Many historians, including those based at the Buchenwald memorial, and Annegret Schüle, had profound reservations concerning Pressac’s approach, including his demands for payment before allowing other historians access to the archive material (part of which was Topf and Sons’s company material he had been loaned by Udo Braun, who was by then running the renamed company) and his strange obsession with military paraphernalia.
Ronald Hirte, a key member of the team at the Buchenwald Memorial, explains:
Pressac has always been an issue when dealing with Holocaust denial and revisionism. He wanted to become a military officer, but that didn’t happen. In the ’60s and ’70s he started studying the feasibility of the cremations of so many people being killed in the gas chambers. He was at first what we would describe today as a ‘revisionist’. This was a very strong movement in France up to the 1980s. They maintained that the Holocaust could not have taken place, because it was technically impossible to commit such a crime in Auschwitz. Pressac stood out among the revisionists, as he came to the realisation that he had been propagating false information all those years. His conscience did not allow him to continue to deny the crimes that had happened. This would be contrary to his ideology and his political actions. So he had to say ‘No! These crimes happened, the mass murders and the mass cremations took place.’ This made him very unusual and distinguished him from the other historical revisionists. His colleagues dropped him. So he had a very strange life – he was a right-wing, nationalist hardliner who then became a reformed autodidactic historian and author, publishing his two main books in France.[151]
Ronald Hirte and Annegret Schüle, who was about to embark on her research into Topf and Sons, travelled to Paris to meet Pressac in 2002, so that they could examine some of his documents at first hand, and also discuss access to the material. Hirte recalls:
It was a very unpleasant meeting and I didn’t think that he was a very nice person. He liked to point out that he knew much more and that we were kind of ignorant in the matter. H e also collected uniforms and arms, he had a huge collection, almost like a museum, and wanted us to put on the uniforms as a kind of a fancy dress and then take pictures of us. I refused. It was a really weird meeting. He was an embittered old man who felt he had not received enough recognition during his lifetime.
After Pressac’s death in 2003, Hirte drove to Paris with Dr Bernhard Post, now the director of the Thuringia State Archive, to retrieve Pressac’s materiaclass="underline"
We travelled to Paris overnight. We only had hours to get the files from Jean-Claude Pressac’s house before they disappeared, or any kind of argument started. The files had disappeared before and the way in which they had arrived in Paris had been illegal. So Bernhard Post and I drove off to Paris without stopping on the way, and arrived in time to meet a colleague there. We got all the material that we already knew about out of the flat and took it back to the archive in Weimar.
Regardless of whether or not Jean-Claude Pressac was a troubling and unpleasant character, he undeniably unearthed much material about Topf and Sons and played an important role in bringing it to light. Despite the flaws in his work, Hartmut Topf was armed with this new material when he heard about the Topf family claim for restitution.
Descendants of the Topf family, who were living abroad, had applied to have the company reassigned to them, but their claim was rejected in 1992 after being called an ‘obscenity’ by the World Jewish Congress and condemned by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Another claim by the Topf family, to reclaim the Topf family park, was still under consideration, however, and Ernst Wolfgang Topf’s daughter-in-law Dagmar Topf, visited Erfurt, to speak on behalf of her claim. She encountered tremendous hostility. The legal ownership of the park was a matter of dispute, as it had never been formally expropriated by the East German government, however Dagmar Topf’s efforts to reclaim it seemed morally indefensible to most ordinary Erfurt citizens. Hartmut Topf was made aware of her efforts by Jean-Claude Pressac.
I heard about the Topf claim from local newspaper reports and from Jean-Claude Pressac. Pressac called me because he knew that I spoke in public about Topf and Sons. He asked me if I knew Dagmar Topf and the other relatives, and I said I did not. There had already been negative articles about them, and he told me I should get in touch with her. I made an appointment with Dagmar and went to see her. I came to terms with Dagmar. She understood that I wasn’t her enemy. And I understood that she had been unjustly attacked by the media and that public opinion in Erfurt was very hostile towards her. She had been portrayed as a lady from the West who wanted Topf property and was a Nazi. She had a hard time in Erfurt. She doesn’t like to go back there, even today.[152]
Although Hartmut believed Dagmar Topf had been subjected to an unfair personal attack, he was equally determined that no Topf should receive any financial benefit from Topf and Sons or the Topf family park.
‘I spoke out in Erfurt and said that if there is any money it should be given to victims’ organisations – or it should be put into political education. Local people responded very positively to the fact there was a Topf who spoke up against the relatives.’
Dagmar Topf and the other Topf relatives lost their claim to the Topf family land in 1994, but Hartmut was emboldened by the public response to his speech and decided to bring together a society of supporters to find a suitable way to remember and reflect on the atrocities that Topf and Sons had participated in.
The first thing I said was: we must do something to stop a general forgetting of the past. We have to mark the place. We have to leave a sign to tell people – it was here in the middle of our society. I asked the people of Erfurt to help us to preserve the memory, a memory of an average German company, an average wealthy German family, who helped the system commit this huge crime. I did not want a memorial for victims, because we have those in other places; I wanted a place of reflection and learning.
Other people joined the movement to memorialise Topf and Sons, and Hartmut began working with a diverse group that included representatives from the Green Party, the Protestant Church, the European Cultural Centre, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and trade unions. The then president of the Jewish community in Thuringia, Wolfgang Nossen, worked with Hartmut in setting up the Topf and Sons memorial. Nossen had escaped from the Breslau ghetto, and was outraged by Dagmar Topf’s claim for family restitution:
It was the typical insolence. They were all ‘innocent’. Zero morality. I would have changed my name if it had been Topf. But it is good that Hartmut kept his… Ludwig Topf showed character when he killed himself. As much as the Germans would like to, you cannot forget history. It was very difficult to establish the memorial and I was part of those who helped and encouraged it.
While the society of supporters were rallying support for a memorial, a group of left-wing, radical squatters had taken over one of the Topf and Sons buildings, where they ran their own series of social and cultural projects to remind people about the company. The occupation by the squatters lasted for eight years, until they were evicted in 2009, and became a well-known example of anti-establishment and anti-Nazi resistance in Germany.
While Hartmut Topf, and others in the society of supporters, offered encouragement to the squatters, they also continued to work towards a permanent memorial on the site – something that was actively opposed by the Mayor of Erfurt, Manfred Ruge, and some former Topf and Sons’ workers.
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Author interview with Ronald Hirte of the education department at Buchenwald Memorial.