Wolfgang Nossen remembers:
I went to an event and there was a person who had worked for Topf and Sons who said that if Topf and Sons hadn’t manufactured the ovens, someone else would have. That is a wonderful excuse. But it would be better for Erfurt, if they hadn’t done it. They were guilty to a very high degree, because they offered their own services. They invented new machinery so that even more people could be burned in a more economical way. For me, their behaviour cannot be excused. It is not only the two brothers who are guilty, but also the engineers who went to Auschwitz when the Topf brothers did not.[153]
Nossen also had a confrontation with Mayor Ruge, who had stated in a Radio F.R.E.I. interview, in December 2002, that he saw no need for a Topf and Sons memorial.
Asked if he could continue to ignore the memorial services and action groups working to draw attention to the Nazi past of the Topf and Sons site, Ruge said:
What do you mean by ‘ignore’? Then I’d ask, to put it quite plainly, where are the memorial services at the bakers and butchers who delivered their bread rolls and sausages to Buchenwald? And where are the memorial services at the dairy that provided Buchenwald with milk? Or where are the memorial services where lemonade or other drinks were produced? Or where are the memorial services in the pharmaceutical company that made the aspirin or other tablets used at the camp? This is a social question that we need to ask… But here, for this location, the question is bundled together. And I am of the view, and I’ve always said as much, that we should name this place, name what went on here, but that’s where our responsibility ends.
The interviewer presses him further: why does the city not mention Topf and Sons’s history on its homepage?
‘Why should we put it on our homepage?’ Ruge responds.
There are many aspects of the city’s history that we don’t publicise. I don’t see any reason to, and I don’t see anything to find fault with in Erfurt’s conduct. A place is named here, this is where industrial things were manufactured for the destruction of people, questionable, abhorrent things, but many other things connected to Buchenwald were made in the surrounding area, too… We will ultimately ensure that it isn’t only named but is also documented, but nothing more is necessary.[154]
Wolfgang Nossen says: ‘In the end, everything happened the way we wanted but it was a disgrace how they opposed it.’ Hartmut Topf agrees: ‘We had to be very stubborn to pursue our goal.’ The society of supporters had to convince more and more people. ‘We wanted to create a sense of responsibility, to signpost that this was the Topf company. To indicate that this was the place and cement it in the public consciousness. The authorities put up a lot of obstacles, the mayor found stupid excuses. But our small movement grew.’[155]
In 2003, the Topf and Sons site was listed as a protected historical monument by the state of Thuringia, and a memorial and education centre about Topf and Sons opened in the main administration building on Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2011. Director Annegret Schüle explains why the site is a memorial rather than a museum:
The main difference between us as a memorial and other museums is that we are about the history of a crime, and there have always been victims. We are not describing history in a neutral way, and we always mention the victims. We honour their memory. We cannot just say that Topf and Sons did this and that, we always have to take into account that people suffered from the business of Topf and Sons… There are memorials where the victims are the centre of the attention. Nobody died here, but the deaths were the object of the planning and manufacturing.
The Topf and Sons memorial is unique in being the only Holocaust memorial on the historic site of a company. ‘This place has a special aura,’ Schüle says.
We can show here how easy it is for a human being to ignore his responsibility towards his fellow human beings in his daily work. If I go to the memorial in Buchenwald I cannot identify myself with the SS, because I would never have become a member. But I can relate to people who harm other people by doing their normal jobs. This is happening all the time. Visitors are motivated to think about this. Processes that are completely normal within any companies have led to atrocities.[156]
A lifetime has passed since the men of Topf and Sons sat at their desks and dispassionately planned murder, but the memorial poses an eternal question: how would we act today?
CONCLUSION
‘I inherited the name. I did not inherit the company, fortunately. Even so, I felt an obligation. As a child I bathed in the glory of being a Topf, and now I feel I have to tell the horrible story of their infamy. I have to make my contribution. That is my responsibility.’[157]
Hartmut Topf’s long involvement with the company that bore his name began more than sixty years ago – but in a surprising development it appears that he was not the only member of the family to discover the truth about Topf and Sons in a darkened cinema. In another town in Europe, a young boy was also watching the weekly newsreel when he saw the logo Topf and Sons on the oven doors of a concentration camp. This young boy had grown up believing he was the son of Ludwig Topf – and he was a child no one in the family knew existed. Florian, as he wants to be known, was born in 1936, the result of a brief encounter at a party in Munich between Ludwig and his mother, who was a young student of art history.
‘I knew almost nothing at all about my father, just his name and how they’d met – and even that I didn’t know at first. Other than that, my mother was totally clam-like on the subject, which put me off asking questions,’ Florian says.
She’d grown up in a deeply Catholic family and giving birth out of wedlock carried a huge stigma. Because of this, she moved away from Munich before I was born and gave birth to me in Milan, where no one knew her. I had my mother’s surname and I don’t think she tried to get Ludwig Topf to acknowledge paternity. I don’t know why she didn’t, maybe because she knew he was from a renowned industrial company and didn’t want to embarrass him.
Florian says he grew up desperate for a father, even as an adult he often invented names for his father when dealing with the authorities. In the aftermath of the war, life was unstable and unpredictable in Europe – Florian attended six different primary schools in the space of four years, he then went on to study at a grammar school, followed by a stint at a boarding school in Germany. It was hard to be close to his mother, he says, when she was working and he spent so little time with her. In the holidays he often lived with his grandparents: ‘The absence of a father lingered over my whole childhood and spoilt it. I desperately missed having the sense of a normal home life, and I was very conscious of not knowing anything about my father.’
Then, as a teenager, he saw the name Topf and Sons on screen for the first time.
I was watching the Wochenschau weekly news programme that came on before the film at the local cinema, and I saw the report on the concentration camps with the ‘Topf and Sons’ plaque on the cremation furnace. I can’t actually remember whether I asked my mother about it at the time, but she would always fall silent at the mention of my father so I always found it very difficult to raise the subject.
153
Author interview with Wolfgang Nossen, former president of the Jewish community in Thuringia.