The Essence of Technology and the Holocaust

37

be, Prfer could hardly believe his ears, for Bischoff was thinking big, very big.
And Prfer, encouraging him in this direction, was reflecting and calculating. The
result of this conversation was agreement on a project for a crematorium with five
three-muffle furnaces, fed by two big underground morgues. In addition there
was to be a single-muffle waste incinerator. The cremation capacity envisaged was
60 corpses per hour, or a throughput of 1,440 in 24 hours. The expected cost of
the entire building was 650.000 RM and the minimum Topf could expect would
be 5 three-muffle furnaces at 12,000 RM each, making 60.000 RM, to say nothing
of the waste incinerator worth about 5,800 RM and the sundry other supplies [in
fact Topf received a total of 110,000 RM for their installations in Krematorium II
as the new Krematorium came to be designated]. It is quite likely that at this date
Prfer had not even designed the three-muffle furnace yet. But he set to work the
moment he got back to Erfurt.27

Hss himself outlines the productivity of the camps and their optimum efficiency in
the most alarmingly detached manner:
The two smaller crematories [IV and V] were capable of burning about
1,500 bodies in twenty-four hours, according to the calculations made by the
construction company called Topf of Erfurt. Because of the wartime shortage
of materials, the builders were forced to economize during the construction of
Crematories [IV and V]. They were built above ground and the ovens were not as
solidly constructed. It soon became apparent however, that the poor construction
of these two ovens, each with four retorts, did not meet the requirements [Gas
Chamber] II [the white farmhouse], later designated Bunker V, was used up until
the last and was also kept as a standby when breakdowns occurred in Crematories
[II or III]. When larger numbers of transports were received, the gassing was
carried out by day in Crematory V, while Crematories I to IV were used for the
transports that arrived during the night. There was no limit to the number of
bodies that could be burned at [the white farmhouse] as long as the cremations
could be carried out both day and night. Because of the enemy air raids, no further
cremations were allowed during the night after 1944. The highest total figure of
people gassed and cremated in twenty-four hours was slightly more than nine
thousand. This figure was reached in the summer of 1944, during the action in
Hungary, using all the installations except Crematory [IV]. On that day five trains
arrived because of delays on the rail lines, instead of three, as was expected, and
in addition the railroad cars were more crowded than usual.28

The more we read and hear about the concentration camps and the Final Solution,
the more we begin to appreciate the aptness of the characterization factories of death.
These houses of horror functioned with industrial efficiency. There was a highly
organized, mechanized approach; the objectives were achieved with a mechanical
level of precision. In the same way that factories began to organize the various
stages of manufacture such that each component was built and assembled quickly
and discretely at one station before being conveyed along to the next station for the
subsequent stage in a manufacturing process, so these people were conveyed along