Kurt Examiner

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Kurt Prüfer (born April 21, 1891 in Erfurt ; † October 24, 1952 in a gulag ) was a German engineer who worked for JA Topf & Sons in Erfurt a. a. was responsible for the construction of crematoria . During the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust , he designed increasingly powerful models of incinerators that were used in concentration camps . He was involved in the planning, installation, testing and maintenance of the crematoria of the Auschwitz concentration camp .

Life

Kurt Prüfer was the son of a train driver . After completing secondary school, he learned the trade of bricklayer and, after completing his apprenticeship at the arts and crafts school in Erfurt, began studying and in 1908 studying structural engineering at the royal building trade school there. From 1911 he was employed by the Topf & Sons company, initially as a technical draftsman and designer for malting plants. After military service and participation in the First World War , he finished his studies with a degree in civil engineering. Subsequently, from 1920 he was employed again at Topf & Sons in Department D for industrial combustion systems. There he specialized in crematoria construction, a still young area in the company that was gaining in importance in the foreseeable future and - according to Annegret Schüles - accommodated Kurt Prüfer's will for advancement. From 1928 he was head of the department for the production of crematoria and from 1935 chief engineer. During the Great Depression in 1930/31 he had to accept considerable wage losses and thus avoided being fired.

The company, which was founded as a machine factory and mainly took on armaments orders from the Wehrmacht during World War II , was the market leader in the manufacture of incineration systems. This was a niche product in the range that accounted for around two percent of company sales. Cremations became more and more popular in Germany from the middle of the 19th century, and Topf & Sons grappled with questions about a respectful urn burial . From the 1920s and 1930s, Topf & Sons supplied municipal crematoria worldwide. In terms of burial law , the Cremation Act was enacted as a Reich law in 1934. The Topf & Sons company also had experience with other incineration plants, for example for waste incineration or for the incineration of animal carcasses .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , he joined the NSDAP in April 1933 . Kurt examiner was shop steward of the German Labor Front .

Installation of crematoria in concentration camps

Kurt Prüfer's three-muffle oven in Buchenwald concentration camp
Letter from Kurt Prüfer to his company regarding the required crematorium ovens and their capacity dated September 8, 1942.

The Topf & Sons company worked with the SS , including Karl Bischoff , from 1939 and took on orders from the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). The pot & sons memorial site draws attention to the extensive voluntary nature with which the private company got involved in supporting the killing machinery in the concentration camps .

"Accomplices (...) [like Kurt Prüfer] reduced mass murder to a 'business process', to a 'technical task' that can be countered with the 'corresponding product'."

- Christine Lieberknecht : Opening speech by the Thuringian Prime Minister at the inauguration of the memorial site in 2011

Mobile and stationary crematoria were developed, built and installed for the Buchenwald , Dachau , Groß Rosen , Mauthausen , Gusen and Auschwitz concentration camps . Through the use of concentration camp prisoners and the inexpensive purchase of materials, Prüfer was able to undercut competing companies in crematorium construction in concentration camps with the products of the company Topf & Sons and open up the "growing concentration camp market for himself or his company".

Chief engineer Kurt Prüfer was aware that his designs of incinerators in the style of cadaver annihilation ovens were a departure from previous considerations about a dignified death and also violated applicable law. Nevertheless, unlike his rival company Kori , he kept designing new furnace models and combustion processes that made the burning of Holocaust victims more efficient. He took into account energy savings and the increasing number of corpses. The muffle furnaces were initially transportable, were later walled in and were finally stationary. As more and more bodies were burned, was obvious that the Topf & Sons partly supplied urn capsules with numbered fireclay -Erkennungsmarken that could be requested by rich German nationals against payment could not contain the ashes of the deceased. The initially individual combustion chambers of the furnaces increased to two- and three-muffle furnaces and were expanded to eight chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp . Developer Kurt Prüfer received a bonus of 450 Reichsmarks from the company's management for the effectiveness of the three-muffle oven .

On August 19, 1942, Prüfer took part in a conference of the Central Construction Office of the Waffen SS and Auschwitz Police , at which the construction of four new crematoria in the Auschwitz concentration camp was agreed. He was also on site several times to check the function of the ventilation systems in the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Kurt Prüfer's supervisor, Fritz Sander, registered the patent for a “continuously operating corpse incineration furnace for mass operations” in November 1942, which, unlike muffle furnaces, was intended to enable corpses to be incinerated without interruption. In 1942, the company management refused a resignation request from Prüfer, in 1943 he was honored with a letter of congratulations for his 25 years of service.

“Crematorium II was completed with the use of all available forces, despite unspeakable difficulties and frosty weather, day and night, with the exception of minor structural details. The ovens were fired in the presence of the chief engineer examiner of the executing company, Topf & Sons, Erfurt, and work perfectly. "

- Central construction management of the Waffen SS and Auschwitz Police in writing on January 28, 1943 to SS brigade leader Hans Kammler

Post War and Death

After the war ended, Prüfer was arrested by American military police on May 30, 1945. They knew that the Topf & Sons company had built crematoria in concentration camps, but not their type. He was released on June 13, 1945 and given the job of delivering a crematorium. First, however, he destroyed all contracts concluded with the SS. After Thuringia was handed over to the Soviets in July 1945, he built a waste incineration plant in Arnstadt on their behalf . On October 11, 1945, an employee of the Soviet secret service asked the Topf & Sons company about the "Auschwitz engineer", but was held up by an employee of the company. Examiners and three other company employees were arrested on March 4, 1946 by Soviet officers and extensively interrogated. During the interrogations, all those arrested admitted that their actions “contributed to the organized mass extermination in Auschwitz”. Today it is not possible to clarify under what pressure the statements came about or what translation errors crept in. Falsification allegations by revisionists relating to misrepresentation in data are rejected by historians.

The involvement of the Topf & Sons company in the construction of crematoria and the involvement of the accused in it can be proven through confiscated documents. A telephone message from February 17, 1943 proves that there was talk of “gas cellars” in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The examiner himself signed a letter in which it was about the delivery of "desired display devices for hydrogen cyanide residues". According to senior engineer Karl Schultze, he reported on trial gassings:

“The next day I was in the crematorium at ten in the morning. I saw 60 bodies there, men, women and children. […] I told him [ie examiner] what had happened, how these people were led, driven into the gas chamber and killed and now their corpses were being cremated in the crematorium. [...] I stayed there for five days. [...] I had to check the crematorium oven. That was only possible when the transport arrived with the 300 or so people who were killed in the gas chamber. "

Prüfer himself admitted in 1948 that he had known about gas murders in the main camp since spring 1942. In the crematorium there, he saw corpses on the floor through a half-open door; The SS man accompanying him initially replied evasively, but then reported a few things about gassings. On April 17, 1948, Prüfer was sentenced in Moscow by a Soviet military tribunal to 25 years of imprisonment and forced labor in the Soviet Union . In the judgment it says:

"Although Prüfer knew about the real purpose of the crematoria and gas chambers in the camps, he asked and resolved questions on his own initiative that concerned the technical equipment and the improvement of these crematorium facilities and should contribute to increasing their capacity."

He died in captivity on October 24, 1952 as a result of a stroke . The employees Karl Schultze and Gustav Braun, who were also convicted in 1948, were released early in the fall of 1955, while Prüfer's superior Fritz Sander had already died of heart failure on March 26, 1946 in prison in Berlin-Karlshorst .

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • Jean-Claude Pressac : The Auschwitz Crematoria. The technique of mass murder. Piper, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12193-4 .
  • Annegret Schüle : Industry and the Holocaust. Topf & Sons - The furnace builders of Auschwitz. Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0622-6 .
  • Annegret Schüle: International traveling exhibition Industry and Holocaust. Topf & Sons - The furnace builders of Auschwitz. (= Accompanying volume for the traveling exhibition). Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-95565-223-4 .
  • Harald Welzer : Particular Rationalist - About soldiers, engineers and other producers of annihilation. In: Aleida Assmann , Frank Hiddemann, Eckhard Schwarzenberger (eds.): Topf & Sons - manufacturer of the ovens for Auschwitz. A factory site as a place of remembrance? Verlag Campus, New York / Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-593-37035-2 , pp. 139–156.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biographical data according to: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 323 f.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 323 f.
  3. ↑ Harald Welzer: About soldiers, engineers and other producers of destruction . In: Aleida Assmann, Frank Hiddemann, Eckhard Schwarzenberger (eds.): Topf & Sons - manufacturer of the ovens for Auschwitz. A factory site as a place of remembrance? , New York / Frankfurt a. Main 2002, p. 151.
  4. ^ Annegret Schüle: Industry and Holocaust. Topf & Sons - The furnace builders of Auschwitz. Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0622-6 , p. 49.
  5. ↑ Address by Prime Minister Christine Lieberknecht . In: Thuringian Parliament, Erfurt City Administration (ed.): January 27, 2001 - Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism - Opening “Pot & Sons - The Oven Builders of Auschwitz”. Erfurt 2011, p. 17 f.
  6. ↑ Harald Welzer: About soldiers, engineers and other producers of destruction . In: Aleida Assmann, Frank Hiddemann, Eckhard Schwarzenberger (eds.): Topf & Sons - manufacturer of the ovens for Auschwitz. A factory site as a place of remembrance? , New York / Frankfurt a. Main 2002, p. 152.
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 323 f.
  8. ↑ a b Harald Welzer: About soldiers, engineers and other producers of destruction . In: Aleida Assmann, Frank Hiddemann, Eckhard Schwarzenberger (eds.): Topf & Sons - manufacturer of the ovens for Auschwitz. A factory site as a place of remembrance? , New York / Frankfurt a. Main 2002, p. 153.
  9. ↑ Logs of Death . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1993, pp. 151-158 ( Online - Oct. 4, 1993 , here p 156).
  10. ↑ Logs of Death . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1993, pp. 151–158 ( online - October 4, 1993 , here p. 158).
  11. ^ Annegret Schüle: Industry and Holocaust. Topf & Sons - The furnace builders of Auschwitz. Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0622-6 , pp. 271-274 (against Jürgen Graf (Holocaust denier) ).
  12. ^ Documents reproduced in Annegret Schüle: Industry and Holocaust. Topf & Sons - The furnace builders of Auschwitz. Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0622-6 , p. 456 f.
  13. ↑ Annegret Schüle: Technology without morals. P. 217 f.
  14. ^ Annegret Schüle: Industry and Holocaust. Topf & Sons - The furnace builders of Auschwitz. Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0622-6 , p. 155 f.
  15. ↑ Quoted from Annegret Schüle: Industry and Holocaust. Topf & Sons - The furnace builders of Auschwitz. Göttingen 2010, p. 277.
personal data
SURNAME Examiner, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German engineer
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Erfurt
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1952
Place of death Gulag