Florian’s maternal family were doctors, but even though his grandfather was labelled a ‘Jew doctor’ for treating Jewish patients after Kristallnacht, Florian is still inclined to excuse Ludwig Topf’s role in the Holocaust:
I don’t think he was a Nazi; I think he acted out of necessity and pragmatism, and a sense of responsibility for the company’s workers. Yes, he collaborated, but I’ve read both Jean-Claude Pressac’s and Annegret Schüle’s books and I think that the collusion was pragmatic, not from the heart. They had just wanted to be the best engineers and do the best by their business, and they hadn’t really thought much beyond that. It can’t have been easy for them, and when you run a company of that size, a certain amount of collaboration would have been inevitable. The work for the concentration camps only accounted for a very small percentage of the company’s turnover, and was therefore commercially insignificant.
Having searched all of his life for his father, Florian now finds it hard to believe that Ludwig Topf was a bad person. Although his mother had no papers or photos relating to the Topfs, Florian has seen Ludwig’s photo published in books – and thinks he looks like a nice easy-going sort of man, although, he adds, ‘In order to have taken his own life, he must have been a very disappointed and disillusioned person.’
Before retiring in 2015, Florian had a long career in business and industry, working in England, Belgium and Switzerland. Very much a family man, he married in 1967 and had three children and nine grandchildren. It was his children who encouraged him to find out more about the Topf family, and he recently met Hartmut for the first time when they agreed to conduct a DNA test. Asked how his children feel about being possible descendants of the Topf family Florian says: ‘They feel proud. They knew my mother came from a family of doctors, and were proud of that, but they feel that an industrial family – especially such a major one – is even better.’[158]
Florian is not the only son in this book to be seeking a missing father: Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf lived, unsuccessfully, in the shadow of theirs; Hartmut sought to redeem the family name for his ‘good’ father; while Udo Braun remained unreconciled with Gustav Braun to the end.
The question of family legacy is a large one. It is something that even Hartmut, who has carried out so much work on restitution and remembrance, struggles with. Visiting Erfurt in September 2017, he explains that he now believes Topf and Sons was ‘partly guilty’ – partly because, as Florian also states, the Topf family only made a small financial profit from their work on the Holocaust. Standing in front of the Topf and Sons’ ovens at Buchenwald, and confronted with the visible evidence of the crime, he seems unsure about how to express his emotions – instead he tells a long story about the death of a family friend in Berlin. When the friend died, Hartmut’s son, Till, asked him why he didn’t appear to be sad. Hartmut told his son that he had known his friend’s death was coming and he had grieved for a long time in his own way.
‘It’s a sad story,’ he says about the role Topf and Sons played in the Holocaust.
And it’s a great pity that we have to deal with all those atrocities and crimes, in Europe, in our country and, of course, in our family. But this is a general grief, it’s not a personal thing. I am only one of those catalysts to keep the memory alive or to ask people, at least from time to time, to reflect on that side of our history.
He adds: ‘We should be decent. I am not the protagonist of this story. I always say to people I am a catalyst and I’ve been working on for this for so many years now, but please don’t make me an angel or a hero – I’m not.’[159]
The story of Topf and Sons may be one without heroes, but Hartmut Topf is undoubtedly responsible for ensuring that the company is held accountable to history for its crimes. Through the Topf archives, and the work of historians, we can understand how one small group of men were driven by very human emotions. Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf were weak and greedy men, prepared to do anything to cement their precarious positions at the head of their father’s company. They knew that in doing so they were developing technology that would enable the mass murder of millions of innocent people. This did not deter them in the least – and their collaboration in the Holocaust would be something that Ernst Wolfgang Topf would lie about for the rest of his life. They bear the ultimate responsibility for their crimes.
For the engineers themselves, Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander and Karl Schultze, it was a question of personal ambition, rivalry and financial gain. There they sat, on the third floor of the administration building, drawing up ever-wilder plans for the more efficient disposal of human life – all the while thousands of their victims were trapped in Buchenwald, a concentration camp that could be seen out of the window on the Ettersberg hill. And beyond the engineers were the fitters, the men on site who witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust on a day-to-day basis; more remotely the secretaries who typed the memos; the managers and paper pushers who stamped the files; and the operations director who joked that, surely, there could almost be no one left to burn.
Topf and Sons was by no means unique in serving the SS and the Third Reich; in that, they were like thousands of other technocrats, scientists, engineers, town planners, economists, doctors and business men. In making such a pact with the devil they were given permission to shed their civilised skin, and dream their wildest dreams; to make real their biggest professional ambitions without regard for human life or dignity. Even today their sheer detachment and disinterest creeps from the pages of the archive and lays its cold fingers upon anyone who reads it, yet it was the very ordinariness of their human motivations that makes them so easy to understand – and so appalling.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As an English writer and journalist living in London, completing this book required help and input from many people.
Without the research and translation work of Paula Kirby, this book could not have been tackled at all. Paula, an experienced German translator with an incredible knowledge of, and interest in, German history, devoted an enormous amount of time to translating secondary literature into English for me. She then took on the unwieldy task of sorting thousands of primary archive documents from the Thuringia State Archive, identifying relevant information and translating it. In addition, she was always happy to translate emails, work on footnotes relating to German sources – and conduct phone interviews in German, including an interview with ‘Florian’, who believes he is the son of Ludwig Topf.
The second person who worked extensively on the German portion of the book was Britt Pflüger, herself an author and editor. Britt proved invaluable in navigating the Thuringia State Archive, which was no easy task, and doing a preliminary sift through thousands and thousands of files to identify useful material. Britt also spent many hours reading German newspapers and magazines from the 1940s, as well as conducting and translating long interviews in Erfurt and Weimar.
The final person to help translate German material into English was Caterina Andreae, who swiftly and expertly translated a series of first person audio interviews with some of the key people mentioned in the book.
Of the many people who cooperated, helped and agreed to be interviewed, the most important, of course, was Hartmut Topf. Hartmut plays a key role in this story – his efforts played a large part in bringing the Topf and Sons memorial in Erfurt to fruition. Hartmut also spent many days being interviewed for this book, showing me his childhood scenes in Berlin and Erfurt, and introducing me to others in the story. He facilitated many interviews, and made available many photos and family documents.