Topf began by questioning whether the letters in the book were genuine, and then criticised their inclusion ‘as though this had formed part of the horrendous crimes’. The Topf company carried out its business in ‘exemplary fashion’, Ernst Wolfgang continued, and had always provided technology ‘for the best possible attainment of the greatest possible reverence, as required by the laws relating to cremation’.
Topf continues with what are now familiar justifications for the company’s actions, before claiming that Topf and Sons was a well-known protector of Jews, and the Topf brothers represented ‘a family with the qualities of humanity, especially chosen to protect its persecuted Jewish fellow citizens and colleagues to the very best of its ability, and that we demonstrably did, to the point of self-sacrifice, right up to the end of the war’.
In what he knew was an outright lie, Topf claims that no ‘service personnel from the SS or from any concentration camp were ever received or seen’ in the company, and there had never been ‘any meeting with the SS… in Berlin or anywhere else’. He then goes to great pains to prove that neither of the Topf brothers were Nazis, and that they hadn’t benefited from the Third Reich:
Between 1933 and 1945, we did not take on a single new member of staff with good ‘party connections’, nor did we recruit any such staff from operations. Throughout the twelve Hitler years, we carried out all our customer commissions but did not sympathise in any way whatsoever with either the NSDAP or its affiliated organisations, economic enterprises or functionaries. We deliberately assigned a non-party member to deal with all agencies. We consciously swam against the tide, and consequently encountered serious difficulties with all authorities and party agencies.
We also strictly adhered to our policy relating to treatment of staff, i.e. all staff, whether German or foreign nationals, were treated with equal decency, without any discrimination on the basis of religion, race or language. We also consciously avoided either recruiting, transferring or promoting active party members or other pro-Nazi elements. We rigorously adhered to this principle, even though it put us at a disadvantage when it came to the assignment of white- and blue-collar workers by the Labour Office and State Labour Office. As a consequence of this, our company became a meeting place for opponents of the Hitler system. Of the approximately thirty people we made departmental managers, only three to five were nominal party members.
The ‘political unreliability’ of the Topf brothers can be demonstrated by the fact that neither brother received a war service medal, something handed to many other business owners in Erfurt. In addition, the ‘foreign nationals’ (slave labourers) left the company at the end of the war in an orderly and friendly fashion:
No plundering or destruction of any kind in their camp, the administration block or workshops. No red flag raised. No fighting with Germans… Groups marched off in orderly fashion over a number of days, having first taken their leave of us through spokesmen. Many individual groups of Russian, French and Italian backgrounds thanked us with handshakes.
It is in this document that Ernst Wolfgang Topf refers to the respectable and honourable heads of department who worked for Topf and Sons, and specifically calls Fritz Sander a ‘man of almost excessive integrity’. A succession of investigations had proven that ‘no one in our company had been guilty of anything at all, either morally or in practice’. Challenging the very title of Schnabel’s book, Topf stated that he could ‘describe [his] company and the entirety of its conduct, throughout the twelve years of the Hitler regime, with the phrase: ‘Morality without Power’.[146]
Yet none of this lengthy justification did Ernst Wolfgang any good. When Schnabel’s book was published, in 1957, Topf was already under investigation for promissory note fraud (a crime that involves two or more people sending each other promissory notes as a means of proving that a business is solvent, when there are no actual deals to underpin them). The publication of Macht ohne Moral was the final nail in the coffin for the new Topf company. A loan that had been previously agreed on from the burden sharing office was abruptly turned down. Commerz-und Credit Bank and Deutsche Bank followed suit by refusing to administer a state loan.
The J. A. Topf company of Wiesbaden continued to limp along in its final incarnation until 1961, when a groundbreaking West German TV documentary series Drittes Reich highlighted that ‘the company that supplied the cremation ovens used in the concentration camps’ was now headquartered in Mainz. A few months later, a book by Robert Neumann called Hitler: Aufstieg und Untergang des Dritten Reiches brought even more unwelcome attention from the foreign press after publishing a copy of the Topf and Sons patent for the ‘continuous operation corpse incineration oven for mass use’ and a copy of correspondence with the SS at Auschwitz about the ventilation systems for the gas chambers.
Topf had escaped another police investigation in January 1960 in connection with ‘gassing ovens at concentration camps’, by offering up his usual justification that ‘anything burned in these ovens was already dead’, but as a result of the new television series and book, Ernst Wolfgang found himself referred back to investigators from the Central Land Judicial Administration Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes who passed the case to a special unit preparing for trials in relation to Auschwitz.
Despite the many efforts to bring Topf to justice, he never faced any further prosecution for the actions of Topf and Sons during the Holocaust. The immediate consequence of the new media revelations was that J. A. Topf and Sons was finally deregistered. J. A. Topf and Sons was dissolved on 18 March 1963 and the last Topf brother was out of business for ever. Ernst Wolfgang’s wife Erika died a month later on 23 April.
Despite living on in a state of some dereliction, Ernst Wolfgang survived for another sixteen years – dying on 23 February 1979 in the northern German town of Brilon. He was seventy-four years old, an age many of his victims never reached. He had defiantly evaded justice to the very end.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ATONEMENT
When Hartmut Topf was sixteen, he borrowed five marks from his young teacher Heinz Bunese and caught a bus from his home in Falkensee in the Soviet zone to West Berlin. In the autumn of 1950, eleven years before the Berlin Wall was built, it was still possible for workers with the right papers to cross the city, but Hartmut did not have the right papers and it was a nerve-racking journey; he knew that he would be arrested if caught. The new East German communist police and customs officers were often on the commuter buses, on the lookout for the wrong people, but they couldn’t apprehend every passenger. And, much to Hartmut’s relief, he made it. I went to Spandau. I didn’t know where to go, so I asked the first policeman
I saw and he told me that there were places that welcomed refugees. I went to one of the places he mentioned, got registered, answered some questions, had a medical test and after a few weeks I was accepted as a political refugee – and then I was sent to West Germany.[147]
As a teenager, Hartmut had been involved in small acts of rebellion against Soviet rule, refusing to sign a telegram for Stalin’s birthday, and smuggling in airmail copies of West Berlin newspapers to secretly distribute in school text books. But eventually he had been exposed, and his choice was to flee or be sent to prison. Now that he had made it to the West he was free to build a new life for himself, but in many ways he was still a young boy away from his family for the first time.
146
E. W. Topf defence to Power without Morals, 1958, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.