Erinnerungsort Topf & Söhne

In the location's words:

J. A. Topf & Sons - An Erfurt family business and the Holocaust

There were "not devils and people in Auschwitz, but people and people", according to Józef Szajna, a former Polish Auschwitz and Buchenwald prisoner. People who wanted the camp, built it and kept it running, and people, in the end well over a million, who were killed there.

In the crematoria for the genocide of the European Jews and Sinti and Roma, engineers from J. A. Topf & Sons built the incineration ovens and the ventilation technology for the gas chambers. In no other civilian place were the issues associated with the practice of the industrial extermination of human life more present than in this Erfurt company: as a mission, as work, as a technological challenge.

Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. On January 27, 2011, the Topf & Sons - The Oven Builders of Auschwitz memorial site was opened on the former company premises. The state capital of Erfurt thus acknowledges its responsibility towards history and secures a historical place of learning and its irreplaceable potential for reflecting on ethical questions of work and business for the future.