UNKNOWN ENEMY

Nazi atrocities receive plenty of attention, but one murderous Reich institution has slipped under the wire. 

British journalist and historian Dick investigates Organization Todt—Nazi Germany’s construction department known as the OT. After taking office in 1933, Hitler quickly looked to rearm, construct defenses, and rebuild Berlin to outclass Paris. To oversee construction, he chose Fritz Todt (1891-1942). Todt was competent, fervently loyal, and uninterested in enriching himself or acquiring power. He had impressed Hitler by overseeing construction of the Autobahns, a make-work project because only 1.6 percent of Germans owned a car, compared to 4.9 percent in France. He became “Hitler’s favourite engineer,” rewarded by being dubbed leader of Organization Todt. As megalomaniac as ever, after 1939 Hitler assigned OT vast road, rail, and infrastructure projects in the conquered nations. Many were unrealistic, and Todt was not shy about pointing this out. He died in a plane crash in February 1942 and was replaced by Albert Speer (1905-1981), a better-known figure who served a 20-year prison term after the Nuremburg trials. According to the author, he got off lightly. The book’s first third emphasizes the careers of Todt and Speer and the run-up to the war; the last chapter recounts the Nuremburg trials. In between, Dick recounts OT’s vast operations, in which a cadre of Germans oversaw more than a million POWs, concentration camp inmates, Jews, and others from conquered states as they built infrastructure for the advancing and then retreating armies. Aided by diaries, letters, interviews, trial transcripts, and Nazi archives, the author delivers a painful account of their unspeakable treatment. Poles, Russians, and Jews were considered subhuman, but all workers suffered, and about 200,000 died from starvation, disease, exposure, exhaustion, and physical violence.

An impressively researched indictment of Hitler’s monumentally cruel construction organization.