German Engineers Of Death

 

“Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force That Built the Third Reich

 

By Charles Dick

 

Bloomsbury, 368 pages, $29.99

 

Charles Dick's "Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force That Built the Third Reich" tells the story of Organization Todt, the state-run enterprise that Hitler put in charge of major infrastructure projects.

 

Founded by Fritz Todt (1891-1942), the OT tends to get overlooked compared with the SS and the Gestapo. It gets a single reference in the index of Adam Tooze's magisterial history of the Nazi economy, "The Wages of Destruction" (2006), though Todt figures prominently in its pages until his death, as does his successor as head of the OT, Albert Speer.

 

By 1944 the OT's workforce numbered 1.5 million, around the same size as the Luftwaffe before the invasion of Russia. More than a million of those were foreign workers, most of them slave laborers drawn from Nazi-occupied Europe -- including tens of thousands of Jews plucked from death camps such as Auschwitz and Stutthof.

 

The OT's Jewish victims, like their non-Jewish counterparts, were forced to work on everything from underground armaments factories to V-2 rockets and even a railroad above the Arctic Circle in Norway.

 

According to Mr. Dick, a former journalist at Reuters, "the OT bore a large part of the responsibility for the total estimated death toll among slave laborers" in the Third Reich: "OT staff killed prisoners outright by shooting, hanging or beating them." The author observes that "workers under the OT generally suffered the worst possible conditions because the agency specialized in construction," which meant laboring outside in extreme weather, even while sick, underfed and exhausted.

 

It is a horrific story of how educated Germans hired for their engineering and architectural training were transformed into mass murderers. Yet that is not how the OT started. Todt joined the Nazi Party in the early 1920s. His engineering skill and ardent Nazism won Hitler's approval to lead the construction of the vaunted autobahn system. By the start of World War II, Todt's workforce had built around 2,000 miles of highway along with some 3,000 bridges, all of which required Hitler's design approval. Todt's success with the autobahn earned him promotion to lead all of Hitler's construction programs, and in 1940 he was named the Reich's armaments minister.

 

Todt makes an unusual character study. On the one hand, he was as brutal and ruthless as any of Hitler's henchmen. According to Mr. Dick, Todt was more than willing to set the OT on its path to genocide. On the other hand, Todt was one of the few Nazi leaders who dared to tell Hitler unpleasant truths to his face.

 

When the invasion of Russia bogged down in late 1941, Todt insisted on getting a firsthand tour and came away convinced the war had become unwinnable. He informed Hitler of his fears a week before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and may have repeated the message when he visited Hitler's field headquarters near Rastenburg in February 1942. Todt died in an air crash shortly afterward, leading to suspicions that his plane had been sabotaged, though these have never been proved.

 

Speer didn't share his predecessor's doubts. He would later portray himself as a conscience-stricken and unwilling participant in Hitler's crimes, and his gamble on the sympathy of the judges at Nuremberg paid off. Speer was given a 20-year prison sentence while Fritz Sauckel, Hitler's general plenipotentiary for labor mobilization, was hanged for almost exactly the same crimes. Speer's reputation as a "good Nazi" was enhanced by his relentlessly self-justifying memoirs.

 

Now we know better. Mr. Dick's account of Speer as head of the OT makes for compelling and sobering reading. He and his staff eagerly cooperated with the SS and its grotesque construction projects, including Auschwitz, and devoted forced labor to German armaments production. In human terms, it meant the deaths of at least 2.7 million foreign workers under the Nazis. Those lucky enough to survive Speer's regime considered the OT comparably brutal to the SS.

 

"During the night our hair froze on to the walls," a survivor of the OT's shale-oil project in Estonia recalled. "The sick and weak who were unable to march out in the morning to work were no longer there in the evening. I suppose they had been killed."

 

As Mr. Dick points out, Speer wasn't the only OT operator to escape harsh punishment after the war. The architect Hermann Giesler had been in charge of the OT's efforts in the Baltics. For his crimes, an American military court sentenced Giesler to life imprisonment, but his sentence was repeatedly trimmed before he was set free in October 1952.

 

Erika Flocken, a trained physician who worked for the OT, was the head doctor at the Dachau satellite camp at Muhldorf, which the OT shared with the SS. Rather than improve the inhumane conditions, Flocken helped to select the prisoners who would be shipped to Auschwitz to be gassed. She was sentenced to death by an American military tribunal, but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment before she was released on parole in April 1957.

 

In addition to letting the perpetrators ultimately go free, Mr. Dick writes, "postwar trials have contributed very little to public understanding of the vast scope and brutal nature of the OT's activities." His book performs that important task at last.

 

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Mr. Herman is the author of "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II." His next book, "Founder's Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump," will be published in April.” [1]

 

1. Engineers Of Death. Herman, Arthur.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 25 Nov 2025: A13.