While his mother understandably missed him, his sister Karin remembers being pleased about inheriting Hartmut’s bicycle. ‘I didn’t really notice his absence. Perhaps it was even a relief, because I was also a bit difficult. I had my own ideas, and my own ways.’
Not only was Hartmut leaving his family behind, but also his home town. With refugees flooding into West Berlin from the Soviet zone, housing was horrendously overcrowded and priority was given to families with children. There was no place in Berlin for a sixteen-year-old with few skills, and Hartmut was sent to Hanover where he boarded with other young men. Eventually he managed to secure an apprenticeship with his father’s old company, Siemens, and began a career as a telecoms engineer.
Life in the West was about far more than work, however. Although Hartmut completed his three-year apprenticeship, living in Hanover opened his eyes to theatre and music, and he began to envision a different future for himself:
I met very interesting people in Hanover. I met lots of people involved in theatre and I sang in a choir. I went to the theatre almost every evening. I cut a strange figure wearing my leather shorts and carrying a ceremonial knife while I wandered around in the theatre canteen after the show with the actors… I even celebrated my twenty-first birthday on a concert tour of the Matthäus-Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach. We performed in Belgium and in Aachen. It was another world. That would have never happened in Falkensee.
Even so, Hartmut longed to return to West Berlin, and eventually managed to do this, working a string of day jobs while indulging his passion for the theatre in his spare time. At work, Hartmut was often preoccupied, thinking about the theatre, and the day jobs seemed to inevitably end with his dismissal. As the years passed, Hartmut married and divorced his wife, becoming a single father to their son, Till. Eventually he vowed never to take another full-time job that he woke up dreading, and embarked upon a freelance radio, journalism and theatre career that sustained him for the rest of his life.
In 1956 there was a Soviet military intervention in Hungary, and the army crushed the revolt. My friends, who were actors and artists, were desperate and cried. They were all so involved. I said I have to be closer to the action – and I decided to go to Berlin. I hoped I would also get the chance to go to a theatre school there, but I wasn’t accepted to any. Then I got a job in a small Christian theatre: the Vaganten. The director, Horst Behrend, had four children and was very conservative. He was a bit of a dictator in his theatre, but very devoted to it. He was a Christian and secretly he was a homosexual. He allowed me to work there as an assistant and I learned a lot. It was the best theatre experience I ever had; we put on beautiful plays and I was respected. Later I organised big theatre events, and I also helped organise the filming of Katz und Maus by Günter Grass in Poland in the ’60s.
In the 1960s, Hartmut also began working in puppet theatre – something he had been drawn to since his experiences with his childhood friend Hans Laessig decades earlier:
I like to call it an infection. Puppetry was contagious in my early years. Then I rediscovered it after meeting a puppeteer called Steinmann in Berlin… and I assisted him on the technical side of things in his little theatre, like the sound engineering and the light equipment. I stayed backstage and did all that, and through that I met many, many puppeteers, and I wrote critiques about puppetry festivals. I joined UNIMA, the reformed Union Internationale de la Marionette that was founded in Prague in ’29 by a puppeteer’s friends. I became a notorious festival-goer and the nickname I earned is pretty accurate – I am a puppet diplomat. I connect and I bring people together.
Puppetry, theatre and politics were becoming intertwined in Hartmut’s world, especially in Berlin where everyone was either a dissident or refugee, or an American agent or Stasi spy. His puppet theatre work took him across the border into Poland and Czechoslovakia, and ultimately back to East Berlin, where he reconnected with his family and learned what little he could about the history of Topf and Sons.
My theatre career and journalism absorbed me completely – but of course I read all of the important books, like Eugen Kogon’s work on the SS system and the concentration camps. I was familiar with a lot of political literature. I had my own political education, but there was a big lapse of time before I could look into Topf and Sons in Erfurt.
The lapse Hartmut mentions refers to the decades when Topf and Sons continued to operate as a company in East Germany. There appears to have been no appetite, either under Soviet occupation, or East German rule, to account for the company’s role in the Holocaust (other than the rather strange criminal case of the 1950s, which was dismissed almost as soon as it emerged).
Under the leadership of Willy Wiemokli, who became the head of the company in 1946, Topf and Sons continued to make payments to the wives of Kurt Prüfer, Gustav Braun, Fritz Sander and Karl Schultze while they were under arrest in the Soviet Union, and in 1948 both Paul Erdmann and fitter Martin Holick received fifty-year anniversary commemorations for their dedicated services to the company. Payments to the wives of the four arrested men stopped when Topf and Sons became a state-run enterprise in 1949, and all mention of the war and working with the SS was whitewashed from the company’s history.
Until 1952, Topf and Sons was known as Topf Works VEB, but the company was renamed in 1952 to remove the Topf family name, and then again in 1957 when it became known as VEB Erfurt Malting and Storage Construction. The crematorium division had been closed down two years previously in 1955, with all drawings, documents and models sent to another company in Zwickau, and the new company focused instead on grain malting equipment which was exported to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and then later to Libya, Angola, Cyprus and other countries sympathetic to East Germany.
Just as the old Topf administration building was still the heart of the company, the Topf family park was also still in use – housing a company clubhouse and restaurant in Ludwig Topf’s villa, and at various points, a hostel for apprentices, swimming pool and kindergarten in the grounds.
The expropriation of the Topf family park and villa is referred to in a 1980s company history, as an example of the triumph of the workers in beating their capitalist bosses.
When Hitler came to power, the company experienced a brisk upturn in productivity. It started producing parts for ships and aircraft, as well as grenades and cremation ovens. During the Second World War, the concentration camps were equipped with cremation ovens produced by ‘Topf and Sons’. However, the workers employed by the company at that time did not know what the ovens were being used for. They had only been told they were incineration ovens for animal innards. This inhumanity was only uncovered after the end of the war and the liberation of the prisoners from the concentration camps.
The company brochure continues with an account of the foreign workers forced to work for Topf and Sons during the war, stating: ‘The workers had to work under a piecework system so that the factory owner could hold orgies in his luxury villa, now the Erfurter Mälzerei- und Speicherbau clubhouse.’ Next to this statement is an illustration of Buchenwald and the oath of the Buchenwald survivors swearing to destroy fascism.[148]
In such a way, the history of Topf and Sons had been rewritten to serve the propaganda of communist-controlled East Germany. Annegret Schüle writes that:
148
Schüle, op. cit., p. 300. 1980s company history of Topf and Sons written in GDR.
AS footnote 89: Company timeline, p6f, ThHStAW, J. A. Topf & Söhne Erfurt Nr. 35, sheets 6f.