Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – Book Review: Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps
Book Review by Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig
Karen Bartlett, Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
The edifice of Holocaust literature is like a gigantic skyscraper that just keeps on getting bigger. Some books offer a new “window” into what occurred; others are merely an additional brick in the next floor. Architects of Death is a work of the latter sort – although its subject is important enough to have deserved at least another “room”.
Topf and Sons was a German engineering company founded in 1868 – at first, well managed and quite respectable. In the twentieth century, well before the Holocaust, it started “dabbling” in civilian crematoria as a side business (never more than 3% of its annual revenues, even during its Holocaust “heyday”). By the time the Nazis started thinking and working towards their Final Solution for the Jews, Topf and Sons had gained a reputation as one of the (few) leading companies in this line of business. One thing led to another, and they ended up being virtually the sole supplier of gas chamber equipment and especially crematoria for many concentration camps – all the while, not only well aware of the purpose of their “paraphernalia”, but also actively suggesting “improvements” to hasten the killing and incineration. In the end, one of the two brothers (Ludwig Topf) committed suicide at the end of the war; the second (Ernst Wolfgang Topf) successfully fought off all post-war accusations and attempts at bringing him to trial, but failed miserably in trying to resuscitate the company (or its later namesake), and died a shamed and broken man. That’s the story in a nutshell.
Undoubtedly, this is an important – and under-researched – Holocaust topic (the author does provide some previous works that deal with Topf and Sons). The question is how to treat the subject in a full-length (close to 300 page) book. Karen Bartlett – a journalist, not a scholar – decided to present a descriptive narrative in monumental, but excruciating, detail. The good news here is that this book is about as comprehensive as one could ask for. The bad news is that there is much detail that we don’t need or want. Perhaps this is a result of a penchant for “journalistic padding” or an attempt to “flesh out the picture” with minute details regarding the family: who was against whom, when, why and over what? Unfortunately, lengthy quotes from internal corporate letters or correspondence to and from the two main protagonists does not add much to our understanding of the main enterprise, and this is doubly true when Ms. Bartlett goes off track to devote numerous pages about the extended Topf family rivalries, romances, and finances. She also bookends the work with a Topf great-grandson looking back, trying to make some sense of it all. This is a nice literary gimmick, but here too entails breaking up the narrative chronology.
If we have too much detail here, we conversely get almost no analysis beyond the narrow confines of the crematorium story itself. One understands from the book’s subtitle that the focus is on the people involved in manufacturing the crematoria and not on the victims, or even the technology (although there is some interesting detail regarding the engineering “challenges” that the Topf engineers faced). Fair enough. But then, beyond showing us how guilty were the brothers – and several other Topf managers – why isn’t there some sort of reckoning about the nature of such “ordinary” people who actively and consciously (in their later, post-war defense, they tried to argued that it was more “conscientiously following orders”) provided the means for mass murder at a rate never before seen in history? Even a chapter relating the Topfs to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” would have been useful.
The bottom line: this book is worthy of attention for the main story it provides, but caveat emptor – there is a lot of chaff here to get through in order to winnow out the wheat. The author is to be commended for the archival work, not to mention amount of time and energy expended to bring the story to our attention; it is unfortunate that she spent less time on turning it into something with greater narrative flow and/or contributing some psychological and sociological added-value.
