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Hartmut Topf (* 1934)

• Kurt Hartmut Heinz Topf, called Hartmut Topf, was born in 1934 in Berlin

• in the mid-1930s, the Topf family moved to Falkensee, outside of Berlin

• he went to primary school in Falkensee

• after primary school, he was sent to a so called “Napola school” (National Political Institute for Education) in Ballenstedt for a trial week, which he failed

• he started secondary school in Falkensee and joined the Hitler Youth in 1944

• he witnessed the bombings of Berlin but Falkensee was not as heavily affected

• in 1945, his father was arrested by the Soviets and died in 1947 in the NKVD special camp Sachsenhausen

• after the founding of the GDR in 1949, he started smuggling anti-Communist pamphlets from West Berlin to his school and distributed them

• soon, he was caught and interrogated at school

• he left the GDR the same night so that he would not be arrested

• he moved from West Berlin to Hildesheim to his uncle for a few months

• then he found an apprenticeship at Siemens in Hannover

• after completing the apprenticeship as telecommunications technician in 1956, he moved to West Berlin

• he started investigating his family’s history with the help of a cousin who lived in the GDR

• he worked in different jobs in film and puppet theatre, until becoming a freelance journalist in the 1970s

• he started publicly talking about his family history in the 1990s and supported the establishment of a memorial in the former factory of Topf&Söhne in Erfurt

• in 2007, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

We spoke with Hartmut Topf, born in 1934 in Berlin, about his own memories of the war and post-war period, as well as the role his family played in the Holocaust as “builders of the Auschwitz Ovens”.

Hartmut Topf is the great-grandson of Johann Andreas Topf, who founded the company “Topf&Sons” in the late 19th century. Initially they specialised on developing and building firing systems and grain silos. The firm was led by the two sons of Johann Andreas Topf until they both died unexpectedly in 1914. The widow of the elder son took over the company and later her two sons. The younger son of Johann Andreas Topf, however, is Hartmut Topf’s grandfather. He had died of an infection and left behind his widow and nine children. The youngest was Albert Topf, born in 1900 in Erfurt, where the family Topf lived and where the Topf&Sons company grounds were situated.

Albert Topf studied in Ilmenau to become an engineer. Subsequently, he was employed at Siemens in Berlin, where he bought a small summerhouse. On one of his visits in Erfurt, he met a young kindergarten teacher, called Irmgard. They married and together they moved to Berlin, where their first son Hartmut was born in 1934. Shortly after, they built a house in Falkensee, a small town just outside of Berlin and moved there. In 1937, Irmgard Topf gave birth to her first daughter Elke and in 1940, a second daughter named Karin followed.

Albert Topf joined the National Socialist party but remained a relatively low-ranking member. He was a Zellenleiter, so his responsibilities mostly contained settling disputes between neighbours, supporting widows and collecting donations for the Winterhilfswerk. His son Hartmut does not remember his father as being political. This contrasts Albert Topf’s older brother Hans Topf, who had built a house right next to them in Falkensee. Hartmut Topf remembers his uncle remarking multiple times, “Don’t say, ‘Hello, Uncle Hans!’. Say, ‘Heil Hitler, Uncle Hans!’” Outwardly, Hans Topf showed his conviction and loyalty to the Nazi-regime, wearing his NSDAP-uniform occasionally. But within the family it was an open secret that Hans Topf’s wife had Jewish ancestors.

Hartmut Topf was five years old when Germany attacked Poland and started the Second World War. But the war still seemed far away and he started to go to school. Then, one of his teachers was drafted and died at the front. Soon, the same thing happened to the father of a classmate. This was the first time that Hartmut Topf was confronted with the war. Around this time, he heard of concentration camps for the first time. One of the boys next door told him a joke about Göring. He added, “If you tell this joke anywhere, you can be arrested and put in a concentration camp.” When Hartmut asked him about this unfamiliar term, the boy explained, “Well, this is where enemies, criminals and so on are imprisoned and they have numbers and tags.”

In 1944, Hartmut Topf was old enough to join the Deutsches Jungvolk, the section of the Hitler Youth for ten to thirteen-year-olds. They had meetings in the evening, when their assigned leader, the fourteen-year-old son of the local baker, explained to them the meaning of the word “honour” and made them learn Hitler’s life story by heart. This leader was soon demoted and his badge of honour was taken away because he had ridiculed volksdeutsche members of the Hitler Youth. These ethnic Germans had grown up in Belarus and recently resettled to Berlin. They had a different accent to everybody else which is why the Jungvolk leader had mocked them. Still, they were considered German, part of the Volksgemeinschaft, and therefore were not to be ridiculed.

The pre-military training of children mostly took place in the Jungvolk and Hitler Youth but also in some elite schools. The most prestigious ones were the so called “Napola” schools. Napola stands for Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt, National Political Institute of Education. They were boarding schools for boys between the ages of ten and eighteen, where they received a lot of physical education and military training. The goal was to indoctrinate a new generation with the National Socialist ideology, so that they could take over as leaders of the country and of the party in the future. Hartmut Topf was sent on a trial week to the Napola school in Ballenstedt. However, he struggled with the strict discipline and militaristic organisation of the school and failed the trial week. When his father came to pick him up, Albert Topf told his son about a military exercise at this school where the younger boys had to go to the forest and defend themselves against attacking “Americans”, which were in reality the older students. This exercise did not end well, seeing as quite a few of them got hurt.

1944 marked the year, that the war truly came home for Hartmut Topf, not only because of his membership at the Jungvolk and his trial week at the Napola. In late 1943/early 1944, the bombings of Berlin intensified. His parents forbade him to go to Berlin anymore because it was getting too dangerous. Falkensee was bombed as well, but not as heavily as Berlin and so the family survived the air raids unharmed. Twice, Hartmut Topf saw the wrecks of a British and a Soviet bomber that had been shot down. He noticed that the British bomber was equipped with a targeting device that had been produced in Germany which he found rather ironic.

In the last months of the war, when Germany was lacking more and more soldiers, the authorities drafted the Volkssturm. The Volkssturm consisted of units of boys and men who were either too old or too young for the army, or who worked in companies important to the war effort. Albert Topf, who fell into the last group, was drafted as well and on the 20th of April 1945, he was sent out with his unit and did not return.  

While Albert Topf was away, the Red Army arrived in Berlin. First, the inhabitants of Falkensee saw Soviet air crafts and soon, they could make out Soviet troops in the distance. Hartmut Topf remembers that he wore a hat with a skull-badge. His neighbour, who had deserted the army to return to his family, saw this and said, “Take that off, boy, now! Or else they’ll shoot you dead.” Hartmut Topf obliged and joined his mother, his two little sisters and several neighbours in the basement of their house. A couple of children came to them, whose wrists were bleeding. Their mother, who had lived on the same street as the Topf family, had cut first her children’s wrists and then her own. But the children had survived and came now to the Topf family looking for shelter, orphaned and bleeding.

They stayed in the basement and waited for the Red Army’s arrival. Three or four Soviet soldiers stood at their door. Because he was the only boy, Hartmut Topf had to go upstairs and open the door. The soldiers held machine guns, but only looked around in the house, checked whether anybody had wristwatches and then left. After the combat soldiers had checked all houses, the remaining Soviet forces arrived with old cars and horse carts. In the following time, sexual harassment and rape became a big problem. The Soviet officers were not pleased with this and so the commandant announced that Germans were to sound the alarm if they witnessed a Soviet soldier harassing or raping a woman. The way to do this was to rattle pots and lids outside the window, up the street to the commandant’s headquarters. When they heard the rattling, the military police were sent out, beat up the rapist and took him with them.

Another big problem in the post-war period was the food shortage. They had to queue in front of the bakery for bread. Sometimes, they stood in line for the whole day and when it was finally their turn, there was no bread left. The Topf family fortunately still had preserved fruit from their garden that helped them to survive. They also had rabbits but Soviet soldiers stole and butchered them. However, other Red Army soldiers sometimes gave the children a bit of milk or oil, when they saw them rummaging for something edible on the streets. After a while, food stamps were introduced and after that, the food supply improved.

Uncle Hans returned from his last assignment with the Volkssturm severely injured. He was immediately brought to the family doctor who patched him up. Not too long after, Soviet officers showed up at his doorstep and took him with them. Albert Topf returned home as well. He had been taken prisoner of war by the Soviet Army but because he was sick and wanted to return to his family, they let him go after a few months. However, the reunion in Falkensee was not to last. In August of 1945, an auxiliary policeman showed up at their house and said, “Mr. Topf, we would like to talk to you tonight, at 6 o’clock in the former Hitler Youth house.” So in the evening, Albert Topf went there. This is when Hartmut Topf saw his father for the last time.

The next day, Hartmut Topf went to the former Hitler Youth house because he wanted to bring his father something to eat. The guard in front of the house told him that a lot of men were loaded into Soviet trucks yesterday. He sent the young boy to the secretary in the house who might be able to tell him the whereabouts of his father. As he entered the house, a police officer saw him and sent him home, without telling him anything about what had happened to Albert Topf. After a few months, the Topf family received a message, that Albert Topf had smuggled out of the NKVD special camp where he was held. It read, “I’m in Sachsenhausen. Try to send me a jumper and a pencil.” This was the last sign of life that they received from Albert Topf. One or two years later, a released prisoner came to their house to tell them that Albert and Hans Topf had died in Sachsenhausen. In 1949 or 1950, Irmgard Topf received an official letter saying, “Mr. Topf left the house in August of 1945 with an unknown destination. He has not been seen alive since and is therefore officially declared dead.” Hartmut Topf only knew for sure in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Memorial Moscow published documents of the NKVD special camps. This is when he learned that his father had died in March of 1947 in Sachsenhausen after being imprisoned for eighteen months without a trial.

In 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded on the territory of the Soviet occupation zone. Hartmut Topf remembers Soviet officers coming to his school, trying to convince the students to join the new, state-run youth organisation FDJ. One of his classmates refused, stating that his parents had told him, “We’re never doing anything political again.” Hartmut Topf refused to join the FDJ as well because the organisation reused a lot of old Hitler Youth materials and he did not like this continuity. One time, the FDJ paraded on the school premises with the old Hitler Youth trumpets, and Hartmut Topf raised his arm and shouted “Heil Hitler, Mr. Stalin!”

Hartmut Topf’s rejection of the new political order did not end here. Because the border to West Berlin was nearby and still open, he often went there to collect anti-communist pamphlets from the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit as well as the RIAS, which he then smuggled back to the GDR. At school, he placed these pamphlets in textbooks that were sure to be picked up by other students. During one of these distributions, he was caught red-handed and interrogated by his teachers. They sent him home, where he destroyed all evidence by throwing the remaining pamphlets in a lake. But it was not enough. The headmaster’s son as well as one of his teachers sought him out to warn him: They are after you. Leave.

The same night, Hartmut Topf crossed the border to West Berlin, leaving behind his family and friends, at 16 years old. In West Berlin, he stayed in a transit camp but because it was overcrowded, he soon had to leave to West Germany. He had an uncle in Hildesheim with whom he stayed until Christmas. Then he found an apprenticeship at Siemens. Because his father had already worked for them, they were more inclined to offer him a job. So he moved to Hannover where he completed his training as telecommunications technician in 1956. He then moved back to West Berlin, where he worked in different professions until specialising on film and puppet theatre and eventually becoming a journalist.

What has been a recurring theme through Hartmut Topf’s life, was dealing with his family’s history. As a child, he learned that he had a large family in Erfurt, who were building beautiful chimneys in all of Europe. At home, they had an ashtray with the company logo of Topf&Sons. It came as a shock to Hartmut Topf when he went to the cinema after the war, where they showed pictures of concentration camps in the newsreel. And again and again, they showed the crematoriums and the high chimneys decorated with the same logo of Topf&Sons. Seeing as his father and uncle were gone, his mother had no mind for politics and all other relatives lived abroad, Hartmut Topf had nobody to talk to. Only after he emigrated to West Germany, he contacted a cousin who was still living in Erfurt and who had access to all the old documents, photographs and letters. They smuggled these records to the West where Hartmut Topf started reading them and learning about his family’s past.

Since then, Hartmut Topf has visited multiple concentration camps for which Topf&Sons had built the gas chambers and crematoriums. Every time, he feels ashamed because his relatives enabled the committing of these atrocities. Hartmut Topf underlines that the Holocaust is a German shame and that Germans have to confront themselves with this shame. The first time, he visited Auschwitz was on a day of remembrance in commemoration of the liquidation of the so called “Gypsy Camp”. There, he spoke with an elderly gentleman, who had survived the camp, and introduced himself with his name. The survivor remarked, “This name does not sound good here.” To which Hartmut Topf replied, “Yes, I know. That is why I came.”

In 1993, the French pharmacist, hobby-historian and author Jean-Claude Pressac published his book “Les crématoires d’Auschwitz”. This book opened the debate in German society about the involvement of German companies in the Holocaust, first and foremost Topf&Sons. Up until this point, Herbert Topf had treated his research about his family as a private matter but now, he decided to speak publicly about his family’s involvement in the Holocaust. He donated all his documents to the archive in Erfurt so that professional historians could start digging into the company’s history. Hartmut Topf then initiated a sponsoring association that eventually turned the old company premises in Erfurt into a memorial and a museum. In 2007, Hartmut Topf was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.