Hartmut Topf

"And in Erfurt, there were people who said, “We want to talk to former employees of the company.” And then came Carsten Schneider who was back then the youngest politician of the SPD [Social Democratic Party Germany] in the national parliament. He helped organise grants for the professional research. It wasn’t me who did this. I only tried to research my family and my father’s family. But I hardly had anything about the company and its background. But when he died, Pressac’s research returned to the archive of Thuringia and to Erfurt. And anything that I had, I willingly provided it to everybody in Erfurt. All of it is carefully archived there, also all of the private things. Well, and then came the foundation Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, the educational institute of the DGB [German Trade Union Confederation], churches, die Jewish community… When I received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, I had two supporters who told me afterwards: the leader of the Jewish community in Thuringia, Wolfgang Nossen, and a professor for Marxism-Leninism who had lost his job. These two people had campaigned for me to receive this award. So I was lucky that my intensive ideas found partners. This is how this support organisation was founded. And it’s still active to this day. At first, we only wanted to mark the location, turn it visible for the city as a memorial. The premises laid in ruins and were in a bad state. What can you even do with that? Until it became possible. And then it became a part of the museum landscape of Erfurt and today it’s one of the city’s museums."

"Well, I was… It was the anniversary of the liquidation of the so called “Gypsy camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I went there with representatives of Romani people from Serbia. And for the first time, I made the experience that I introduced myself to an elderly gentleman, a survivor, and told him my name. He simply said, “This name doesn’t have a good reputation here.” So I told him, “Yes, I know. That’s why I’m here. “Well then, in that case it’s alright.” And so I visited Auschwitz for the first time and visited extensively. Buchenwald concentration camp, I had already seen before of course. The national memorial at Sachsenhausen as well as Buchenwald – those I had already seen. It’s always shameful and upsetting when you stand in front of these machines and you know: this is where many corpses were incinerated, burnt to ashes. And not according to the standards of the aesthetic and moral duties of a mortician but according to the standards of the SS: the mass destruction of corpses, like the destruction of the carcasses of cattle or something."

"Well, we had a house with a basement and so our neighbours without basements came to us with their children. There were women with their children. No men, they were all gone. Once, there were children from our neighbour who had tried to flee. The children came alone to us, with injuries on their wrists. The mother had killed herself and had tried to cut her children’s wrists. The children survived, the mother didn’t. These children came to us, the relatives of our neighbour. Luckily, this neighbour returned later on. I only saw small Russian bombers, the single seated ones. During the war, I had already seen British or American bombers that had been shot down. Well, and now, the Russians came. We saw them approach from afar. And there was one neighbour who had deserted, Walter Gorgas, who saw that I wore an aluminium pin of a skull on my hat. It wasn’t only the symbol of the SS but also of the tank units. When he saw this, he said, “Son, take that off immediately! They’re going to shoot you dead!” So I took it off and ran into the basement. And we had to wait there until they arrived. And then they came with machine pistols, three or four soldiers. I had to open the door for them. Then they looked whether we had any watches. There was only a big grandfather clock, no wrist watches. So they left pretty quickly. And then the others came with horses and carts and some of them were very drunk. There was a good thing that you can say. Of course there were assaults, mainly against women. And so the local Russian commander – I don’t know his name – issued an order: “If something like this happens, raise an alarm!” But how? Nobody had a telephone. “Take the lid of a pan and rattle out of the window. The neighbour rattles. Within minutes, the rattling reaches the commander’s office.” As soon as they know about it, they send out the military police. And they came. On a truck, they put their usually drunk mate, usually beat him up, loaded him half dead onto the truck and left. They tried to keep things in order in their own way. I saw this as a child. But the Red Army had many facets. Sometimes, a Red Army soldier would gift us some oil or mild. At home, nobody knew how to cook with oil but the Russians knew how to do that. And when a man had some oil on him and saw us hungry children trying to beg, then he would give us some oil, for example."