After the Erfurt case was closed, and the four men had been released, the state prosecutor replied to the inquiry from Wiesbaden stating, untruthfully, that the investigation was still ongoing and that they had secured statements from Topf oven fitters claiming that they had repeatedly asked to be removed from working on the installations in the camps – but that these requests had been rejected by the Topf brothers. The Wiesbaden prosecutor responded to this letter, asking to see copies of the statements as they were of considerable importance in determining ‘whether or not the accused knew of the criminal purpose for which the cremation ovens supplied to the concentration camps were to be used’. Although the Erfurt prosecutor general instructed the office to send these statements to Wiesbaden, they were never delivered.
In an interim report of 6 June 1951, the Wiesbaden prosecutor, Dr Konig, stated that they were unable to demonstrate that Ernst Wolfgang Topf had had dealings with the SS at Buchenwald, or other camps, or that he knew about the criminal use of the ovens.
Without access to the SS files at Auschwitz that documented correspondence between the camp and Topf and Sons, witness statements from camp survivors, or the Soviet interrogation reports for Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander or Gustav Braun, the investigation largely accepted Ernst Wolfgang’s version of events. On 10 June 1952, the criminal case against him was officially closed, with the prosecutor noting that ‘it had not been possible to disprove the accused’s claim that he had never dealt with technical matters and had not been informed about the real purpose of the cremation ovens supplied to the Buchenwald camp’.[142]
Topf and Sons’s copies of the files detailing their work with the SS have never been discovered. While the controversial amateur historian Jean-Claude Pressac (more of whom later) claimed that Kurt Prüfer had disposed of the files prior to his arrest, Annegret Schüle suggests that Ernst Wolfgang Topf actually passed the files to the American CIC at the end of the war – before they mysteriously disappeared. Even without the files, the evidence of what Topf and Sons had done was always in plain sight – the Topf name was branded across the ovens in iron letters, and Buchenwald survivors testified to the role Topf and Sons played in building the crematoria. Yet the American forces seemed relatively disinterested in Topf and Sons, perhaps because they were so overwhelmed by the horrors that they had seen in the camp and the other, more obvious, perpetrators of war crimes.
With the conclusion of the case, Ernst Wolfgang Topf was free from the prospect of a life in prison. The long-drawn-out denazification case, which was followed by criminal proceedings, had done nothing to deter him from trying to re-establish his business in West Germany – and he demonstrated that he intended to restart Topf and Sons using a patent for the ‘process and device for the incineration of bodies, carcasses and parts thereof’.[143]
This patent was not, as is sometimes reported, based on the techniques Topf and Sons employed, or had planned to employ, in the ovens of the concentration camps. But the very fact that a new company run by Ernst Wolfgang was intending to make money from ‘carcass incineration’ outraged Holocaust survivors and the families of victims.
In December 1947, Topf applied for a business permit in Wiesbaden and opened an engineering office in Recklinghausen, hiring an engineer and some shared work space in a wooden barracks. From the outset, the company focused on furnace and oven construction, as Ernst Wolfgang probably surmised that a lack of capital would make it more difficult to break into the bigger malting and storage businesses. There is no doubt that Topf planned to recreate an almost exact replica of the business he’d presided over in Erfurt, even wanting to assign the same departmental letters, including the infamous Department D for oven construction and furnace constructions. A 1953 brochure proudly proclaimed ‘Seventy-five years of Topf’ ovens, which were ‘of first-class quality’ and ‘the product of long years of experience’.
Yet, although some of these ovens were sold to civic crematoria in West Germany during the early 1950s, the new Topf company struggled under insurmountable debts. Soon the company office and Topf’s family home were relocated in an unsavoury part of town in nearby Mainz, where potential customers were put off by having to run the gauntlet of ‘prostitutes, ex-offenders and drunks’ to get to the office entrance.
By 1956, the Topf company had given up selling cremation ovens, and was focusing on making municipal incinerators, while Ernst Wolfgang employed desperate measures to stave off insolvency and apply for loans. These efforts proved to be nothing more than sticking plasters: two years later, the Topf family was registered as living on state welfare, with Ernst Wolfgang marked down as unfit for work on health grounds. The new Topf company was economically dormant from 1959 until its final dissolution in March 1963.
These economic difficulties faced by a small, failing company, which Ernst Wolfgang Topf likened to ‘the life of a tiny creature’[144] were severe, but they were just a small fraction of the problems Topf was facing. However grandiose his plans, Topf was constantly forced to respond to damaging accusations aired in books and the media, and his denials appeared to do nothing to stem the tide.
Ernst Wolfgang had first compiled a long company and family history in 1950, in a document which made no mention of dealings with the SS or concentration camp ovens. Annegret Schüle notes that Ernst Wolfgang glosses over his brother’s suicide, almost as if it was a family tradition, stating that ‘on 31 May 1945 Ludwig Topf chose to end his life – as his father had done in 1914’. Ernst Wolfgang then adds that both brothers were in grave danger during the war as ‘passionate enemies of Hitlerdom’.[145]
By the mid-1950s, with the denazification tribunal and the criminal case behind him, Topf might have been lulled into a false sense of his security; he may have allowed himself to believe that his past actions were well and truly buried. But in 1957, just as Ernst Wolfgang’s financial woes are at their worst, former Dachau inmate and journalist Reimund Schnabel published a book called Macht ohne Moral (Power without Morals), which printed documents linking Topf and Sons directly to the SS and the Holocaust. Schnabel had spent time in Dachau for opposing the Nazi euthanasia programme and had written the book to drum up opposition to a plan to allow former Waffen-SS officers, up to the rank of lieutenant colonel, to join the West German army. The book contained photos of piles of bodies of the victims and the ovens themselves, a letter from Topf and Sons to the SS construction management at Mauthausen concerning the incineration capacity of the double-muffle oven, and a letter to Auschwitz from 1 April 1943 quoting a price for building a giant ring cremation oven.
Topf and his wife Erika immediately understood the book would have a ‘devastating impact on anybody who picked it up’, and drafted a 21-page typed response to the main allegations levelled against Topf and Sons. As the archive files show, they took pains to revise and edit the draft several times to ensure that their justifications were exactly right.
142
Schüle, op. cit., p. 324. Quote on closure of criminal case: ‘it had not been possible to prove…’ AS footnote 166: Ministry of Justice of the State of Hessen, file ref. V-90/62, sheet 17; see also the Register of Criminal Investigations at the Wiesbaden Public Prosecution office, HHStAW [Hessen State Archive, Wiesbaden], section 468, no. 1211.
143
Ibid., p. 328. Quote from the new patent application: ‘process and device for the incineration of bodies…’ AS footnote 184: German Patent Office, German patent T 1562 V/24d, 24.6.1950; see also ThHStAW, Collection Jean-Claude Pressac Nr. 25, sheets 3–11, 35f, 42f, 51–56.
144
Ibid., p. 335.
AS footnote 206: Ernst Wolfgang Topf to the Wiesbaden municipal authorities, 14 March 1952, ThHStAW, Collection Jean-Claude Pressac Nr. 30, sheet 26.
145
Ibid., p. 331.
AS footnote 195: The text has survived without cover sheet or covering letter. It is in two parts: A) Report on J. A. Topf & Söhne, (sheets 1–8) and B) Grounds for the request (sheets 9–10). ThHStAW, Collection Jean-Claude Pressac Nr. 30, sheets 41–57, here sheet 50. The request in question is not clear from the text; it only shows that it was about the development of Topf machine manufacturing, i.e. production of installations for the food industry.