Author(s): Karen Bartlett

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For 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.