Karen Bartlett: Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Holocaust

Before Pep Guardiola and before José Mourinho, there was Béla Guttmann: the first superstar football coach.

Remarkably, Guttmann was also a Holocaust survivor. Having narrowly dodged death by hiding for months in an attic near Budapest as thousands of fellow Jews in the neighbourhood were dragged off to be murdered, Guttmann later escaped from a slave labour camp. His father, sister and wider family were murdered by the Nazis.

But by 1961, as coach of Benfica, he had lifted one of football’s greatest prizes: the European Cup – a feat he repeated the following year. Rising from the death pits of Europe to become its champion in just over sixteen years, Guttmann performed the single greatest comeback in football history.

‘Through thick and thin, never separate. Stick together, guard each other, and live for one another.’

As Hitler’s war intensified, the Ovitz family would have good reason to stand by their mother’s mantra. Descending from the cattle train into the death camp of Auschwitz, all twelve emerged in 1945 as survivors – the largest family to survive intact.

What saved them? Ironically, the fact that they were sought out by the ‘Angel of Death’ himself – Dr Joseph Mengele. For seven of the Ovitzes were dwarfs – and not just any dwarfs, but a beloved and highly successful vaudeville act known as the Lilliput Troupe. Together, they were the only all-dwarf ensemble with a full show of their own in the history of entertainment.

The Ovitzes intrigued Mengele, and amongst the thousands on whom he performed his loathsome experiments, they became his prize ‘patients’: ‘You’re something special, not like the rest of them.’ It was this disturbing affection that saved their lives. After being plunged into the darkest moments in modern history, this remarkable troupe emerged with spirits undimmed, and went on to light up Europe and Israel, which offered them a new home, with their unique performances. Giants reveals their moving and inspirational story.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

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Copyright © Karen Bartlett 2018

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Author interview with Hartmut Topf.

Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, 1984, p. 45.

Ibid., p. 47.

Kurt Prüfer personnel file, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780–1918, Blackwell Publishing, 1997, p. 1.

Annegret Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust: Topf & Söhne – Die Ofenbauer von Auschwitz, Wallstein Verlag, 2010, pp. 29–30.

AS footnote 69: Mein Lebenslauf [ My Life ] (E.W. Topf), undated (presumably early 1946). ThHStAW [PK: i.e. Thuringian State Archive, Weimar], Collection: Jean-Claude Pressac Nr. 81, sheets 1–22, this quote from sheet 1. Dieter Wettig, grandson of the Topf director, Heinrich Wettig (died 1926), was one of Ernst Wolfgang Topf’s playmates. He confirmed that the family lived on company land (statement made by Dieter Wettig to the author). The baptismal register shows the address as Dreysestraße 7. Baptismal register of the Merchants’ Church, Erfurt, 1903/4.

Blackbourn, op. cit., p. 205.

Ibid.

Schüle, op. cit., p. 64.

AS footnote 5: AS interview with Udo Braun, 31 July 2001.

J. A. Topf commemorative brochure, Landesarchiv Thüringen – Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

E. W. Topf justification, Power without Morals, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

Willy Wiemokli letter and CV post war, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

Bernhard Bredehorn’s statement, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

Kurt Prüfer’s letter of application to Topf and Sons, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

Schüle, op. cit., p. 48.

AS footnote 154: Kurt Prüfer personnel file, ThHStAW, J.A. Topf & Söhne, no. 14, p. 398.

Schüle, op. cit., p. 49. Prüfer finds a way of dealing with death within ordered parameters.

Kurt Prüfer letter, Oct 1943, Landesarchiv Thüringen - Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar.

All quotes used in this chapter have been taken from an author interview with Hartmut Topf.

Richard Alewyn quoted in Michael H. Kater, Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present, Yale University Press, 2014, p. 263.

Max Mayr quoted in Gedenkstätte Buchenwald (ed.), Buchenwald Concentration Camp 1937–1945: A Guide to the Permanent Historical Exhibition, Wallstein Verlag, 2004.

Michael H. Kater, op. cit., p. 118.

Ibid., p. 126.

Ibid., p. 134.

Ibid., p. 212.

Gedenkstätte Buchenwald (ed.), op. cit., p. 24.

Eugene Kogon quoted in ibid., p. 29.

Ibid., p. 27.

Ibid., p. 31.

Ibid., p. 19.

Kater, op. cit, p. 256.

Ibid., p. 268.

Gedenkstätte Buchenwald (ed.), op. cit., p. 20.

Kater, op. cit., p. 266.

Schüle, op. cit., p. 108.

AS footnote 164: Erich Haase in Das war Buchenwald [ This was Buchenwald ], Leipzig, p. 79.