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    Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust
    Unavailable
    Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust
    Unavailable
    Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust
    Ebook359 pages7 hours

    Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust

    By Karen Bartlett

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria at the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen. At its height sixty-six Topf triple muffle ovens were in operation – forty-six of which were at Auschwitz.

    In five years the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz had been the engine of the holocaust, facilitating the murder and incineration of more than one million people, most of them Jews.

    Yet such a spectacularly evil feat of engineering was designed not by the Nazi SS, but by a small respectable firm of German engineers: the owners and engineers of J. A. Topf and Sons. These were not Nazi sadists, but men who were playboys and the sons of train drivers. They were driven not by ideology, but by love affairs, personal ambition and bitter personal rivalries to create the ultimate human killing and disposal machines – even at the same time as their company sheltered Nazi enemies from the death camps.

    The intense conflagration of their very ordinary motives created work that surpassed in its inhumanity even the demands of the SS. In order to fulfil their own ‘dreams’ they created the ultimate human nightmare.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiteback Publishing
    Release dateMar 27, 2018
    ISBN9781785903571
    Unavailable
    Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust
    Author

    Karen Bartlett

    Karen Bartlett is a writer and journalist based in London. She has written extensively for the Sunday Times, The Times, The Guardian and WIRED from Africa, India and the US, and has presented and produced for BBC Radio. She was the youngest director of democratic reform and human rights campaign group Charter88 and began her career in the UK and South Africa. She is the author of After Auschwitz: A Story of Heartbreak and Survival (with Eva Schloss), Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust and the bestselling Dusty: An Intimate Portrait of a Musical Legend.

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    Reviews for Architects of Death

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      This is a biography of the Topf family of Erfurt, Germany and the family firm, Topf and Sons. The company's primary business was manufacturing brewing equipment. However, a division within the company manufactured ovens for crematoria. This division supplied ovens for Auschwitz and other extermination camps during the Nazi era. Most of the focus is on brothers Ludwig Topf Jr and Ernst Wolfgang Topf, who headed the company during the Nazi era, as well as senior employees who were complicit in the design and manufacture of the crematoria ovens and the ventilation systems for the gas chambers. There is more focus on Topf cousin Hartmut Topf than perhaps there should be. While he shares the Topf name, his grandfather left the firm long before the Third Reich came to power. However, he has been outspoken about the Topf family and its legacy, so it probably would have been difficult to write this book without including him. This book would be a good choice for readers looking for information about support for the Nazis among the general populace. This review is based on an electronic advance reading copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley.