Dagmar Topf: A Defence Of Family Furnaces
ghettoes, massacres, concentration camps,
the moral decadence, of rich war profiteers,
yet impossible, to keep pace, with final solution,
dispose of thousands, of bodies daily, without Toft,
Dagmar Toft, in the 1990s, seeks legal restitution,
compensation, for Topf property, seized by the Soviets,
represents, dispossessed offspring, confiscated inheritance,
Copyright © Terence George Craddock
See also The Holocaust Files!
Source for Dagmar Topt quotations, The Register-Guard. Oregan, Saturday. September 3,1994.
Quotation from Topf & Sohne, The Site and its History
1939 Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf, owners and managing directors of the family business in the third generation, begin supplying the SS and its concentration camps with corpse incineration ovens specially developed by furnace construction engineer Kurt Prüfer to meet the needs of these camps.
1942 With full knowledge of the practises of mass murder being carried out with gas at Auschwitz, the company – on the initiative of engineer Fritz Sander – applies for a patent for a “continuous-operation corpse incineration oven for mass use”.
1943 The large-scale crematoria in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp are equipped as “death factories” with ovens and gas chamber ventilation systems from Erfurt.
1945 In February, Topf & Sons works on setting up a new extermination centre near Mauthausen Concentration Camp using the death factory facilities dismantled in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In April, the newly elected works council composed of Communists and Social Democrats supports the company management’s justification of its oven-supplying activities as a completely normal business relationship. On 31 May, for fear of being arrested by the U.S. Army, Ludwig Topf commits suicide. Ernst Wolfgang Topf travels to the Western occupied zones and is prevented from returning after the Soviet army becomes the occupying force in Erfurt.
1946 Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander, Karl Schultze and Gustav Braun are arrested by the Soviet army. In 1948 they will be sentenced in Moscow to twenty-five years in a penal colony for assisting the SS in committing genocide.
Quoted from REUTERS.Com, Thursday, July 21,2005, Auschwitz oven builders scrutinized at new Berlin exhibition, http: //www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/602999.htmlFresh archive evidence shows the brothers who ran Topf, cousins of Hartmut's father, were not fanatic Nazis and faced no personal risk for declining orders for furnaces from Hitler's elite SS guards. Nor were they in it for the money. Crematoria and ventilation systems for the concentration camps comprised only two percent of their turnover, and the SS paid late. Rather a picture emerges of a firm of meticulous technocrats, motivated by the 'challenge' of perfecting and installing incinerators capable of burning thousands of corpses daily, and blinded by the detail to their moral crime. Hartmut Topf said 'It makes me furious that these were my relatives... they were no anti-Semites, no evil Nazis. They were normal people, in a completely normal firm, which only makes it harder to understand'.