Builders of the Third Reich

The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour

Charles Dick

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350337053
• eBook ISBN: 9781350182684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This is the first comprehensive critical study of the Organisation Todt (OT), a key institution which oversaw the Third Reich's vast slave labour programme together with the SS, Wehrmacht and industry. The book breaks new ground by revealing the full extent of the organisation's brutal and murderous operations across occupied Europe and in the Reich. For the first time, Charles Dick provides a strong voice for camp survivors overseen by the OT, drawing on an extensive collection of personal accounts and analysing the violence they endured. Builders of the Third Reich shows Hitler used the OT, which had a labour force of around 1.5 million people in 1944, as an instrument of subjugation and occupation to project German imperial power. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, it demonstrates how the organisation participated in the plunder of Europe's raw materials and manpower, greatly boosting the German war economy. The book reveals how OT staff shot, beat or worked tens of thousands of prisoners to death, both within the SS-run concentration camp system and outside it, with analysis of OT operations showing that where it had sole, or very high levels of control over camps, prisoner death rates were extremely high. Examining how engineers and builders, individuals who fitted the category of 'ordinary men' as precisely as any other group so far examined by historians, perpetrated war crimes, this volume reflects on how few OT personnel were interrogated or came to trial and how the organisation passed largely under the radar of post-war prosecutors, researchers and the general public.

1

The Organisation Todt in Hitler’s empire

On the road to war, Hitler entrusted Fritz Todt and Albert Speer with two tasks at the core of his future empire: the dictator chose Todt to mastermind the construction of the Third Reich’s motorway network, destined to radiate out into conquered territory, and instructed Speer to begin rebuilding Berlin as an imperial capital, to be renamed ‘Germania’.¹ Hitler put Todt in charge of building the Autobahnen in 1933, just months after he became chancellor. He then appointed Speer to realise his vision for Germania on 30 January 1937, the fourth anniversary of his accession to power. In both instances he chose men who would go on to serve in succession as his armaments ministers and leaders of what became known as the Organisation Todt (OT). This labour force grew out of Todt’s motorway-building concern, and Hitler publicly named it for the first time in 1938. This was while its engineers were building the Westwall, known as the Siegfried Line to Germany’s wartime foes, just over a year before the Second World War started with the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland.

The projects to create the motorways and Germania reflected Hitler’s megalomania and craving for all things gargantuan. They also demonstrated his reliance on the workforce of engineers and construction specialists created by Todt, which began on the motorways, largely transferred to the Westwall and then absorbed the builders of Germania during the war.² From an improvised group of around 350,000 German workers in the run-up to the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflict, the Organisation Todt metamorphosed in wartime into a 1.5-million-strong agency mostly composed of foreign slave labourers,³ including Jews and Slavs vilified under the Nazi racist code. Germans made up less than a quarter of the force. As Hitler’s imperial designs grew following initial military successes, so did the OT’s geographical reach. By 1940 the OT had started motorway networks to link Klagenfurt to Trondheim and Calais to Warsaw, with a route later planned as far as Moscow. Development of the railways was to include the introduction of double-decker trains travelling at up to 200 kilometres per hour, taking 600 passengers per carriage from Munich to Rostov-on-Don. Hitler instructed Munich rail authorities to make the necessary changes to the main station, whose hall was to have required the largest steelframe structure in the world. As for the city of Germania, Hitler’s obsession with buildings which would outdo rival colonial powers was its hallmark. A triumphal arch would dwarf its Parisian counterpart, and the main north–south and east–west roads were to have been more than 100 metres wide. A massive domed hall next to the Führer’s palace would accommodate 180,000 people, while a neighbouring square was designed for events attended by a million.⁴ On seeing a model of the planned city, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels commented admiringly: ‘Incomparably monumental. The Führer is raising a memorial to himself in stone.’⁵

The imperial capital of Germania was the biggest of five ‘leader cities’ (Führerstädte) to be redeveloped at great cost under plans reaching into peacetime after an imagined Nazi final victory. The other cities in this elite group were Nuremberg, Hamburg, Munich and Linz, earmarked for the grandest rebuilding under plans which, to a lesser extent, included almost all of Germany’s major cities. The Baltic seaside spa of Prora, on the island of Rügen, was to have become the world’s largest resort, with 75 kilometres of beach and facilities for 14 million German holidaymakers a year. Although German military setbacks from late 1941 onwards meant most of these long-term schemes were never realised, they covered not just the core of the Reich but the occupied territories of Europe. The Norwegian city of Trondheim was to have been turned into a settlement for more than a quarter of a million Germans, protected by a naval base which Hitler claimed would have made Singapore look like ‘mere child’s play’. In Eastern Europe the dictator instructed that new German urban developments should be modelled on the Fatherland’s medieval towns, such as Regensburg or Heidelberg. They would have been ringed at a distance of 30–40 kilometres by model settlements built for the German rural population, with imposing public buildings and fast road links.⁶

The significance of the OT’s involvement in this chilling imperial vision, under which the lives of the local East European population counted for virtually nothing, was twofold: building was Hitler’s passion, and this was the area where the OT excelled. Hitler’s imperial goals were central to the operations of the Organisation Todt, which was deployed almost exclusively in Nazi-occupied territory for most of the war and relied heavily on slave labour. In choosing Todt and Speer to construct the Third Reich’s highways and the colossal buildings of metropolitan Berlin, even before he appointed them as successive armaments ministers, Hitler entrusted these two men with components of his imperial design that he especially prized. What he required were edifices and feats of technology designed to proclaim German power and his own to the world.

The dictator relied on Todt and Speer to fashion these symbols of imperial might, while hundreds of thousands of OT staff and foreign labourers built defence lines and transport links to defend conquered territories up to their furthest frontiers. For Hitler, the OT was an instrument of conquest and occupation. The bonds that developed between himself, Todt and Speer boosted the profile of the organisation, which became tightly woven into his dreams of empire, architecture and German technological prowess. To understand how the OT spread its network through German-occupied Europe and came to dominate all construction in the Reich in the final year of the war, the structure and aims of the organisation itself need to be investigated. Professional and academic qualifications of around 1,400 OT personnel are analysed in this chapter to assess the backgrounds of senior staff. Investigation of the remarkable expansion of the OT should start, though, with an assessment of the contribution of its two successive leaders. Hitler respected Todt, valuing his loyalty and competence; he delighted in discussing architecture with the much younger Speer, who was thirty-one when put in charge of rebuilding Berlin. Hitler’s relationships with Todt and Speer are examined in turn, contrasting the two OT chiefs’ individual styles of leadership and gauging their separate efforts to realise Hitler’s imperial ambitions.

The Organisation Todt under Todt

Todt and his large workforce had been constructing motorways for five years before Hitler named the ‘Organisation Todt’ in public for the first time. The dictator’s decision, proclaimed at the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg rally in September 1938, represented an extraordinary honour for a man who had become one of his closest confidants.⁷ It recognised Hitler’s favourite civil engineer in a way normally reserved for the Führer alone. The leader of the Third Reich was the figurehead of the Hitler Jugend, but Fritz Todt became one of the few in the Nazi elite deemed worthy of having a national organisation bearing his name.⁸ This accolade reflected the strength of the bond between the two men, first forged during the building of the Autobahnen and the Westwall.

Hitler’s impatience with the army led him to choose Todt’s labour force to complete the Westwall. Frustrated by the slow pace of army engineers, Hitler ordered Todt to take over building the fortifications facing France’s Maginot Line in May 1938. The dictator saw the Westwall as essential to secure Germany’s western flank before his grab for Czechoslovakia, but concluded that the army was not up to the job.⁹ He derided army understanding of the required bunker strength and the power of modern weapons as ‘shocking’. Hitler later declared that, if he had left it to the army alone, the Westwall would ‘still not have been ready in ten years’. It was thanks to the Organisation Todt, he said, that the whole project had got under way and progress had been made.¹⁰ The dictator foresaw two possible outcomes: Europe would either be under German leadership or fall victim to ‘Bolshevism’. He would rather not have to build the Westwall, but the more intensely the Third Reich looked to the East, the more it needed to guard itself against the West, where France, its First World War enemy, was viewed as the threat.

Like many OT operations, the Westwall was a massive undertaking, measuring about 600 kilometres in length and up to 50 kilometres in depth.¹¹ Its construction required 350,000 OT workers, 90,000 of the army’s fortification engineers and 100,000 from the Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst – RAD).¹² Todt set up his headquarters in Wiesbaden for what became a roundthe-clock operation. He used his excellent contacts with industry to enlist the expertise and manpower of about 1,000 firms,¹³ as well as Nazi Party resources such as the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps – NSKK) to provide the fleets of trucks and other transport needed. It was this kind of improvisation and ingenuity that inspired Hitler’s faith in Todt and his workforce.

When Hitler came to power, Todt was forty-two and possessed impeccable political credentials for becoming part of the regime. He had joined the Nazi Party as early as January 1923, gaining the very low membership number of 2465, and the SA in 1931. Like Hitler, he had served in the armed forces in the First World War, having been forced to interrupt his engineering studies to do so. He had joined the army in 1914 and transferred to the air force in 1916. He was wounded and received the Iron Cross. After the war he returned to college and gained his engineering diploma in Karlsruhe before eventually going on to obtain the higher qualification of doctor of engineering in Munich in 1931. On acquiring his initial qualification in Karlsruhe, Todt worked in industry, gathering experience which was to prove exceptionally useful in building up contacts with firms which would later be hired by the OT to carry out its gigantic construction and engineering projects. Some of Todt’s colleagues from his time with the Munich road-building firm Sager and Woerner from 1921 to 1933 held senior posts under him in the OT, including his deputy, Xaver Dorsch.¹⁴

It was while he was working for Sager and Woerner that Todt wrote to the NSDAP in Munich in response to an appeal in the party’s publication, the Völkischer Beobachter, and offered his services as an engineer, suggesting ways to make technical and administrative savings in building the Reich’s highways.¹⁵ The party’s favourable response brought an invitation for him to join the newly formed Kampfbund deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure (KDAI – Action Group of German Architects and Engineers) as head of its section for civil engineers. In December 1932 Todt wrote a forty-nine-page report entitled ‘Road-building and Road Administration’, which set out for the party leadership what he viewed as a way to combat Germany’s high unemployment and provide a motorway network with considerable military potential. He estimated that an army of 300,000 men could be transported during just two nights of driving on these highways from the east to the west of the Reich. Hitler was said to have been delighted when the report was presented to him, and Todt’s appointment as overseer of the construction of the Reich’s motorways followed soon after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.¹⁶

After Todt went on to oversee construction of the Westwall, he revealed a ruthless streak in his character when problems arose. Long shifts and hard labour, sometimes under fire after the war began, sparked protests among the workers and Todt, fearing delays, resorted to harsher methods to ensure the pace did not slacken.¹⁷ He acted swiftly to crush opposition among his workers (at that time predominantly German). The measures he took to punish OT Westwall workers guilty of mostly minor offences included detention and ‘re-education’ in Hinzert camp, led from October 1939 by a future commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Pister. Since 1938 the OT had used police detention centres to incarcerate alleged offenders from the Autobahnen and Westwall workforces as a means of ensuring labourers quickly returned to work, typically after three weeks of ‘re-education’. When Pister started work with Todt as part of the SS security staff on Germany’s western frontier, he was given OT funding to convert disused barrack camps into detention centres designed to reform any ‘work-shy’ OT labourers on the Westwall and the motorways. The project was fully supported by the local Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei – Secret State Police). Hinzert and three other SS special detention units quickly came to resemble small-scale concentration camps, despite Todt’s express instruction that they should not do so. The head of the OT was nevertheless said by Pister to have been very satisfied with an increase in productivity among his labour gangs. When the OT shifted manpower into occupied France following the Wehrmacht’s May 1940 western offensive, the SS at first regarded Hinzert as having lost its reason for existence. On Himmler’s order, however, it continued to operate and was brought under the SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager – IKL) in July 1940. Hinzert was deemed in its initial phase to have been so successful that it became a model for experiments with police detention centres elsewhere. The Gestapo, whose acts of terror against political opponents earned them a fearsome reputation, also detained tens of thousands of German and foreign workers for non-political, labour-related offences in around 200 ‘work education camps’ (Arbeitserziehungslager – AEL) around the Reich.¹⁸

In a report covering his time in charge of Hinzert, Pister said the camp’s average total of 600–700 prisoners could be put to work on the Westwall and other sites and their SS guards could ensure ‘maximum work performance’, combining punishment with productive labour at the same time as relieving the load on the prison system. He bragged that initially reluctant firms had become eager to use his prisoners, whose productivity was twice or three times as high as that of other labourers.¹⁹ The concept of re-education or reform of offenders was much favoured by Pister. He believed that his German ‘boarders’ (Zöglinge) in the Hinzert special camp could be reintegrated into society and turned into useful members of the community. He relied on traditional techniques based on military-style camp life, strict discipline and extreme hard labour.²⁰

Todt was proud of his organisation’s links with the SS and recommended Pister to Himmler, whose SS controlled the concentration camps, as a ‘good leader of men’. Todt was himself an SA-Obergruppenführer and committed National Socialist, having been a Hitler loyalist from the movement’s earliest days. In an exchange with Himmler in October 1941 about SS members working for the OT, he argued that about seventy such SS officers should keep the field-grey uniforms worn by the Waffen-SS, ‘for I have always considered it right that it should be indicated by means of the uniform, also, that the OT’s leadership developed strongly from party structures’.²¹ The OT became a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Organisation Todt in Hitler’s empire
• 2 Plunder in Europe
• 3 The Organisation Todt in the Nazi system
• 4 Slave labourers under the Organisation Todt
• 5 Engineers as slave drivers
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Appendix: Organisation Todt ranks with Army equivalents
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint