The Trial of Organisation Todt

Early on 8 February 1942 a plane crashed shortly after take-off near the ‘Wolf’s Lair’, Adolf Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia, killing the dictator’s armaments minister, the founder of Organisation Todt (OT). The death of Fritz Todt, whose pessimism about victory in the East against Stalin was well known, prompted speculation that he had been assassinated, perhaps by the SS, but no documentary evidence exists to support the theory. Although there was proof of arguments between Todt and Hitler over whether Germany could prevail after the launch of Operation Barbarossa in mid-1941, no detailed record was taken of discussions they held late into the night before the crash. Exactly why the converted Heinkel He 111 plunged to earth is likely to remain unexplained. At a critical juncture in the war, a key minister fiercely loyal to Hitler, who dared to cross his Führer and suggest a political rather than military end to the conflict, was gone.

The man who took over from Todt was Albert Speer, who would have been on the doomed plane had he not pulled out because of his own conversations with Hitler, after Todt’s, which lasted well into the early hours. Having made the fortuitous decision to get a bit more sleep, he was woken by a phone call shortly after 8am informing him of the crash. Hitler appointed Speer as Todt’s successor without delay and the new armaments minister and OT chief set out to organise Germany’s resources in support of the war effort. It was far from clear whether Todt’s proposed diplomacy would have had any success if Hitler had not rejected it, but all Speer’s energy, in contrast to the sanitised version of his actions presented after the war at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs, went in the opposite direction. He strove constantly to increase armaments production to win the war and later, even when final defeat seemed unavoidable, acted to prolong it. As leader of the OT, he was a key player in the exploitation of millions of forced and slave labourers across occupied Europe and in the Reich, and he acted ruthlessly to harness those workers to the Nazi yoke.

Building an empire

The Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced Speer to 20 years’ imprisonment for war crimes related to slave labour and specifically mentioned his role as OT leader in its judgment. The OT’s most prominent war criminal served his time in Spandau Prison, but, considering the organisation’s brutal and murderous role in the Nazi slave labour programme, its contribution to the wholesale plunder of the resources of conquered nations and the fact that it was a key institution at the heart of the Nazi system, how did so many other members of the OT largely escape the attention of postwar prosecutors?

Much of the general public has never heard of the OT, yet it was from this organisation, founded by Todt, that Hitler enlisted the nation’s leading engineers and architects to build his empire. Whether it was military fortifications in wartime, or grand imperial cities in peacetime after the imagined final victory, the dictator turned to the OT to design and create them. Specialising in large-scale construction tasks, the Organisation Todt was formed in 1938 and its uniform included swastika armbands, although it was not a party organisation and answered directly to Hitler. High-ranking SS or SA officers, including Todt himself, held key positions. OT construction experts oversaw vast building programmes throughout German-occupied Europe, being deployed from the Arctic Circle to the Balkans and deep into what the Third Reich termed its eastern Lebensraum. In the final year of the war, the OT gained control of all military construction in the Reich and played a key part in gargantuan projects, such as the relocation of vital German industries underground to protect them from Allied bombing.

Like the Romans

Hitler described the OT as ‘the greatest construction organisation of all time’, commissioning it directly to oversee works he considered vital to the Third Reich’s war effort. He was not the only one to express such praise. In 1945 British intelligence credited the OT with having carried out in little over five years ‘the most impressive building programme since Roman times’. In wartime, OT operations relied mainly on Germany’s slave labour system, the largest such exploitation of foreign labour since the end of the transatlantic slave trade in the 19th century. Under the German slave labour programme in Europe, millions of civilians, prisoners of war, Jews, Ostarbeiter (from East and Central Europe) and other workers from Nazi-occupied territories lost their lives. While no exact figures exist for deaths of foreign workers, an estimated 2.7 million died in the Greater Reich alone out of more than 13.5 million. Yet this was only part of the story, since these calculations excluded millions of slave labourers in German-occupied territories such as the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands were deported to third countries, where they worked mainly for the OT.

The OT was one of four major German entities exploiting forced and slave labour during the Third Reich. The three others were the SS, the Wehrmacht and German industry. Although collaboration with these other entities was the hallmark of OT practice in running slave labour projects, the OT also ran work camps by itself with its own guards across occupied Europe.

Cars, rockets and jets

The OT grew out of Fritz Todt’s prewar development of Germany’s autobahn network and the Westwall defence line. As it expanded, the organisation shifted from initially seeking voluntary, paid workers to one of coercion and an increasing dependence on prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. Its tasks ranged widely, including the erection of the Atlantic Wall coastal defence line, designed to stretch from Norway to the Franco Spanish frontier, road and rail links in occupied territories, armaments production, including V1 and V2 rockets and large-scale energy and mining projects to exploit captured sources of raw materials, as well as the huge operation to move key German armaments factories and industrial plants underground. This last task included ‘bomb-proof’ subterranean factories, which Hitler instructed OT deputy chief Franz Xaver Dorsch to build. They were to produce Messerschmitt Me 262 planes, the world’s first operational jet fighters.

Camp survivors told of acts of brutality by OT guards, who shot, beat or worked inmates to death. They also described suffering hunger, sickness and torment. Because OT overseers drove slave labourers ever harder at the work sites and generally provided pitifully inadequate rations and shelter, they bore a heavy responsibility for the high prisoner death toll. Most deaths in labour camps, other than those caused by physical violence, typically resulted from abuses for which the OT was responsible. It was the OT that set the exhausting pace of work, provided inadequate rations, medical care, shelter and work clothes, causing deaths through extreme hard labour, malnutrition, sickness and exposure. With the important exception of the gas chambers in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, these were the biggest killers in the slave labour and concentration camps.

Under the radar

One explanation for the OT having passed largely under the radar of public consciousness for 75 years is that, apart from the regime’s political and military leaders, the SS attracted much of the attention of postwar prosecutors investigating mass murder and genocide before the major trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere. While OT guards had also routinely used lethal violence against prisoners, trials were rare. Another explanation is the length of time slave labour took to become a focus of debate. Interest within Germany on slave labour, enacted using the country’s concentration camp prisoners, was barely aroused until the 1980s. Since then, much has been published on the satellite camps that mushroomed from 1942 to place labourers closer to worksites, such as factories producing armaments. Parent concentration camps were often too far away. The OT’s role, though, has been marginalised in this literature. Its real level of involvement was further shrouded by tortuous negotiations over the issue of compensation for the victims, which continued for decades after the war. This was because the negotiations specifically excluded any pay-out to millions of prisoners of war, who constituted one of the biggest sources of OT slave labour.

The OT has also evaded attention because historians have tended to focus on slave labour within the Reich, where statistics are more precise and German interest most intense, rather than in the Nazi-occupied territories across Europe. Yet these areas of foreign conquest were where the OT mostly operated. In the Soviet Union, for instance, the OT’s labour force numbered around 400,000 after a major expansion at the start of summer 1942. For short periods it reached 800,000, more than the combined total of inmates in all Germany’s concentration camps registered in mid-January 1945. The OT partially withdrew into Germany’s core only during the last year of the war, when its workforce in the Reich grew, by September 1944, to more than 835,000.

The OT possessed one further quality that was perhaps its most effective camouflage; it defied easy classification. No official decree was ever issued announcing the OT’s founding. Instead, the German public first heard the name ‘Organisation Todt’ from Hitler when he addressed a Nazi party rally in Nuremberg in 1938. This was while Todt’s engineers were building the Westwall, known as the Siegfried Line to Germany’s wartime foes, just over a year before the Second World War began. The OT had existed for almost five years before its functions were set out in German law in 1943.

Imperial designs

The roots of Hitler’s later reliance on the OT reach back to before the war, when he entrusted Todt and Speer with two tasks at the core of his future empire. He chose Todt to mastermind the construction of the Third Reich’s autobahn network, destined to radiate out into conquered territory, and instructed Speer to begin rebuilding Berlin as an imperial capital, to be renamed ‘Germania’. Hitler put Todt in charge of building the autobahns 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.

The projects 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 absorbed the builders of Germania during the war. From an improvised group of around 350,000 German workers building the Westwall before the war, the Organisation Todt metamorphosed in wartime into a 1.5-million-strong agency, mostly comprised of foreign slave labourers. These included Jews and Slavs vilified under the Nazi racist code, with Germans making up not even 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 autobahn 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 have included the introduction of double-decker trains travelling at up to 200km 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 steel-frame structure in the world.

As for Germania, Hitler’s obsession with buildings to outdo rival colonial powers was to be 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 could have accommodated 180,000 people, while a neighbouring square was designed for events attended by a million. 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.’

Extreme violence

After war broke out, as the Wehrmacht swept through western Europe and launched Operation Barbarossa in the East, the OT set up an initial seven Einsatzgruppen in various sectors of the territories that had either been conquered, or where the military campaign was being waged against the Red Army. The OT acted as a force of occupation and subjugation, plundering raw materials and exploiting slave labour to boost Germany’s war economy and construct colossal fortifications in order to secure the newly acquired lands. The OT’s projects required hundreds of thousands of slave labourers and the voices of these prisoners are finally being heard. Drawing on extensive collections of their accounts, the picture that emerges is that the Organisation Todt practised its most extreme violence against slave labourers when it had most control over them. OT personnel beat or worked prisoners to death, or ‘selected’ hundreds of sick camp inmates for extermination. When the OT did not have complete control, it shared tasks usually performed by the SS, such as guard duties and the role of sub-camp commandant in SS-run concentration camps. Its staff, who were thus integrated into the SS system, also participated in selections of sick camp prisoners, either directly or by alerting the SS to pick out certain prisoners. OT guards also worked closely with the SS during the evacuations of concentration camp networks in the war’s final stages and herded prisoners during ‘death marches’.

OT staff physically assaulted prisoners and had complete, or overriding, responsibility for inadequate food and the denial of other basic needs to prisoners. Sickness and disease, such as typhus, were widespread. The OT also brutally exploited women, forcing them to perform extreme hard labour in all weathers in camp networks, such as the Bartold Operation on the Reich’s eastern borders and the Gutowo and Thorn sub-camps in the River Vistula project.

Tens of thousands of slave labourers died on OT projects carried out with one or more of its slave labour partners, the SS, Wehrmacht or German industry. Out of about 8,300 inmates of the Mühldorf camp network in Bavaria, for instance, around half died building one of the underground factories. Other examples with high prisoner death rates included the SS-run Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia, where the OT was deeply involved in an energy project to extract oil from shale. Conditions in Project Riese, the ‘Giant’ camp complex in Lower Silesia were similarly catastrophic; after the OT took it over in April 1944, around 5,000 of the 13,300 Jewish inmates died. In Norway more than 116,000 foreign slave labourers were deported to the country during the war to work mostly on OT projects and more than 18,000 died. As for the infamous Transit Road IV, the strategic highway through Ukraine towards the Caucasus oilfields, the OT played a major role in overseeing slave labourers and around 20,000 Jewish prisoners died on just one 265 km section of the road eastwards from PrzemyŚl.

‘Ordinary men’

Apart from Speer, some other OT personnel were sentenced for war crimes, including those connected to the projects listed. At the Mühldorf trial of 1947, an architect favoured by Hitler and an intense rival of Speer’s, OT regional chief Hermann Giesler, was sentenced to life imprisonment, although his term was later reduced. At the same trial, an OT physician, Erika Flocken, was convicted of ‘selecting’ prisoners she deemed unfit to work to be sent to Auschwitz to be murdered. Flocken was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment and later further reduced.

Such cases raise the question of how OT war criminals fit into broader research on Nazi perpetrators. SS officers, as well as leaders of Hitler’s regime and the German armed forces, have been analysed extensively by historians, who have frequently sought to discern the motives of perpetrators they saw as ‘ordinary’ men, to use the historian Christopher Browning’s term. OT staff, however, perhaps deserved this label more than any other group of Nazi perpetrators. These were not soldiers or policemen, let alone units of the SS or SD execution squads formed to commit mass murder. They were builders and engineers, whose ranks included a significant number of SS or SA officers, but whose organisation was created not to kill an enemy or implement genocidal policy, but to perform the everyday work of construction. 

How did it come about, then, that OT engineers, architects and building site foremen became Hitler’s slave drivers? Why did they kill prisoners through shootings, beatings or hard labour and neglect, when their job was to construct buildings, bridges and bunkers? 

The phenomenon of Wehrmacht participation in the mass murder of Jews in the German-occupied east has been well researched. ‘Ordinary men’ in the German Order Police also carried out mass shootings of Jews in Poland. It has been established, too, that the SS involved soldiers and policemen in genocide and thus made them partners in crime. But the OT was also drawn into the concentration camp system to perform duties that were normally the exclusive preserve of the SS. The OT also ran entire operations in the networks of concentration camps, including Groß-Rosen, Dachau and Stutthof. OT engineers and construction teams treated slave labourers across Europe with brutality and murderous neglect. Like the soldiers and policemen, since Hitler took power OT personnel had absorbed a barrage of propaganda advocating hatred of Jews and ‘Bolsheviks’. They differed, however, in that they worked for a construction agency, not for state organisations created to wield military might or powers of law and order. Neither was their institution founded as a force of ‘political soldiers’, like Himmler’s SS. They were indeed ‘ordinary men’ operating within the deadly currents of Nazi racist ideology. 

Speer’s guilt

It is tempting to speculate how events might have unfolded had Todt not died in the plane crash in 1942, but what is certain is that Speer was a lynchpin of the Nazi war effort, even though he tried to reinvent his past after the war by emphasising his work as Hitler’s architect and telling Allied interrogators and the Nuremberg judges that his role was merely ‘technical’. The tribunal’s decision to sentence him to jail was taken despite a Soviet demand he should hang. Researchers have since gathered significant evidence not made available to the tribunal at the time. This includes Speer’s eviction from their homes in Berlin of thousands of Jews who were subsequently murdered by late 1942, as well as his involvement in an extension of Auschwitz, which became known in the SS as ‘Professor Speer’s Special Programme’. He mercilessly exploited slave labourers to undertake the OT’s vast projects across Europe and in the Reich. 

One example which makes a mockery of Speer’s denials of responsibility concerned his request to Himmler for concentration camp inmates to perform hard labour for the OT on the Atlantic Wall, since not enough labourers were available in France and elsewhere in the occupied West. In February 1944 Speer wrote to Himmler that a camp and the necessary guards were ready to receive 6,500 prisoners, with resources soon expected to be available for 1,000 more. In addition, he requested at least 10,000 prisoners to work in chemical plants in Upper Silesia, pointing out that the provision of labour would be relatively simple since Auschwitz was in the region. Speer hoped such damning evidence would never come to light, but the truth is inescapable and undeniable: the head of the OT was a co-enforcer of Nazi racist policy, who made pacts with the SS and drove slave labourers to their deaths.

Charles Dick is author of Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour (Bloomsbury, 2020).