COLUMN ONE : Holocaust Haunts Heirs’ Bid : The Topf brothers built the ovens for the Nazi death camps. Now, their descendants want the factory and villa seized after the war--testing the limits of Germany’s tangled land restoration program.

ERFURT, Germany —  The image was unforgettable: Oskar Schindler climbing out of his Mercedes-Benz, noticing a flurry of ash drifting down from the sky, sniffing the wind, flicking with puzzled irritation the flakes from his windshield and his trim, double-breasted suit.

Viewers of the movie “Schindler’s List” know that this apparent midsummer snowstorm was really human ash, the incinerated remains of the Jews and others gassed at Hitler’s death camps. What viewers may not have known is that such storms were the patented work of a family business here in east-central Germany, J.A. Topf & Soehne. During the Second World War, the company made the ovens used to dispose of the bodies of those murdered at Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald.

If it hadn’t been for Topf ovens, the Nazis would have had a far harder time killing so many and leaving so little evidence. And, chillingly, there are indications that the family was proud of its work. A visitor to the Holocaust memorial site at Buchenwald can inspect the old crematories and see the ovens, the doors handsomely emblazoned with the name Topf in Gothic brass letters.

Today too, half a century later, the family’s factory still stands on a side street in the Thuringian capital of Erfurt, not far from the family villa, set on a large tract of urban parkland. The Topfs had their property seized by the Soviets at the end of the war; the factory fell into disrepair, and the villa swimming pool is full of dirt. But no matter. Today, in a bizarre land claim, one that is remarkable even in a country plagued by post-Communist property tangles, a new generation of Topfs is trying to get the old manufacturing domain back.

“Heirs have the duty to take responsibility for the past,” says Dagmar Topf, a 50-year-old therapist from the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein who, in the name of the Topf brothers’ descendants, filed a claim in 1990 on the factory, park and villa. The parkland alone is said to be worth at least $2.5 million. But Topf, the daughter-in-law of a late factory director, argues that it is social consciousness, and not greed, that motivates her and those she represents. If the factory were in family hands, she says, she and the other Topfs would find ways of running it that might somehow atone for the past.

“This company was involved in the terrible things that happened,” she says. “My personal task now is to see to it that such things never happen again.”

Maybe yes, maybe no--but in any case, how could such a land claim prosper? Why should the German legal system entertain the arguments of a woman whose Nazi-collaborator in-laws were apprehended, interrogated and irreversibly expropriated?

In the end, the Topf descendants may never get their family’s property back--the head of the land-claims office in Erfurt predicts as much--but nevertheless, the eagerness with which Dagmar Topf has pursued her mission says much about the chaotic state of property ownership in what used to be East Germany.

For the younger Topfs are not the only westerners who have been trying, since 1990, to lay claim to a piece of eastern German real estate--far from it. During the Third Reich, the Nazis seized homes and businesses from Jews and other perceived enemies of the state; then, when the Soviets rolled into what would later become East Germany, they expropriated countless more properties from the fascists and their supporters, real and perceived.

Then, for the four decades that East Germany did business as a Communist country, the authorities treated all this seized real estate as “the people’s” property, and parceled it out as living quarters and “people’s enterprises.”

Finally, with reunification in 1990, the authorities gave eastern Germany’s dispossessed, and their offspring, the chance to set things right. Anyone whose property was confiscated between 1933 and 1945, or between 1949 and 1990, was empowered to demand restitution or compensation.

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That was when Dagmar Topf made her move.

“After the Wende (the Great Change), I was moved to come forward and say, ‘I know what my relatives did. I want to use my knowledge to create something. To build something. To improve something,’ ” she says. “So, we talked it over, and (my father-in-law’s) side of the family decided to authorize me to represent them.” She filed her first claim in 1990.

Which put her in ample company. As of this year, 1.2 million people have come forward in Germany, seeking more than 2.7 million pieces of real estate in the former East. The government has been swamped sorting out who owns what, separating legitimate claimants from charlatans, and deciding what to do in the not-uncommon cases in which, say, addressing the claims of descendants of an emigre Jew would mean evicting an innocent eastern German family.

“We will do our best to see that more than half of the claims are settled by the end of 1995,” says Hans-Juergen Schaefer, president of the Federal Department of Unsettled Property Ownership. “But it is very difficult, and I’m certain that we won’t be done with all the claims until sometime after the year 2000.”

Meanwhile, investment in the dilapidated and needy former East has slowed to a crawl, and resentment among easterners toward the western land claimants is impossible to miss.

In the Saxony-Anhalt town of Barby, someone torched the central land-title office last year in an apparent attempt to destroy the property records and put a halt to the restitution.

And in another particularly sad case, a well-known East German reform activist, Detlef Dalk, killed himself during a property dispute after composing an eloquent suicide note in which he protested “the gigantic flood of property from the east to the west” and called the claim on his land “ridiculous.”

“There is a certain number of false claims,” admits Schaefer, “and when someone pursues an illegitimate claim, they can do so very skillfully, so that it takes a long time to find it out. But I would say that is only a small percentage. Most claims are filed in good faith.”

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The case of the Nazi oven works started over a century ago, when Julius Andreas Topf, a blacksmith, opened a furnace and heating-equipment foundry in Erfurt. Topf had heard that in Milan, Italy, the city fathers were experimenting with cremation, and it struck him as a good business opportunity. He asked his engineers to work on the burning of corpses, and even joined a promotional society called Friends of Cremation.

By the late 1920s, J.A. Topf & Soehne, operated by the founder’s sons, Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig, was selling crematories to cities as far away as Lisbon and Brussels, as well as throughout Germany.

Then came the rise of Adolf Hitler. The Jews were herded into ghettos, then shipped to concentration camps, and eventually selected for forced labor or gassing. At this point, the activities of J.A. Topf & Soehne become somewhat murky.

How much did Ernst Wolfgang and Ludwig know about the mass murders? Nothing, insists Dagmar Topf: “I feel quite sure that they didn’t know how their ovens were being used.”

Records show that the brothers joined the National Socialist Party in 1935, but Dagmar Topf maintains they did so only under pressure. “You have to understand about German history,” she says. “If you didn’t go along with the system, you had lots of problems.”

But does that really explain the zeal with which J.A. Topf & Soehne fulfilled its contracts? One company engineer, Kurt Pruefer, went so far as to take out a patent on his “Auschwitz style” twin-chambered oven, boasting that its burning capacity--30 to 36 corpses in 10 hours--easily beat the competition. Pruefer went on to invent a 46-chambered oven, and reportedly won the nickname “the Wizard of Cremation” around the Topf factory. How could he not have known what was going on?

“Yes, it’s true that the company built four big crematoria at Auschwitz,” says Dagmar Topf. “But at that time, you could have called them civil crematoria.” She pulls out a scholarly work on Nazi cremation technology, which shows that while the Topf brothers’ first order from the SS--the special Nazi police--came in late 1939, the gassing of the Jews began in earnest in March, 1943. Until then, Topf argues, it is reasonable to assume that the ovens were needed only to cremate camp inmates who died in epidemics.

“It was only on the date of March 13, 1943, that the misuse of the crematoria began,” she says. “It was a tragedy for the company, and also a tragedy for the victims.”

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At the end of the war, when Germany was divided among the Allies, the administration of Erfurt, a city not far from Buchenwald, fell to the Soviets. They seized the oven factory and sent Pruefer and several other senior managers to Siberian work camps. Ludwig Topf took his life in the villa. Ernst Wolfgang hastened to the French-administered zone in the West, eventually going into business there; he died without returning to live in what became East Germany.

“What was burned in those ovens was already dead,” he told a German court in the early 1960s. “You can’t hold the builders of the ovens responsible for the deaths of the people who were burned in them.”

Back in Erfurt, East Germany’s socialist overlords gave the Topf factory a new name: the “Erfurt People’s Malting and Storage-Container Construction Co.,” or E.M.S. The rank and file were put to work building breweries, field kitchens and silos for the Soviet Union, as war reparations. The villa was converted into a kindergarten. As the years passed, hundreds of political employees found their way onto the E.M.S. payroll, and the company settled into a routine of building huge storage elevators for the East German grain crop.

One fast-rising staff member, as it happens, was a man named Udo Braun, a descendant of the oven makers. His father, the factory’s production manager in the Nazi years, had been condemned to Siberia. While the elder Braun shivered in the Soviet subarctic, Udo was starting as an apprentice, earning an array of engineering degrees, and working his way up through the E.M.S. ranks, always in the face of discrimination by Communists, he says, who would never let him forget what his father had done.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Braun had become E.M.S.’ production manager and interim chief executive. Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and E.M.S., like all East German “people’s enterprises,” was faced with liquidation, privatization, or a return to its pre-Communist owners.

Dagmar Topf says she knew that lots of hustlers and carpetbaggers were flocking east, trying to grab the best pieces of the old industrial stock. She feared the worst for the staff at her ancestral oven works: “There were many, many employees who had been with the firm for 30 or 40 years,” she says. “There was a great danger that they would be fired. We were afraid that someone would buy the place just to get the real estate, and not to save the factory and the jobs.”

But to Udo Braun, one of those easterners who had toughed it out in Erfurt through the Communist years, the worst danger came precisely from the likes of Dagmar Topf. “That woman is so dumb!” he exclaims when her name comes up. “I am trying to remain charming, but with her it is simply impossible.

“In the beginning, after the Wall came down, I was very euphoric,” he goes on, sitting in shirt sleeves on a warm Friday afternoon. “I just didn’t think about property rights. But later on, when the first prospective investors came and I could sense that some of them were speculators, then I got the feeling that we were in trouble.”

The government told Braun he had three months to find financial backing for the factory, or it would be liquidated. Braun says he jumped into his car and began crisscrossing Germany, looking for business contacts in the unfamiliar West. He says he logged more than 60,000 miles, and finally found an investor on his birthday, April 2, 1993. By the end of June, the factory was private, and the new owner had made him CEO. The factory, which today employs 85 people, makes steel containers for preparing malt used in brewing beer.

Dagmar Topf says the privatization was a “brutal” affair, and that Braun has fired hundreds of E.M.S. staffers. “Of course there had to be some firings,” she says. “It wasn’t economically feasible to keep all the hundreds of jobs. But I wanted to save some of the jobs. And I didn’t have a chance.”

The government has rejected most of the Topf descendants’ claims--on technical, not moral, grounds. The German unification treaty says that nothing expropriated by the Soviets between 1945 and 1949 can be given back, and the Topf factory was seized during that time. There are still-unresolved Topf claims on the villa parkland, but officials in the Erfurt land-claims office say they expect these eventually will be denied.

That doesn’t stop Dagmar Topf. She is combing the corporate and German state archives, trying to uncover more secrets from the past. “This part of history should never be closed,” she argues. “I want to make sure that all the facts are clear. It’s a sociopolitical task.”

And what of Braun? Does he ever stop to contemplate the oddness of it all? The Topf heirs are all but shut out, but here he is, coming to work each day, running the plant where his father played his own unique role in the Nazi horror.

“Of course,” he says. “I was 9 years old at the end of the war, and my father was taken away for some investigation. . . . And then, when I was at school, they sent us to look at an exhibition about the Holocaust, and we had to look at all these shrunken heads and human skins. It was very shocking--as shocking as it must have been for the citizens of Weimar, when they were forced to get onto buses and go walk through Buchenwald. I never forgot a single detail of that exhibition. I think it was good that I had to see it.

“Then, when I became an apprentice here, they put all of us into one room and showed us pictures, so that we knew that the owner of this place had once produced those ovens. The East German state wanted us to know this history. But they did it in a peculiar way. They were constantly saying, ‘We are the new state, and we had nothing to do with this.’ They kept repeating and repeating it, and of course, when you hit someone again and again in the same place, it starts to get tired. Sometimes it’s very hard to be a German.”