1. In Unknown Enemy, you uncover the story of the Organisation Todt. What was the OT for those unaware of its existence?

Organisation Todt was a vast Nazi building concern which Hitler called “the greatest construction organisation of all time.” Its engineers, architects and other specialists exploited millions of slave labourers from countries conquered by the Wehrmacht, Germany’s armed forces, during World War Two. The OT was founded by Fritz Todt, creator of Germany’s first motorway network, and was led from 1942 by Albert Speer, who took over as Armaments Minister and head of the OT on Todt’s death in a plane crash. The OT had a mostly foreign labour force of about 1.5 million in 1944 and carried out brutal and murderous operations extending from the Arctic to the Balkans and deep into what the Third Reich called its eastern Lebensraum (living space) – a chilling vision of mass settlement by Germans in captured lands. The OT, together with the SS, the Wehrmacht and German industrial firms, used slave labourers to build gigantic defences such as the Atlantic Wall, which included coastal batteries and bunkers stretching from Norway to the Franco-Spanish frontier. In the final year of the war. when Allied bombing was devastating Germany’s war production, Hitler commissioned the OT to build factories underground to manufacture Me-262 jet fighters, the first such operational warplanes. Foreign workers were essential to projects like this and around 2.7 million of them died in the Nazi slave labour programme out of 13.5 million in the Greater Reich alone, not counting vast areas like occupied territory of what was then the Soviet Union.

2. Why do you think it’s important to tell this story now?

In today’s troubled world, it is worth reflecting on what motivated those who carried out Nazi atrocities and deciding what lessons can be drawn from it. Historian Christopher Browning investigated how “ordinary men” in the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 turned into hardened killers, carrying out mass shootings of Jews during the war, yet the OT was perhaps the most eligible group of “ordinary men” at the heart of the Nazi regime. These were neither soldiers nor policemen, let alone units of the SS or its Security Service execution squads formed explicitly to commit mass murder. Their fundamental job was not to kill an enemy or implement Nazi racist policy resulting in genocide of six million Jews. They were builders and engineers whose organisation was created to perform the everyday work of construction. Yet they shot, beat or worked prisoners to death and killed many more through starvation and disease by failing to provide their victims’ basic needs. Jews were persecuted mercilessly and Nazi racist propaganda taught OT overseers to view slave labourers like Soviet prisoners of war as subhuman. A total of 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war perished in German captivity or were worked to death during the war.

 

Author Charles Dick


3. Did anything come up in your research which you hadn’t anticipated?

It was a real revelation from the start! I think the biggest eye-openers were the extent of the OT’s reach across Europe, how its murderous treatment of slave labourers often matched that of the SS, and how much power it wielded at the centre of the regime, basking in Hitler’s favour. Wherever I looked in archives around Europe, evidence emerged of the OT’s tentacles extending into every area of German occupation. The trail of discovery could sometimes be made easier because of the range of information held in some valuable collections: documents held in Western Europe could throw light on OT operations far into the east of the former Soviet Union. Germany’s Ludwigsburg archive, containing investigations into Nazi war crimes, is an excellent example; the national archive in Norway, which Germany occupied during the war, is another because of the extent of surviving OT material. The truth was that the OT was virtually omnipresent in wartime Europe, so even though many contemporary documents were destroyed, some revealing evidence remained. Construction was vital to Germany’s war effort and this was the area in which the OT excelled. Fortifications to defend Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’, as well as armaments factories, roads and railways were what the Führer needed and he habitually turned to the OT to build them.


4. Why was Organisation Todt not investigated and charged with war crimes in the same way as other departments within the Reich?

The main reason was that Nazi political and military leaders, together with the SS, were the most obvious targets for prosecutors at Nuremberg, as well as other war crimes trials. Speer was the OT’s most prominent war criminal, escaping the death sentence but receiving 20 years in jail; the OT otherwise remained mostly in the shadows. The OT has also kept largely under the radar because of the way it has been researched. Historians have shied away from comprehensive, Europe-wide studies. Where such an approach has been taken, the OT’s true nature has been concealed by apologists for the Nazis. Unknown Enemy is the first mass market book on OT operations throughout Europe, offering a comprehensive, critical analysis. The OT has previously been treated marginally in wide-ranging scholarly works on the Third Reich, or studies have been confined to specific camps or countries. Another reason for the OT’s “stealth” profile in the 80 years since the war is the length of time slave labour took to become a focus of debate. Slave labour was central to OT operations, but interest within Germany on the issue was barely aroused until the 1980s. The OT possessed one further quality which 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’s lips when he addressed a Nazi party rally in Nuremberg in 1938. The OT had existed for almost five years before its functions were set out in 1943 in German law.

5. What is the OT’s legacy? Do we live with any of the repercussions of the actions of this organisation?

The OT’s most visible legacy today is remnants of fortifications like the Atlantic Wall, as well as other wartime military installations in virtually every Nazi-occupied European country. U-boat pens built on the French coast still exist, for instance, at Lorient, St Nazaire and La Rochelle, as well as remains of gun emplacements like the Batterie Todt, near Cap Gris-Nez. The Channel Islands, despite their relatively small size, absorbed one-twelfth of resources for the entire Atlantic Wall and are covered in wartime relics such as bunkers, artillery observation towers and gun emplacements built during the occupation. More Atlantic Wall coastal guns and other components of the defence line are to be found all the way up to Norway, where Soviet prisoners of war and other foreign workers also built roads and railways up into the country’s Arctic zone. Fritz Todt was responsible for one of the most enduring improvements to German infrastructure by overseeing construction of a national Autobahn network at Hitler’s behest. His organisation went on to oversee slave labourers building motorways radiating out into conquered states, including a highway through Ukraine towards the Caucasus oilfields. A total of 25,000 Jews and tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war died while building it. The OT worked with the SS on this last project, as it did in concentrations camps from Auschwitz to Vaivara, in Estonia. Memorials are located on the sites of these concentration camps, where OT staff were so well integrated, to ensure that atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany are not forgotten.

You can buy a copy of Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force That Built the Third Reich here.