Germany plans Holocaust museum at firm that made crematoriums

A factory in Germany, where the crematoriums for Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps were built, is to be turned into a Holocaust museum, the city of Erfurt said Saturday.

It will provide a permanent home for an exhibition that began earlier this year at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The “Technicians of the Final Solution” exhibition describes how an ordinary German engineering company, which did not go out of business until 1994, built the

crematoriums.

Apparently it was fully aware that the SS forces of the Nazi Party were killing people in hundreds of thousands at Auschwitz.

Topf did not have to take orders from the SS. It pursued the business and took the initiative in “improving” the devices, said the head of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, Volkhard Knigge. The engineers were not rabid Nazis but ordinary Germans.

Work for the SS accounted for only 2 per cent of Topf’s overall sales and could have been dropped without imperilling the company.