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Photo: Michael Sander, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The company Topf & Söhne built the cremation ovens for concentration camps during the Holocaust. The site of the factory is now a Holocaust memorial site and a museum.
J. A. Topf and Sons was an engineering company, founded in 1878 in Erfurt, Germany by Johannes Andreas Topf (1816–1891). Originally, it made heating systems and brewing and malting equipment. Later, the company diversified into silos, chimneys, incinerators for burning municipal waste, and crematoria. During World War I, it made weapons shells, limbers and other military vehicles. In World War II, it also made weapons shells and aircraft parts for the Luftwaffe.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Take a walk around the town park and see the green side of the city
Main square of the city. Full of stores with the old Post Office building.
The name could be translated as "merchants' bridge"
A bridge with houses built on either side, mostly used for shops. Once this style of bridge was rather common in medieval European cities. However, in many cities such bridges were abandoned due to fire safety concerns or fell victim to the demands of car culture. It is by far Erfurt's most iconic landmark.
Right at the Wenigemarkt or behind the Krämerbrücke beside the river you can have a beautiful look at the old houses standing on the 'bridge'.
ritual bath
A Mikveh is a ritual bath fed by "living" water (in this case a nearby river, which however had much more water in the Middle Ages than it does now). This Mikveh was in use during the same time as the Old Synagogue and is attested in tax records as early as the 13th century. Those same tax records also attest the surrounding area as densely populated by both Jews and Christians. The Mikveh was damaged during the 1349 pogrom but used again after 1354. Following the 1453 expulsion of the Jewish community the mikveh fell into disuse and was converted into a cellar which was subsequently forgotten about. Only in the 2000s were archeological excavations undertaken to unearth this part of Erfurt's Jewish history and it opened as a museum in 2011. Not all questions that science can answer have yet been answered about this site and research is ongoing. You can see down into the Mikveh through a glass window outside the guided tours.
This synagogue sits on the site of the 1884 building plundered and burned down by the Nazis in 1938 and later razed. The Nazis had forced the congregation to sell the land on which the building sat afterwards, but astonishingly the city council gave the land back to the reestablished congregation in 1947. There was debate on the style of the synagogue to be built, with early suggestions rejected as "too ecclesiastical" by the anti-religious East German authorities so the resulting building is pretty modest and betrays its 1950s origins. It is kept under police surveillance due to fear of antisemitic attacks and you can see security cameras near the entrance.