Germany is to open a further Holocaust monument Thursday, this time at the former engineering plant which built the crematorium for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Records show the Topf und Soehne company in the city of Erfurt was proud of the energy-saving design of the furnaces it supplied to the Nazis in 1942 to burn the bodies of up to 1 million dead quickly.
The memorial joins the Holocaust Monument in the heart of Berlin and preserved concentration camps all over the country as visible reminders of the genocide of the Jews that continued till the Nazis' defeat. January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, is marked as Holocaust Day internationally. Topf und Soehne went out of business years ago and only its office building is left. Visitors will be able to see the rooms where engineers drew up the blueprints. A cast-iron model of the vanished factory complex has been set up in the newly paved courtyard.
The architects chose to paint a fawning phrase from one of the company's letters to the SS, "Stets gern fr Sie beschaeftigt..." (Always glad to work for you ...)" on the outside of the grey building as a catchphrase for the new exhibition. "It's the perfect example of the connections between the Holocaust and private enterprise," explains Annegret Schuele, a historian who has spent years studying the Topf und Soehne story. She said there was no evidence the company did the work under any duress.
Topf und Soehne, which had built civil crematoriums since the 19th century, was eager for the government contract to build a bigger, industry-scale furnace to eliminate human remains in bulk. The two engineers who worked on the job, Fritz Sander and Kurt Pruefer, were rivals who each thought he knew a better way to reduce energy use and speed up the process of burning the bodies.
The company also supplied a system to vent away gas from the Auschwitz gas chambers, but did not build the chambers themselves. "After the firm got a business opening with the SS, they boasted their know-how and tried to land contracts from other concentration camps," said Schuele. They had other metal products too.
At Buechenwald concentration camp, there are still cast-iron doors in place that were manufactured by Topf und Soehne. "The two owners and their staff acted purely out of business motives. Even after the Second World War they advertised the world-class design of their crematorium furnaces," said Schuele.
In an example of the moral ambiguity of so much in Nazi Germany, the firm actually saved people from the concentration camps too. Its staff included a significant number of communists and people with mixed Jewish and "Aryan" ancestry who might have been thrown into the camps if they had not had essential employment. After the war, those grateful survivors opposed calls to pillory the firm or punish its executives. Research shows the executives must have clearly known by 1942 what the Auschwitz crematorium was for. The precise number of people killed at Auschwitz is unknown. The memorial there says historians estimate 1 million to 1.5 million.
The Erfurt exhibition, which has toured to Berlin, Oslo, Copenhagen and Brussels before coming home, is entitled "Engineers of the Final Solution" and explores the guilt of the firm and its staff. "It's a universal theme," explains Ricola-Gunnar Luettgenau, head of the Buchenwald Memorial.
Not much is left of the company, which was founded in 1878. The office block has been restored to its 1940s state, exposing the staircase and wall tiles as they were then. The window frames are replicas. A draftsman's table was rediscovered in rubble.
Photos from the 1940s give an idea of what it was like to work there. Civic activists in Erfurt, located in former East Germany, began campaigning in the mid 1990s for the monument. "They confronted the city fathers, who were in denial about it," said Luettgenau. Erfurt had tried for years to live down its Auschwitz association and was reluctant to advertise it.
The monument was also delayed by leftist squatters who had made themselves at home in the former factory. After trepidation, the city adopted the monument as an official municipal project in 2007. "It took them a while to realize this was the right thing," said Schuele. "Erfurt has won new respect abroad by doing this."