Sons. Another prisoner, architect Franz Ehrlich, who was forced to work in the SS construction management unit after his release on October 24 1939, made a note that at the time of
test buildings for a mobile crematorium by the Erfurt company Topf and Sons, all leading engineers and technicians of the company were involved. Crematorium taken over by representatives of the Chancellery of the Führer in the presence of company representatives. The Topf and Sons representatives are aware that these drivable crematoria are intended for the liquidation of whole municipalities in Poland. They performed the capacity calculations.
From their establishment in 1933, the death rate in concentration camps was always much higher than in ordinary life, or even in normal prisons – and the work of the directors and engineers of Topf and Sons would be to immerse themselves in finding technical solutions to this horror.
Although local residents would later say: ‘We didn’t know,’ when shown evidence of the years or torture and mass murder that occurred at the camp, the life of Weimar, Erfurt and hundreds of local businesses was inexorably intertwined with the camp from the very beginning.
Since the nineteenth century, Weimar had been a hotbed of anti-Semitism. It was ‘the centre for gravity for the most Germanic Germany and for the most German of Germans’,[21] serving as home to Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche’s cerebral anti-Semitism, and a group of semi-intellectuals including Ernst Wachler, Friedrich Lienhard and newspaper art critic Mathilde Freiin von Freytag-Loringhoven who focused on the idea of the German volk as defined by a racist perspective.
It was also home to Adolf Bartels, a torridly prolific writer based in Weimar, and a vicious anti-Semite. It was Bartels who introduced the idea that Jews were biologically inferior, as well as suggesting the resettlement of the eastern European Slavs with racially pure Germans.
This ideology overlapped with another group of thinkers in Weimar – exemplified by Johannes Schlaf, who adopted a theory of biological inequalities through which people could redeem themselves by eugenic self-selection, the most ideal genotype being Nordic man. Schlaf had welcomed First World War believing it a good chance for cleansing Europe of decadent French and English culture and letting German customs and culture triumph throughout Europe. For these men Weimar was a ‘healing antidote to the intellectual urbanity and attendant perversions of the capital’.[22]
As Michael Kater writes in his book on the town, ‘Weimar became a hunting ground for anti-urbanists, eugenicists, befuddled German history memorialists all buttressed by anti-Semitism of various shades.’[23]
Weimar of course also had a very different legacy during this time – being the home to both the Bauhaus movement, which attracted possibly the biggest collection of artistic geniuses of the twentieth century, including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and sculptor Gerhard Marcks – and giving its name, through hosting the country’s first national assembly in 1919, to the Weimar Republic, Germany’s ill-fated attempt at social democracy which ended with Nazi rule.
Yet such strong countervailing trends did not stop Weimar becoming an early base of the Nazi movement, and the town proved so sympathetic to Hitler he visited more than thirty-five times before he became Chancellor, enjoying, in particular, the Hotel Elephant in the main market square. In 1926, the Nazis felt the town was a safe haven for their first party rally (a role subsequently taken up by Nuremberg). Hitler was unaware that Rosa Schmidt, the wife of the owner of the downmarket Hotel Hohenzollern, which served as the organisational headquarters for the rally, and the site of his first speech in Weimar in 1925, was in fact Jewish. The Nazis would catch up with Frau Schmidt eventually; she died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Thuringia and Weimar always had a higher percentage of Nazi Party members than the Reich as a whole (14.3 per cent versus 11.7 per cent nationally) – as well as a higher number of Nazis represented in individual professions, like medicine. In 1930, Wilhelm Frick became the first Nazi minister in Germany, taking up the post of Minister for Internal Affairs and Education for Thuringia. By 1932, Thuringia had a Nazi First Minister, Fritz Sauckel, and in the elections of that year more than half of Weimar’s citizens voted for Hitler, in comparison to 37.3 per cent nationally (a figure that was 10 per cent lower again in most of the big cities).
Weimar had no synagogue and the town’s Jewish population, which had never been large, had dwindled to forty-three families by 1933. Five years later and only one Jewish business remained, a doll shop run by a widow called Hedwig Hetteman. On Kristallnacht the shop was destroyed, the front display window smashed and the dolls, which the children of Weimar had loved, were thrown out on to the road. After being driven from their homes into ‘Jew Houses’, Hedwig Hetteman joined Weimar’s last remaining Jews on one of the three transports between April and September 1942 to the death camps of the east. She died in the ‘liquidation camp’ at Majdanek in Poland (where all victims were sent immediately to their deaths).
‘Weimar is a centre of Hitlerdom,’ wrote Thomas Mann who visited the town in 1932, and was unnerved by the strange mixture of Nazis and Goethe. ‘Everywhere you could see Hitler’s picture etc. in the National Socialist newspapers on exhibit. The town was dominated by the type of young person who walks through the streets vaguely determined, offering the Roman salute, one to the other.’[24]
The region’s deep links to the Nazi Party were symbolised by the founding of the very first concentration camp in Germany near the Thuringian village of Nohra in early March 1933, which lay a few miles west of Weimar on the road to Erfurt. As the concentration camp system became more organised and established, a larger, permanent concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, was opened on 22 March 1933. This was followed by a large network of up to 150 smaller camps within Germany, which were then consolidated by Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler. The camp at Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin, was opened in July 1936 – and Buchenwald followed in July 1937.
From the first, Buchenwald aimed to be a proto-type concentration camp and in early 1945 it was still the largest concentration camp in existence. The formal history of the camp states that ‘all of the system’s functional expansions found concrete realisation here. Buchenwald was the camp for the isolation of “community enemies” and for the repression of resistance in Germany and the occupied countries. Furthermore, with its total of 136 sub-camps, it was part of the SS’s vast forced labour emporium.’[25] In other words, it would combine the political and economic interests of the SS in one vast complex.
The SS had ambitious plans for concentration camps and Weimar had ambitious plans to be at the heart of Nazi Germany. Buchenwald, constructed in a spot of great meaning in Germany history, and, until then, a popular local destination for day trips, represented the apex of such designs.
20
Max Mayr quoted in Gedenkstätte Buchenwald (ed.),