Rather than treat the sick, or improve conditions, the SS planned to deal with the situation by moving cremation to inside the camp itself. As Kurt Prüfer’s May 1939 design for a mobile incineration oven demonstrated, they had already approached Topf and Sons about this task. Now their relationship could begin in earnest.
The SS had restructured their organisation and control of concentration camps under the leadership of SS Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl, who was now in charge of two newly created offices in Berlin: the Office for Administration and Economy and the Office for Households and Buildings. One of Oswald Pohl’s first tasks was to organise the disposal of the bodies in concentration camps, and in October 1939 the name Pohl appears for the first time in Topf and Sons’ records.
Kurt Prüfer maintained meticulous handwritten records of all his sales during the period that he was paid commission, and these records are available to look at in the Thuringia State Archives in Weimar.
In October 1939 Prüfer records an unusually large amount of money, 15,948 RM against order number 39 D 1018/19 for customer ‘G. Pohl Trade Group Berlin’. The order does not state the product, but it was later revealed to be for three single-muffle ovens, one of which was tested and set up in Buchenwald next to the special camp.
G. Pohl, Trade Group Berlin shows up again in Prüfer’s records in March 1940, this time against a sales figure of 1,466 RM. Topf and Sons’ historian Annegret Schüle, surmises that the ‘G. Pohl’ referred to in these early orders is Gruppenführer Pohl, using the cover of the Construction Industry Trade Group (a national body of which Topf and Sons were members) to disguise the fact that he was placing the orders on behalf of the SS. Both orders also state ‘Wehrmacht Contract’, which was standard practice when referring to SS orders for rationed building materials for the camps. In addition, Soviet administration documents produced in 1947 list the production of a mobile single-muffle oven in 1939, and a mobile double-muffle oven in 1940. Any early attempts to conceal the relationship were soon abandoned, however. From March 1940, Kurt Prüfer’s records list the customer as SS Reich Office for Household and Buildings.
After securing his first commission from the SS for the mobile single-muffle oven, Prüfer got to work designing a mobile double-muffle oven which was sold to Dachau in November 1939. Prüfer’s technical innovation with the double-muffle oven allowed two incineration chambers to be fuelled by one source of fire, through gaps left in the dividing walls between the chambers. This speeded up the incineration process, but the gaps and the single source of fire meant that the ashes and remains of the deceased intermingled – something that was illegal under German law where the ashes of each body were supposed to remain strictly separate.
Topf and Sons had proven themselves to be reliable suppliers to the SS and, having completed two orders for mobile ovens, began work on building permanent crematoria inside the camps. Oswald Pohl issued the order to build a crematorium at Buchenwald on the 11 December 1939 and, on 21 December 1939, Topf and Sons responded with a quote for a static, double-muffle oven with oil burner for 9,728 RM. This oven would be completely walled in and had to be installed in-situ. With better insulation and greater capacity, it would be able to burn more bodies more quickly. (With no slider or ornamental door, it would also badly burn the hands of those forced to open and close the ovens.)
On 21 January 1940, the Buchenwald concentration camp management unit submitted an ‘application for building materials for the new build of an emergency Crematorium In the KLB prison camp’ to the SS main Office for Household and Buildings, and work commenced in the freezing winter of 1939–1940.
With temperatures dropping as low as -39°C all other work at the camp stopped, but the SS insisted that the building of the crematorium had to continue. ‘All the SS Blockführer and foremen gathered together on the site,’ an Austrian prisoner called Franz Bera recalled. ‘The crematorium was built at speed, as the field crematoria that had been set up were no longer able to burn the bodies.’[36]
By summer that year the crematorium was up and running, and a crematorium manager had been employed at Buchenwald. Prisoner Eric Hasse remembers that the SS were so concerned with disposing of their ever-increasing number of victims that they would try to double the number of cremations per day by pushing in two or three bodies at the same time. ‘It meant that larger bits of bone were left over; the SS people would wait until night and then throw them into the sewers. The prisoners in the camp only realised this was happening when the drains from the sewage treatment facilities became blocked.’[37]
Contrary to Topf and Sons’ frequent boasts about ensuring ‘smoke-free’ cremation, smoke and flames often poured from concentration camp chimneys, and the smell of burned flesh lingered in the air. Curiously, it is a point that descendant Hartmut Topf feels most defensive about. Standing in Buchenwald next to the crematorium he says: ‘If they say they saw that, I am not going to say they are lying. But that was one of the things that Topf and Sons was most proud of – being smoke free.’[38]
Of course, Topf and Sons’ claim applied only to their standard practice in town crematorium – and as we know, in concentration camps, no rules applied. Smoke-free cremation is only achieved if bodies are burned individually over a long enough period of time. Burning multiple bodies too quickly meant that cremations in the camps were incomplete, and it was the unburned human remains and carbon that prisoners could see and smell.
In a statement given to Soviet prosecutors in 1948 in Moscow, Kurt Prüfer outlines how the business relationship between the SS and Topf and Sons began:
The Topf company started building ovens for crematoria in 1940 [Note: It was actually 1939]. The head of the SS construction management unit of the Buchenwald concentration camp, whose name was Grosch, approached the company about this. I conducted negotiations with Grosch on behalf of the company director, Ludwig Topf, for the construction of two ovens for the crematorium of the Buchenwald camp. Shortly afterwards a representative from the SS main office, whose name I’ve forgotten, visited the Topf company in Erfurt for negotiations with Ludwig Topf in connection with the construction of cremation ovens in other concentration camps. I took part in these negotiations by invitation of the company director, along with Mersch, who was head of the planning department. At the meeting an agreement was reached with the Reich Main Office of the SS that the Topf company would build ovens for crematoria in concentration camps, although the specific contracts in each case would be concluded with the SS construction management unit at the respective concentration camp, and these would also be the commissioning customer. And this is what later happened. [The ‘Grosch’ Prüfer refers to was SS-Obersturmführer Gerhard Grosch, a Weimar native and a construction manager at Buchenwald.][39]
Kurt Prüfer, as well as other engineers, fitters and the company management, must have been made aware of the conditions at Buchenwald after their very first visit to the camp when they were trialling the mobile single-muffle oven. Yet instead of being put off by the inhumanity, they saw the camp as an opportunity to attract more business from a previously untapped market. They dedicated themselves to cementing their relationship with the SS, in spite of the horrors they must have witnessed. For Prüfer, it was an opportunity to make more money and improve his status in the company – both of which were at a standstill. The motivation of Ludwig Topf, however, appears less straightforward.
36
Schüle, op. cit., p. 117. Austrian president Franz Bera’s account.
AS footnote 197: Report by Franz Bera, Buchenwald Memorial Archive 31/455.
37
Schüle, op. cit., pp. 117–18.
AS footnote 198: Eric Haase in
39
Kurt Prüfer, Soviet interrogation records, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.