War & dictatorship

1914–1918: the war reaches everyday life

Erfurt was far from the principal battlefields of the First World War, but it was deeply involved in the war economy. Metalworking and engineering businesses turned towards armaments production, while trades serving civilian needs faced contraction. The city’s role as a garrison and industrial centre shaped how the war was experienced at home. 1

Food shortages, rationing, and declining purchasing power placed households under pressure. Schools and gymnasiums were used to accommodate wounded soldiers. Bereavement belonged to the same urban history as factory production: the war’s effects reached families, classrooms, and neighbourhoods, rather than remaining an event experienced only by soldiers. 1

As hardship increased, enthusiasm for the war weakened. Erfurt was drawn into the workers’ and soldiers’ revolution of November 1918. The end of imperial rule opened a new political period, but left the city with the social and material consequences of four years of war. 1

1933: the destruction of democratic safeguards

The Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship were distinct political systems. The passage from one to the other was not simply an inevitable continuation of wartime hardship. It involved the seizure and dismantling of institutions through political decisions, intimidation, and violence.

After Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, the National Socialists used state power against their opponents. The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended fundamental rights, including protections for personal liberty and freedom of expression and assembly. Communists and Social Democrats were among those subjected to persecution. These national changes created the framework in which local authorities and organisations operated. 2

For a history of Erfurt, that framework matters because persecution was enacted locally. The consequences can be traced in the city’s record of Jewish residents: exclusion, dispossession, forced departure, and deportation were changes imposed on identifiable people and families. 3

Jewish Erfurt: persecution and destroyed lives

The Große Synagoge, or Great Synagogue, had opened in 1884. During the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, members of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organisation, looted and burned it. Homes and businesses were attacked, and Jewish men were assembled in the school gymnasium on Meyfartstraße before being taken to Buchenwald. This was the Great Synagogue, not the medieval Alte Synagoge—the Old Synagogue that survives today. 3 7

The city’s commemorative biographies make the effects of persecution concrete. Four-year-old Günther Beer lived with his mother and grandparents at Domplatz 23. In May 1942 he was deported with his family through Weimar towards the Lublin district. The municipal account identifies him as the youngest Erfurt resident in that deportation. A familiar address on the cathedral square thus belongs to the history of a child whose life was destroyed by Nazi persecution. 4

The same records describe the Dublon family, whose shoe businesses were lost and whose attempted escape aboard the St. Louis did not bring lasting safety. These histories should not be reduced to a single anonymous total. They preserve relationships, occupations, and the attempts people made to survive. 4

Topf & Söhne: engineering and responsibility

The Erfurt firm J. A. Topf & Söhne links the city directly to the machinery of the Holocaust. Its business included industrial heating and brewing equipment; from 1914 it also manufactured cremation furnaces. In 1939 the owners began supplying the SS with furnaces designed for concentration camps. 5

By 1943, furnaces and gas-chamber ventilation equipment from Erfurt formed part of the large crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The memorial’s chronology documents the company’s knowledge of mass killing, including a 1942 patent application for a furnace intended for continuous mass operation. Cremation furnaces and gas-chamber ventilation were different systems, but both were part of the company’s contribution. 5

The importance of this history extends beyond the identification of a manufacturer. It raises precise questions about professional expertise, commercial initiative, and personal responsibility. The documents preserved and studied by the memorial show how civilian business activity helped enable genocide. The crimes were committed through human decisions, not by technology acting on its own. 8

Buchenwald and the geography of forced labour

Erfurt’s connections to Buchenwald include the imprisonment of Jewish men following the November pogrom and the business relationship between Topf & Söhne and the SS. These are distinct connections and should be described as such. 3 5

Buchenwald also operated a large network of subcamps. The memorial explains that by mid-1944 more than half of its prisoners were held outside the main camp. Companies, municipalities, and state and military bodies exploited their labour. This network spread far beyond a single town, making forced labour part of a wider economic and administrative landscape. A local history must therefore distinguish the main camp, its individual subcamps, and other forms of coerced labour rather than treating them as interchangeable. 6

Remembering within the city

The end of Nazi rule did not undo the destruction of families and communities. Erfurt’s present-day remembrance work brings the history back into public space: the DenkNadeln, commemorative markers, recall residents persecuted and murdered as Jews. The Jewish Life network connects historic places, the living Jewish community, and the Topf & Söhne Memorial. Jewish history is presented as more than the history of persecution alone. 7

The memorial’s educational work uses documents to examine the relationship between industry and the Holocaust and to counter denial. Reading these records alongside individual biographies helps keep both responsibility and the lives of victims in view. Neither an attractive cityscape nor an account of technical achievement is an adequate history if it leaves out the people harmed and the institutions that enabled the harm. 8