Even though the Topf fitters spent long periods of time in the camps; even though the mobile ovens were built in the Erfurt company and were returned there for repair; even though the staff involved spoke quite openly of the equipping of the gas chambers; this version of events, with its abstruse reference to the incineration of animal innards, declares the entire workforce collectively innocent [creating] the impression that the Topf villa, which was expropriated and placed at the disposal of the workers after the war, could now serve as a symbol that the oath taken by the Buchenwald survivors had now become reality at VEB Erfurter Mälzerei- und Speicherbau.
The fall of communist East Germany and the reunification of Germany in 1990 spelled the end for many state-owned enterprises – including the VEB Erfurt Malting and Storage Construction (EMS), the company that was once Topf and Sons. Now under the leadership of Gustav Braun’s son, Udo (who had finally surpassed his father’s achievements), EMS was placed under the administration of the ‘Trust Agency’ which sought privatisation. Ultimately, Udo Braun’s efforts ended in failure; the company was initially sold before it petitioned for bankruptcy on 19 June 1996.
‘They gave me eight months to find an investor in Germany who would be willing to buy Topf and Sons,’ Udo Braun says.
I accepted and did my best, because I didn’t want the company to die and people to lose their jobs. Lots had to leave anyway. Of the 700 employees only 100 stayed. Since I had spent my entire working life there, my heart was also in it. The company was bought. The new owner got 70 per cent, I got 10 per cent – that’s what they wanted – and there were two other partners. That went on for two or three years. We then found out that we didn’t have enough money to construct new premises since we were not allowed to sell land that we owned in order to finance it. So the inevitable happened. The investor had difficulties of his own and in 1996 a liquidator took over and filed for bankruptcy. That was the worst day for me, when I had to go to the court. But I had to do it. I had to take care of everything.[149]
The administration building where the Topf brothers and their engineers had plotted how to build the technology for mass murder fell into decay, the family park slipped into leafy ruin. In its final company history, written in the 1990s, EMS had not mentioned the period of the Second World War at all – but still some important documents remained in the company archives, including Fritz Sander’s memo about his patent application, and the note about the dispute with the SS over the missing blower. Other documents had been retained by the former East German state archive in the Document Centre for the Prosecution of Nazi and War Crimes where Western researchers could look at them under Stasi supervision. These papers formed the basis of a file that was used at one stage to try to persuade Hartmut Topf to become a Stasi agent – an offer he refused.
Hartmut had been visiting Erfurt and staying with his cousin Dietrich since the 1970s. During one of these visits he visited the concentration camp at Buchenwald for the first time:
I wanted to see what was left of the camp. That was the first time that I walked through the small crematorium building that Topf and Sons had built. It was a shocking encounter. You walk through a very sad environment, and I found it hard to digest. I think I was speechless for a while. I saw things that I’d only seen before in photographs or in the newsreels. Then I wanted to know more, but at that time there was nobody to ask, not in Erfurt and not anywhere else.[150]
Hartmut began piecing together his family history, discovering the Topf and Sons commemorative brochure and old letters, while at the same time reconciling his much more immediate relationship with his father.
I grew into researching and asking questions slowly, step by step. I knew that the Nazis had killed so many people and that Topf had played a part in building the machinery. And of course they earned a lot of money from the Nazis, and my first thought was that they should not have touched this dirty money.
I was good friends with Jewish people over the years in Berlin, and I read all the important books, and I wanted to understand when people told me their stories. I wanted to know the whole system and framework, and the framework of the dictatorship too. I felt obliged to warn people who follow ideology, because I had the example of my own ‘good’ father, who also believed in Nazi ideology.
I loved my father, and I felt so sorry that he had served the Nazi movement with all of his good manners and his devotion to social tasks and neighbours. He was a naïve believer perhaps. I wanted to discuss all these questions with him: why did you join this movement? Perhaps you did it to help your brother, to protect his half-Jewish wife? In my father’s case, I think he was partly convinced that this really was a way of national socialism, of building a community for all. He must have believed that. That was his profound error. As a boy, these were the questions I wanted to ask him, but he wasn’t there so I could only dream of how he might have responded.
My aim is not to blame people, or to put them in jail or punish them, but to understand how it happened, why it happened, the road to this disaster. And, of course, within that at least name who was responsible, and make people liable for whatever they did.
So back then my priority was not so much the concentration camps, my first task was to warn people to look at the motives of those ‘bagpipers’ who led you to catastrophe, and into an abyss, because you believed them and supported them. That was my first course of action. Later, of course, I got into the precise and exact story of the Topfs in Erfurt, and this crystallised as the main topic.
Two events in the early 1990s forced Hartmut into taking a more active and public role in discussions about Topf and Sons: the fall of the Eastern bloc and the reunification of Germany meant that many former residents and business owners were seeking to reclaim the homes and businesses they had been forced to abandon during East Germany’s communist era. More than 2.5 million claims were filed, one of which was registered by members of the Topf family, who were seeking ownership and financial restitution for the company of Topf and Sons and the Topf family park in Erfurt.
At the same time, more information about the company’s role in the Holocaust was coming to the attention of the international media due to the publication of a book by Jean-Claude Pressac on the crematoria of Auschwitz, detailing the SS’s relationship with Topf and Sons, and the discovery by historian Gerald Fleming of the Soviet interrogation records for Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander, Gustav Braun and Karl Schultze.
Jean-Claude Pressac was a French pharmacist, and a former Holocaust denier who spent years compiling an archive of sources relating to Topf and Sons. Pressac had started investigating the SS construction management files from Auschwitz in the 1970s, when he was collaborating with French revisionist Robert Faurisson who believed the Holocaust was Allied propaganda. Holocaust deniers claimed that technical information from Auschwitz proved that the gas chambers never existed and that far fewer people died there than is claimed. At first, Pressac believed this too, and set out to prove it. His own investigation, however, forced him to change his mind. His 1989 book, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, was the first to publish documents from the SS construction management office, and was used by those who sought to counter revisionist history. In 1993, Pressac published his second book in France called Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz.