--- title: Inside the Company Behind the Nazi Concentration Camp Ovens description: The employees of Topf and Sons were the office-workers who greenlit the Holocaust, writes author Karen Bartlett. canonical: https://time.com/5371687/nazi-camp-crematorium-builders/ author: Karen Bartlett article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-08-21T15:00:52.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:42:10.543Z article:section: History og:title: Inside the Company Behind the Nazi Concentration Camp Ovens og:description: These were the office-workers who greenlit the Holocaust, yet they were far from fervent Nazis. og:url: https://time.com/5371687/nazi-camp-crematorium-builders/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfea333595d5b2c43/698938158fd2ee447b35c686/topf-and-sons.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: Buchenwald Crematorium og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Inside the Company Behind the Nazi Concentration Camp Ovens twitter:description: These were the office-workers who greenlit the Holocaust, yet they were far from fervent Nazis. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltfea333595d5b2c43/698938158fd2ee447b35c686/topf-and-sons.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # These Men Offered 'Perfection in Cremation Technology' to the Nazis. 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The trial of a former Nazi guard brings forth questions about justice and forgiveness for Holocaust survivors and German citizens._ by [Karen Bartlett](https://time.com/author/karen-bartlett/) ## Karen Bartlett Aug 21, 2018 3:00 PM UTC  Ovens By Topf & Sohne In The Crematorium, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Germany (Photo by: Insights/UIG via Getty Images) Ovens By Topf & Sohne In The Crematorium, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Germany (Photo by: Insights/UIG via Getty Images) Insight/UIG/Getty Images by [Karen Bartlett](https://time.com/author/karen-bartlett/) ## Karen Bartlett Aug 21, 2018 3:00 PM UTC A man in a stiff white collar sat down in his office in the provincial German city of Erfurt in the Spring of 1939, to draw up a plan for what he neatly named the first “mobile oil-heated cremation oven.” It was to be delivered to the nearby concentration camp of Buchenwald. But this engineer, Kurt Prüfer, carefully marked on his design “incineration chamber” rather than “cremation chamber,” for he completely understood the power of words. With a few strokes of his pen, his bland description disguised the red line between his previous work, serving the life and death of an ordinary community, and building the technology to fuel mass murder. It was a technocrats’ trick often employed as first German and then all of Europe’s “undesirables” were herded towards the “final solution” and “selected” to perish in the so-called “undressing rooms” and “saunas” of the gas chambers. Prüfer worked for the family company Topf and Sons, a traditional brewing and malting manufacturer run by two brothers Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf. During the 1930s, Topf and Sons had branched out into building ovens for civil crematoria. Both Prüfer and his boss, Ludwig Topf, considered themselves the leading lights of a new movement to bring dignity to death and reverence to human remains. The product they developed and sold throughout Europe, was lauded in a company brochure as “the purest expression of perfection in cremation technology,” promising an odorless, smokeless, dispatch of human bodies, which were burned solely in super-heated air. Topf and Sons’ work for the SS in serving the Nazi’s concentration camps was quite different: here Prüfer and his colleagues stood with watches in front of the gas chambers of Auschwitz timing the death and incineration of thousands of victims to perfect a more efficient killing technique. Bodies were shoveled one on top of another into a single chamber, and burned directly in the flames — their ashes unidentifiable and intermingling. Yet they remained careful to maintain the falsehood that there was some dignity in death — Topf and Sons also supplied false firebricks and urns for non-Jewish victims whose families were allowed to claim their remains. In reality, mixed ashes, sawdust and general dust was shovelled indiscriminately into each urn, which was then stamped with a false identity number. (The families of Jewish victims were not even allowed the comfort of this lie.) What to make of the men and women of Topf and Sons? By any assessment today they must surely be monsters; the engineers who drew up the plans, the secretaries who saw the memos, the accounts department who stamped the orders, and the playboy directors, Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig Topf, who signed every letter to the SS with the words, “always at your service.” These were the office-workers who greenlit the Holocaust, yet they were far from fervent Nazis. Astonishingly, from the 1930s until the end of WWII, Topf and Sons was a hotbed of Nazi opposition, housing workers who were often knowingly part of the communist resistance, while the Topf brothers themselves sheltered several half-Jewish employees, including one, Willy Wiemokli, who saw the plans for the crematoria at Auschwitz. After the war Wiemokli discovered that his own father had been murdered at Auschwitz, and most likely burned in an oven built and installed by Topf and Sons — yet he still spoke out in defence of his former employers, supplying a statement outlining how he had believed Ernst Wolfgang Topf had protected him. Both the Topf brothers and Kurt Prüfer joined the Nazi party in April 1934, the last possible moment when it was acceptable to do so for any ambitious businessperson in the Third Reich. Yet rather than expressing horror and terror when they discovered the true purpose of the Topf and Sons contracts with the SS, they reacted with total indifference towards the suffering of their victims. After developing the first crematoria for Buchenwald, Kurt Prüfer wrote to his employers demanding a bonus for work he had proudly pursued “in his own free time.” His wish was granted. “Rest assured,” Ernst Wolfgang Topf wrote to the SS in November 1941, the company will provide a new design for crematoria at Auschwitz that will “improve efficiency” even taking into consideration the likelihood of “frozen corpses.” An office feud between Kurt Prüfer and his senior manager, Fritz Sander, prompted the latter to invent his own design for a concentration camp oven. Sander’s plan for a “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” seems almost a replication of hell, where piles of corpses are shoveled down into a ring of fire and the bodies are used as fuel to continuously burn other bodies. In a memo, Sander, who had previously shown no interest in cremation ovens at all, described the process to his employers as a superb way or “restoring hygiene” in “war-related conditions.” The Topf brothers, more interested in funding their lavish lifestyle, drinking and womanizing, approved it without comment. Only Kurt Prüfer took issue with the design, claiming that it would not work in practice — and coming up with his own alternative, equally deplorable design instead. The work of Topf and Sons was no longer just enabling the Holocaust. Prüfer and the Topf brothers were now taking the initiative in encouraging the SS to go further in their murderous regime, designing more efficient ventilation systems for the gas chambers at Auschwitz so that they could kill more people. As the end of the was drew closer, the SS finally abandoned Auschwitz to Soviet forces, after forcing most of the remaining inmates to undertake death marches to other concentration camps deeper within Germany and Austria. By January of 1945, the end was near, but even in the final days Kurt Prüfer and Topf and Sons planned to recreate the killing system at Auschwitz at Mauthausen camp in Austria where they relished the prospect of fully taking control on an entire “extermination center.” The story of Topf and Sons proves that words matter. Every bland description and technocrats’ lie allowed Topf and Sons to be supremely indifferent to their de-humanized victims. The final statements of these men, as they were held to account for their actions after the war, showed that they had never once considered the millions of victims of their technology as people at all. During his interrogation by Soviet forces Kurt Prüfer calmly lies about his role in the process, but when pressed about whether he knew that innocent people were being murdered and burned in his ovens he eventually replies — “Yes I knew that.” Fritz Sander describes with some pride his “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” and then states “As a German engineer and employee of the Topf company, I felt it was my duty to help Hitler’s Germany to victory, even if that resulted in the annihilation of people,” while, for the rest of his life, Ernst Wolfgang Topf maintained, “No one in our company was guilty of anything at all.” Building the technology for the Holocaust had a become a passion project for the men at Topf and Sons, and it was not even a profitable one; Topf and Sons never derived more than 3% of its income from contracts with the SS. Driven by self-preservation, office rivalries and personal greed, the men of Topf and Sons had human motives for heinous behavior. It is their very ordinariness that makes them so appalling.  St. Martin's Press _Karen Bartlett is the author of_ [Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250117700)_, available now._ ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Our family had tried so hard to stay together. My sister Edith was about 12 years old was sent in the direction that my mother went. The SS guard he motioned me to in the direction other young adults went. I didn't move. I leaned over peering into the crowd and trying to see if Edith had caught up. I was horrified that she would not find our mother. She would be lost to our family, alone amongst strangers. The trauma of this separation Lingers with me to this day. [ MUSIC ] [ SOUND ] [ CROSSTALK ] It's not a matter of Sending him to jail for the rest of his life. I don't feel that, that will help, but what's happening now will help. And today, I must do what I'm asked to do and not stop and cry because that is not what's required at the moment [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay look at me. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ LAUGH ] It's a teaching moment for the entire country of Europe to rethink and learn from it. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ MUSIC ] The lawyers were searching for people Survivors. They asked, would I come, and do I know anything about this Nazi guard, and of course no. I was much too distracted to look into his face, but I was not required to have remembered the face, so I said yes. If I can help. I would come. So far over the last seven decades, prosecutors just focused on the murder of the people who arrived in Auschwitz on the lam and then were gassed right No prosecutor ever brought forward a charge, saying that a guard is also responsible for making it possible that the people who were prisoners in the camp were murdered systematically. And the indictment against Hanning is the first indictment that actually says Auschwitz was altogether A organized factory of mass murder. Not only the selection on the [ INAUDIBLE ] This is, I am here. Right here standing here. As I said in the testimony, I had just been separated from my younger sister, and as I was saying I didn't leave. I actually defied orders, I just stood there. How am I to leave her like this? People tell me, you know she died, you know everybody died, and it's been a long time. And it doesn't help. [ MUSIC ] This is Council Aide and Justice Says it's too little, and is a enormous failure, it's a system in the end does the right thing, it's better than not going. I think the main purpose of this trials is to give justice to our clients, it's for them. I just want him to Hear from me and others who testified, what the consequences were of what he did at a young age. But he keeps his eyes down, head down. I don't know whether he doesn't want to face the survivors. What his motivation is. I really don't know. [ FOREIGN ] And the further you go down in the chain of command, the more the question arises of how far legal responsibility goes. And if none of the witnesses know the defendant, this, in the view of the defense, is a testament to how unremarkable the defendant possibly was. [ MUSIC ] I'm not interested in the personality of the defendant. For me he's a broken, failed person. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. If he was a warden in Auschwitz, I already judge him. I can't judge that. Forgiveness? Maybe he just... How many people followed? How many people killed? Maybe they didn't have a choice but to act in that way? [ MUSIC ] There's a lot of talk of forgiveness, I'm very surprised about it. Everybody had to do their part or it wouldn't have worked efficiently. How does mass murder get forgiven? [ MUSIC ] The crime is so enormous, it's not a forgivable crime, it's a crime to be analyzed and learned from. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ SOUND ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ SOUND ] [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5371687/nazi-camp-crematorium-builders/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5371687/nazi-camp-crematorium-builders/"},"headline":"These Men Offered 'Perfection in Cremation Technology' to the Nazis. 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