Organisation Todt

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Organisation Todt

The Organisation Todt (OT) was a Third Reich

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany and the Third Reich are the colloquial English names for Germany under the regime of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party , which established a Totalitarianism dictatorship that existed from 1933 to 1945....
civil

Civil engineering

Civil engineering is a Professional Engineer discipline that deals with the design, construction and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including works such as bridges, roads, canals, dams and buildings....
and military engineer

Military engineer

A military engineer is primarily responsible for the design and construction of offensive, defensive, and logistical structures for warfare. Other duties include the layout, placement, maintenance and dismantling of defensive land mine and the clearing of enemy minefields and the construction and destruction of bridges....
ing group in Germany eponymously named for its founder, Fritz Todt

Fritz Todt

Fritz Todt was a Germany engineer and senior Nazism figure, the founder of Organisation Todt. He died in a plane crash during World War II....
, an engineer and senior Nazi

Nazism

Nazism, officially National Socialism , refers to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers? Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945....
figure. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in pre-World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
, and in Germany itself and occupied territories

List of military occupations

In most wars, some territory is placed under the martial law of a hostile army. Most belligerent military occupations end with the cessation of hostilities....
from France

France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
to Russia

Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
during the war, and became notorious for using forced labor

Forced Labor

#REDIRECT Unfree labour...
. The history of the organization falls fairly neatly into three phases:

Autobahn concept did not originate with the Nazis but had its beginnings in the efforts of a private consortium, the HaFraBa (Verein zur Vorbereitung der Autostraße Hansestädte-Frankfurt-Basel), founded in 1926 for the purpose of building a high-speed highway route between Northern Germany and Basel

Basel

Basel is Switzerland's third most populous city . With 731,000 inhabitants in the tri-national metropolitan area , Basel is Switzerland's third-largest urban area....
, Switzerland

Switzerland

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Prehistory from 1933 to 1938: the construction of the German Autobahn network

The Autobahn concept did not originate with the Nazis but had its beginnings in the efforts of a private consortium, the HaFraBa (Verein zur Vorbereitung der Autostraße Hansestädte-Frankfurt-Basel), founded in 1926 for the purpose of building a high-speed highway route between Northern Germany and Basel

Basel

Basel is Switzerland's third most populous city . With 731,000 inhabitants in the tri-national metropolitan area , Basel is Switzerland's third-largest urban area....
, Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland is a landlocked Swiss Alps country of roughly 7.7 million people in Western Europe with an area of 41,285 km?. Switzerland is a federal republic consisting of 26 states called Cantons of Switzerland....
. With a decree establishing a Reichsautobahnen project for an entire network of highways, issued on June 27, 1933, Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born Germany politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , popularly known as the Nazi Party....
made it a vastly more ambitious public project and the responsibility of Fritz Todt as newly-named General Inspector of German Roadways.

By 1934, the self-aggrandizing Todt had succeeded in elevating this office to near cabinet rank. Todt was, however, also an extremely capable administrator and had built by 1938 more than 3,000 kilometres of roadway. The Autobahn project became one of the show pieces of the NSDAP

National Socialist German Workers Party

The 'National Socialist German Workers' Party', , commonly known in English as the , was a racialist, totalitarian political party in Germany between 1919 and 1945....
regime. Todt had also in that period put together the administrative core of what would properly speaking become the Organisation Todt. The growth and growing importance of the organization, and the increasing prominence of its leader, are a textbook example of the way in which an aggressive and able party leader could expand his authority and purview in the fluid (and treacherous) context of the polycratic

Polycracy

A polycracy is a state ruled by more than one person, as opposed to monocracy. The word is derived from Greek language -- poly which means "many" and kratos which means "rule" or "strength"....
German state under Adolf Hitler.

Initially, the Autobahn project relied on the open labour market as a labour source. Germany was at this time still recovering from the effects of the world economic crisis (known in English as the “Great Depression

Great Depression

File:International depression.pngThe Great Depression was a worldwide economic Recession starting in most places in 1929 and ending at different times in the 1930s or early 1940s for different countries....
”) and there was no shortage of available labour. As the economy recovered and labour supply became a more serious issue, the Organisation Todt was from 1935 able to draw on conscripted—i.e., compulsory—labour, in these years from within Germany, through the Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst
Reichsarbeitsdienst

The Reichsarbeitsdienst was an institution set up in Nazi Germany as an instrument to combat unemployment, similar to the Civilian Conservation Corps of the United States....
, RAD). As per the law of June 26, 1935, all male Germans between the ages of 18 and 25 were required to perform six months of state service. In this period too the work was compensated, at a rate slightly greater than that of unemployment support. The composition and working conditions of the labour force would change drastically for the worse over the course of the ten following years.

1938 to February 1942: the Organisation Todt proper

In 1938 Todt founded the Organisation Todt proper as a consortium of the administrative offices which Todt had personally set up in the course of the Autobahn project, private companies as subcontractors and the primary source of technical engineering expertise, and the Labour Service as manpower source. He was appointed by Hitler as plenipotentiary for Labour within the second four year plan, undermining Goerings rule.Investment in civil engineering work was greatly reduced. Between 1939 and 1943, in contrast to the period from 1933 to 1938, less than 1,000 kilometres of roadway were added to the Autobahn system. Emphasis was shifted to military efforts, the first major project being the Westwall (known in English as the “Siegfried Line

Siegfried Line

The original Siegfried line was a line of defensive forts and tank defenses built by Germany as a section of the Hindenburg Line 1916?1917 in northern France during World War I....
”) built opposite the French Maginot Line

Maginot Line

The Maginot Line , named after French Minister of Defence Andr? Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defenses, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in the light of experience from World War I, and in the run-up to World War II....
and serving an analogous purpose. Correspondingly, Todt himself was in 1940 named Minister of Armaments and Munitions. In 1941 Todt and his organization were further charged with an even larger project, the construction of an Atlantic wall

Atlantic Wall

The Atlantikwall was an extensive system of Coastal artillerys built by the Germany Third Reich in 1942 until 1944 during World War II along the West Europe to defend against an anticipated Allied invasion of the continent from Great Britain....
to be built on the coasts of occupied France, the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a country that is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is a parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy. The Netherlands is located in North-West Europe, and bordered by the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east....
, and Belgium

Belgium

* A small German-speaking Community of Belgium exists in eastern Wallonia. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political and cultural conflicts are reflected in the history of Belgium and a complex Communities and regions of Belgium....
. Included with this "Atlantic Wall" project were the fortification of the British Channel Islands

Channel Islands

The Channel Islands are a group of islands in the English Channel, off the France coast of Normandy. They include two separate bailiwicks: the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Bailiwick of Jersey....
, which were occupied by Nazi Germany from 30 June 1940 to 8 May 1945.

The huge increase in the demand for labour created by the Westwall project was met by a series of expansions of the laws on compulsory service, which ultimately obligated all Germans to arbitrarily determined (i.e. effectively unlimited) compulsory labour for the state: Zwangsarbeit. Between 1938 and 1940, 1.75 million Germans were conscripted into labour service. Both the Organisation Todt and the Labour Service were characteristically paramilitary in hierarchy and appearance, with elaborate sets of chevrons, epaulettes, and other insignia for the display and recognition of rank.

Fritz Todt died in a plane crash on February 8, 1942, shortly after a meeting with Hitler in East Prussia

East Prussia

East Prussia refers to the main part of the Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Sea from the 13th century to 1945. From 1772?1829 and 1878?1945, the Province of East Prussia was a province of the Germany state of Prussia....
. Todt had become convinced that the war could not be won and thought himself indispensable enough to say as much to Hitler. As a result, there has been some speculation that Todt’s death was a covert

Covert operation

A covert operation is a military, Military intelligence, or Politics activity carried out in such a way that the identity of the sponsors of the operation is concealed or kept secret....
assassination

Assassination

Assassination is the targeted killing of a public figure. Assassinations may be prompted by ideology, politics, or military reasons. Additionally, assassins may be motivated by contract killing, revenge, or celebrity or may be mental disorder....
, but this has never been substantiated. Todt was succeeded as Minister of Armaments and Munitions and de facto head of the Organisation Todt by Albert Speer

Albert Speer

Albert Speer was a Germany architect who was, for part of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Nazi Germany. Speer was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming ministerial office....
.

1942 to 1945: the Organisation Todt under Albert Speer's Reichsministerium für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion

Despite the death of its paladin, the Organisation Todt continued to exist as an engineering organization and drew multiple further assignments. At the beginning of 1943, in addition to its continuing work on the Atlantic Wall, the organization also undertook the construction of launch platforms in northern France for the V1 and V2 rockets. In the same summer, following the increasingly defensive course of the German war effort, the organization was further charged with the construction of air-raid shelters and the repair of bombed buildings in cities within Germany and with the construction of underground refineries and armaments factories.

Administratively, however, the organization was effectively incorporated into Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production in 1943. Speer’s concerns, in the context of an increasingly desperate Germany in which all production had been severely impacted by materials and manpower shortages, and by Allied bombing, ranged over almost the whole of the German war-time economy. Speer managed to increase production significantly, at the cost of a vastly increased reliance on compulsory labour. This applied as well to the labour force of the Organisation Todt.

By the end of the war, the compulsory state service for Germans had been reduced to 6 weeks of perfunctory military training and all available conscript German manpower diverted to military units and direct military support organisations. From the beginning of 1942 at the latest, their place was increasingly taken by prisoners of war and compulsory labourers from occupied countries. Foreign nationals and POWs were often, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as "foreign workers" (Fremdarbeiter). In 1943 and 1944 these were further augmented by concentration camp and other prisoners. Beginning autumn of 1944, between 10,000 to 20,000 half-Jews (Mischling
Mischling

File:WernerGoldberg.jpgMischling was the German term used during the Third Reich era in the German Empire to denote persons deemed to have partial Jewish ancestry....
e) and persons related to Jews by marriage were recruited into special units.

By the end of 1944, of approximately 1.4 million labourers in the service of the Organisation Todt overall, 1% were Germans rejected from military service and 1.5% were concentration camp prisoners; the rest were prisoners of war and compulsory labourers from occupied countries. All were effectively treated as slaves and existed in the complete and arbitrary service of a ruthless totalitarian state. Many did not survive the work or the war.