Topf and Sons

When Johannes Topf founded the firm on 1 July 1878 he was already 62 years old. He owned his own brewery and had also worked in the fuel technology industry. He established the new company to sell a system for heating brewing coppers which he had invented and patented.

He had four sons: Gustav (1853–1893); Albert (1857–1896); Max Julius Ernst, known as Julius (1859–1914) and Wilhelm Louis, known as Ludwig, (1863–1914). A fifth son died in childhood. He founded the firm against the advice of his sons, although the younger two sons, Julius and Ludwig, joined him. By 1885 J.A. Topf & Söhne was producing heating, brewing and malting systems and working collaboratively with other firms to sell products all over Germany and beyond.

The two older brothers also joined the company in the late 1880s, but they both died by the mid-1890s; Gustav, aged 40 and Albert, aged 39. Johannes Topf died in 1891, and in 1904 Julius Topf stepped down to become a sleeping partner due to ill health, leaving Ludwig managing it on his own.

The company began manufacturing incinerators for burning municipal waste and, from 1914, crematoria for local authorities, due to the increasing acceptability of cremation as a means of body disposal. By 1914, it was one of the largest firms of its type in the world, employing over 500 staff and exporting to 50 countries.

Ludwig Topf was wealthy and successful, but committed suicide in February 1914, aged 51, due to the stress of running the business. His brother Julius died of blood poisoning later the same year. With the second generation of the Topf brothers all dead, Else Topf (1882–1940), Ludwig's widow, became the owner. The firm's senior managers already had a lot of independence and operations continued without any major upheaval. It prospered during World War I due to contracts for weapons shells and military vehicles.

Investigations into Ernst Topf

Topf, now living in the American occupied zone, was arrested by the American CIC on 25 March 1946. He was held in custody and interrogated for two or three weeks and then let go. He maintained that the ovens they had delivered to the concentration camps were standard equipment, of the same type that they made for city crematoria for civilian use and claimed that if they had refused to work with the SS they would have been severely punished.

Later, in December 1946, because of his membership of the Nazi party, the Fritzlar-Homberg Spruchkammer, a German civilian denazification court, started investigating Ernst Topf. About 8.5 million Germans had been members of the party and the Spruchkammer were set up to investigate them. Topf was required to provide two sworn witness statements regarding his non-Nazi political leanings – two employees of Topf & Söhne provided these and vouched for him. The Spruchkammer had difficulties in getting evidence, partly due to a lack of co-operation between American officials and officials in Soviet occupied Erfurt.

In March 1948 the Spruchkammer in Wiesbaden, where Topf had moved to, took over his files. This closed at the end of 1949 and Topf's file was handed over to the Wiesbaden state prosecutors office, where investigations into him as an accessory to murder for his role in the Holocaust began. However, important witness statements were lost and Soviet authorities in Erfurt were no longer interested in assisting with the case. The investigation was suspended in 1951.

In 1959 the state prosecutors in Frankfurt reopened investigations into Topf. Two further legal proceedings followed in 1962 but neither resulted in a formal charge. Topf died in 1979. He never made any apology for Topf & Söhne's involvement with the Nazi regime.