Topf & Sons, Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens. A Place of Remembrance
The manufacturing name ‘Topf & Sons’ might at first glance appear innocuous. Yet this museum reveals the story of a company that, having originally produced incinerators for public and agricultural crematoria, later extended their services to support far more disturbing processes, by building the infamous Auschwitz ‘ovens’.
Why go there?
The concentration camp sights of Auschwitz and Buchenwald have for a long time been ‘popular’ destinations for tourists wishing to learn about the human tragedy of the Holocaust. Yet the Erinnerungsort Topf & Söhne can offer a different perspective, providing insight into the pervasiveness of the Nazi regime in regular industry and showing how one business became complicit in the extermination of Jews and other minorities.
Erfurt is a picturesque German city steeped in history, once home to arguably the most famous German of all time, Martin Luther. The building is thus fairly incongruous within an otherwise scenic setting. Located on the other side of the railway tracks from the pretty Altstadt, the museum looms large, with the quote „Stets gern für Sie beschäftig” (“Always happy to serve”) wrapped around its outside walls. As part of a larger national trend to preserve and memorialize original sites of the Nazi regime, the museum functions as a potent physical link with the past, unavoidable in Erfurt’s landscape. Whilst no atrocities were actually committed here and no ovens remain on the site, the building remains as the lasting reminder of a larger complex of factory buildings, which are marked on a scale model outside its entrance. Whilst the content of the exhibition is not graphic, the museum is not the most inviting for younger visitors. The industrial aesthetic makes for a sombre, reflective experience. Captions are available throughout in English.
What’s inside?
Although you may expect to see an incinerator in a museum marking the building of the Auschwitz ovens, the exhibition instead focuses on the disturbing mundanity of this former factory. The connections with everyday life necessary for the Holocaust to have occurred are central: individual work spaces are demarcated on the floor, alongside desks and easels, not so different from a normal office today. Yet, no matter how prosaic the reconstructions and pictures of the original offices appear, the plans, invoices and instruction manuals reveal the true extent of the factory’s involvement with the building not just of crematoria, but of ventilation systems for the gas chambers, too. A small section of the exhibition touches on the history of the company post-1945, but rather glosses over the museum’s post-millennium incarnation as a squat, whose residents ran tours of the site.
The exhibition features objects as well as documents, some of them displayed in a more conceptual way than is usual for history museums. An installation made up of uniform funeral urns that bookend a dusty pile of shoe leather acts as an eye-catching central feature in the exhibition space. At certain points, visitors can look out onto the outside world: a window captioned ‘a view of the Ettersberg-Buchenwald concentration camp’ reveals that the horrors of the Holocaust were not always as far off as Auschwitz. Although it is a stretch to suggest that one could have seen the Buchenwald camp from this vantage point, it nonetheless raises interesting questions about what ‘normal’ German citizens were unaware of, or prepared to ignore, on their doorstep.
German History Museums 