J.A. Topf and Sons – The Engineers of Nazi Industrialized Killing

Block 23-3, written by Jerry Elman, February 21, 2023

For many, the image remains unforgettable: Oskar Schindler climbs out of his Mercedes-Benz, noticing a flurry of ash drifting down from the sky like snowflakes. With puzzled irritation, he flicked the flakes from his car windshield and his trim, double-breasted suit. Viewers of the movie “Schindler’s List” know that this apparent midsummer snowstorm was really human ash, the incinerated remains of the Jews and others gassed at Hitler’s death camps.

What most viewers do not know is that such ash storms were the patented work of a family business in east-central Germany, J.A. Topf & Sons. During the Holocaust, the company made the ovens used to dispose of the bodies of those murdered at Nazi death camps.

When Allied liberating forces arrived at the Nazi concentration and death camps at the end of World War II, they discovered endless piles of dead bodies waiting to be burned in the incinerators bearing the logo of J.A. Topf & Sons.

J.A. Topf & Sons helped make the Holocaust possible by building incinerators* for Nazi concentration camps. *(I refuse to use the term ovens or crematoria after learning these were deliberately designed high-volume incinerators, not funeral home ovens! These were not crematoriums, as most books and historians refer to! These were incinerators to burn human bodies like trash!)

The infamous German company, based in the eastern city of Erfurt, had collaborated with the Nazis, proudly designing, building, and delivering equipment for the specific purpose of mass incineration of prisoners. Their ghastly engineering made the enormity of the Holocaust possible. If it hadn’t been for Topf incinerators, the Nazis would have had a far harder time killing so many and leaving so little evidence. 

Johannes Andreas Topf, a blacksmith, opened a furnace and heating-equipment foundry in Erfurt, Germany, in 1878. In 1904, Johannes’ son had heard that in Milan, Italy, the city fathers were experimenting with cremation, and it struck him as a good business opportunity. He asked his engineers to work on the burning of corpses and even joined a promotional society called Friends of Cremation.

By the early 1920s, J.A. Topf & Sons sold cremation ovens to cities as far away as Lisbon and Brussels, as well as throughout Germany. By 1931, Johannes’ two grandsons, Ernst and Ludwig Topf, took over the company.

Their lead cremation oven engineer was Kurt Prüfer. J.A. Topf and Sons considered themselves at the leading edge of a new movement to bring dignity to death and reverence to human remains. The cremation oven they developed 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.

The company’s business flourished. Then Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws were enacted, and Jews lost their citizenship, homes, and businesses. Many were arrested. In 1938 came the devastation of Kristallnacht, and then German Jews were rounded up and placed in labor camps like Buchenwald and Dachau. At the same time, the extermination of Jews who did not leave Germany began. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began. Germany now controlled the largest Jewish population in the world, and the Final Solution was implemented.

After Buchenwald was built in July 1937, both Ernst and Ludwig Topf, now members of the Nazi party, could see the concentration camp from their factory office windows. The Nazi SS approached the Topf brothers to provide cremation ovens for the bodies of Jews and others killed in the labor camps. The first order was for Buchenwald. The second order was for Dachau. The Nazi SS were also building and opening death camps in Poland that, expanded the need to cremate victims.

Kurt Prüfer worked in this same building that overlooked Buchenwald and drew up plans for what he named the first “mobile oil-heated cremation oven.” It was delivered to Buchenwald for the sole purpose of incinerating Jewish bodies. The incinerator marked a radical departure from the culture and the rules of civic cremation. Human beings were burned in these incinerators like refuse.

Prüfer was proud of the initial success of his design and soon presented the Nazis with a new design featuring two stationary incineration muffles. A muffle is a term used in cremation and refers to the interior oven chamber a body is placed in. This two-muffle model was installed in the Dachau concentration camp in November 1939.

The company was so proud of the work that it applied for a patent on the design. They viewed the need for mass killing incineration as a long-term business, and they wanted to keep the competition out of it. Their competitors were now restricted to only building conventional cremation ovens, which up to that time, were in use at some Nazi death camps. Now J.A. Topf had a monopoly on industrialized human incinerators.

After developing the new stationary incinerators for Buchenwald and Dachau, Kurt Prüfer demanded that the Topf brothers give him a bonus for the work he had proudly pursued. His request was granted.

When Nazi leaders decided to make Auschwitz-Birkenau the central work and death camp hub in the Holocaust, Topf’s complicity reached new heights. “Rest assured,” Ernst Topf wrote to the SS, the company will provide a new design for crematoria at Auschwitz that will “improve efficiency,” even taking into consideration the likelihood of “frozen corpses.”

“When SS administrators at Auschwitz-Birkenau discovered they could kill thousands of people at a time using Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) in gas chambers, they faced the problem of getting rid of these thousands of bodies. The two muffle incinerators could only incinerate 30 to 36 bodies in 10 hours. Bodies were stacked in large piles waiting to be incinerated.

Prüfer and his colleagues stood with stopwatches in front of the gas chambers and incinerators at the death camp, timing the gassing death and incineration of thousands of victims. Their goal was to increase the production of both the gas chambers and incinerators. Prüfer aimed to engineer the most efficient and high-volume incineration technique possible.

Topf engineers improved the ventilation systems of the gas chambers so they could kill people faster. They reduced the killing time from one hour to twenty minutes. This then meant the incinerator capacity needed to be increased even further.

On August 19, 1941, Prüfer met with SS construction managers. He presented his design for three muffle incinerators. Crematoriums II and III were built using this design. Each contained five of these three muffle incinerators.

The muffles of the newly designed incinerators were smaller than those for civil crematoria because no space for a coffin was needed, saving space and fuel. Prüfer later designed ovens with muffles large enough for multiple bodies to be burned simultaneously. Later, in Topf & Sons’ instructions on using the incinerators, they advised adding bodies to the muffles at 20-minute intervals as the previous body burned down. Bodies were often pushed in four, five, or even six at once

Prüfer then designed an eight muffle incinerator. Crematoriums IV and V were then each built with two of these eight muffle incinerators. By the summer of 1942, the Nazis incinerated up to 9,000 bodies daily at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

An office feud between Kurt Prüfer and his now senior manager, Fritz Sander, prompted the latter to invent his own design for a death camp incinerator. Sander’s plan for a “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation” was a replication of “burning in hell.” This new design called for the uninterrupted incineration of bodies in a “production-line” system from the gas chambers through the incinerators.

The design called for the piles of corpses in the gas chambers to be placed onto continuous conveyors that would move the bodies through intense rings of fire in forty-six muffle incinerators. The incinerator would be four stories tall. The body and body fat, in particular, would be used as fuel (instead of coal) to burn other bodies continuously. Human ash would also be removed from the incinerators using conveyors and loaded onto dump trucks for disposal.

In a memo, Sander described the process to the Topf brothers as a superb way of “restoring hygiene” in “war-related conditions.” The Topf brothers quickly approved it with praise. Only Kurt Prüfer took issue with the design (out of competitive spite), claiming that it would not work in practice. He came up with his own alternative and equally deplorable design instead.

According to the Nazi plans, Sander’s design would be used to build massive killing centers that would complete the extermination of all Jews and then begin the extermination of the Polish, Slavic, and Russian populations. Only those of the Aryan race would remain. Not much is written about these extended killing plans that would have been implemented had the Nazis won the war. The mass extermination would not have ended with the Jews!

Time would not allow for constructing these mass killing centers, as the German army was no longer advancing and conquering more nations. They were now retreating on both fronts. The focus became killing Jews as fast as possible using all existing resources. Outdoor burn pits were used when incineration capacity was not enough.

Even after the war, Topf and Sons remained indifferent and unapologetic for their actions. Attempts were made to hold them accountable for their actions after the war. Their statements confirmed they had never once considered the millions of victims of their technology as human beings, and they showed no remorse.

During his interrogation by Soviet forces, Kurt Prüfer calmly lied about his role in the process. When pressed about whether he knew that innocent people were being murdered and burned in his ovens, he eventually replied — “Yes, I knew that.”

Fritz Sander described with some pride his “Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Operation.” Then he stated, “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. ” For the rest of his life, Ernst Topf maintained, “No one in our company was guilty of anything at all.”

When Nazi Germany was defeated in May 1945, Ludwig Topf committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule after being informed of his pending arrest by US military officers. In a suicide note, he defiantly declared his innocence, writing: “… if the people want blood, I’ll do it myself. I was always forthright — the opposite of a Nazi — everyone knows it.”

His brother Ernst fled Russian-occupied Germany to the Western occupation zone, where he started a new company. “What was burned in those ovens was already dead,” he told a German court in the early 1960s. “You can’t hold the builders of the ovens responsible for the deaths of the people who were burned in them.”

The investigations into his wartime activities were eventually closed. He was released and went on with his new company and life.

It wasn’t until the publication of the book “Macht ohne Moral” (Power without Morals), written by concentration camp survivor Reimund Schnabel, that the West German public was reminded of the company’s earlier activities. After that, Topf was no longer extended credit. The company soon went bankrupt.

Engineer Kurt Prüfer, meanwhile, died in a Soviet prison camp in 1952.

J.A. Topf & Sons Nazi past was all but forgotten in East Germany after it was nationalized and its name changed to VEB Erfurt Malting and Storage Company, eventually going bankrupt in 1994 after German reunification. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall and an attempt by a Topf heir to gain restitution for the East German nationalization of the company that the German public became aware of the company’s dark past.

That was when Hartmut Topf, a great-grandson of company founder J.A. Topf, got involved. He was a journalist and decided to make it his life’s work to research the company’s history and preserve it for future generations. He proposed the company’s building and property be preserved as a memorial site and museum.

Initially, politicians in Erfurt opposed his plan to open a memorial site on the grounds of the former factory. They instead wanted the building torn down. But in the end, Topf and his associates won out, and a place of remembrance was opened on the site of the company’s former administrative offices in 2011. There, a permanent exhibition illustrates the company’s dark history.