Todt Organization

Todt Organization. In scarcely five years, according to a 1945 British Intelligence report, the Organization Todt (OT) carried out the most impressive construction programme since the days of the Roman Empire. More than 1,400,000 men built bunkers and bridges for the Wehrmacht, but though they wore uniforms with swastika armbands they were neither soldiers nor members of a party organization. A Nazi body, though independent of party control, the OT was the only organization in the Third Reich besides the Hitler Youth to bear the name of a member of the party élite. The reactions it provoked varied from amazement to fear.

In 1938 Fritz Todt (1892–1942), Hitler's young engineer and chief architect, had been commissioned to complete the building of the giant West Wall on the German–French frontier as quickly as possible. To do this he brought in gangs from his newly-built autobahns, mobilized the Reich Labour Service, and used the Wehrmacht's construction battalions. Todt placed his trust in the principles of private enterprise, the art of improvization, and the triumph of technical rationality over red tape. Under his leadership, almost half a million workers built 5,000 concrete bunkers in record time, freeing Hitler to invade Poland without the need to worry about his western borders.

Following the outbreak of war, Todt as a close confidant of the Führer, was given an ever increasing number of construction tasks vital to the war effort (see Table). The OT followed the conquering Wehrmacht across Europe, repairing bridges, dams, road systems, and bombed factories, and in the process playing a large role in exploiting the occupied countries. In the Balkans it took care of the mining of ores essential to the war effort and their shipment to the Reich; and the roads on which Hitler's Wehrmacht marched to Yugoslavia and Greece were brought up to scratch by it. In the west its building gangs were put to work from Norway to the Bay of Biscay to construct the Atlantic Wall intended to protect Hitler's conquests against the British and American forces. The great U-boat pens in France and the airfields used in the bombardment of Allied Arctic convoys en route for Murmansk were also its work as, later, were the V-1 launching ramps (see V-weapons).

After February 1940, when Fritz Todt became minister for weapons and munitions, he was given ever more responsibility for the war economy. The OT expanded in consequence, recruiting large numbers of foreign workers. But it attracted few Germans and those it employed had an average age of 53. Some 80% of the OT's members were young non-Germans, many of them volunteers taken in by clever propaganda. But most were forced labour and prisoners-of-war (POW), uniformed and drilled and in a position which was little better than those working in the concentration camps.

The OT's greatest task came in June 1941 as Hitler's Wehrmacht invaded the USSR (see BARBAROSSA). The military construction battalions alone were incapable of building the necessary railway links, bridges, and repair facilities in the vast expanses of the USSR. Even at this stage the OT was no more than an improvised construction organization rather than an official institution of the Third Reich, and thus avoided being taken over by either the party or the armed forces.

In February 1942 Todt was killed in a mysterious air accident; thereafter his successor, Albert Speer, maintained the OT as his predecessor had run it. Under Speer it reached its maximum size. From 1943–4, in addition to its many tasks abroad, it became heavily engaged in clearing up air raid damage in Germany and building more facilities for the war effort. In this latter regard it became more and more obvious that the OT were not just ‘soldier-workers’, but part of the Nazi system of terror and annihilation. Its members were committed in anti-partisan campaigns and supervised teams of Jewish slave-workers and Soviet POW. They were technicians, slave-drivers, and in some cases murderers. Their technical ability was doubtless greater than their discipline. Complaints about corruption in the OT and other signs of organizational degeneration dramatically increased in 1944 as the Germans retreated on all fronts.

At no time did the authorities succeed in welding the military and civilian construction units together. The OT remained independent—even when, in the autumn of 1944, it was renamed the ‘Front-OT’, armed, and committed to the defence of the Reich. Most of the buildings it created were now destroyed and after the German defeat the OT itself was broken up and banned. Speer, its last head, was convicted at the Nuremberg trials of forced recruitment and employing slave labour. While the ruins left by the Romans can still be seen and marvelled at today, most of the buildings erected by the OT for Adolf Hitler's ‘Thousand Year Reich’ have long since disappeared in the dust of history. See also Speer Plan and raw and synthetic materials.

Rolf-Dieter Müller

Bibliography

Guse, J. C. , The Spirit of the Plassenburg. Technology and Ideology in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983).
Seidler, F. W. , Die Organisation Todt (Koblenz, 1987).
—— Fritz Todt (Munich, 1986).