Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour by Charles Dick (review)

One of the biggest, if not the most extensive, builders of infrastructure in twentieth-century Europe was the "Organisation Todt" (OT), the construction arm of Nazi Germany. At its peak, it employed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million European laborers. According to Charles Dick's important book, 185,000 people died while working for the OT. Its laborers constructed roads, railroads, fortifications, and underground factories. The OT plundered resources from Nazi-occupied Europe and set up facilities to extract shale oil and other materials required for the war effort. Given the scale of OT operations, it is remarkable that few scholars have studied this organization.

Named after the Third Reich's top engineer, Fritz Todt, the OT grew out of Todt's orchestration of the autobahn network and the Siegfried Line, the defensive line on Germany's Western border. Todt was Hitler's favorite infrastructure builder and amassed growing power in the fields of armament and construction. By 1938, the OT had its name and organizational structure. Due to Germany's wars of aggression, OT expanded rapidly. Its hierarchy resembled the military, with uniforms, ranks, and lines of command. Builders and engineers from private German industries joined its ranks as leaders. After Todt's death in 1942, Albert Speer took over the OT. Dick describes it as a "parastatal organization driving the slave-labor economy to boost the war effort" (p. 33).

Before the war, the majority of the OT's workforce was German. During the Nazi conquests, OT workers were predominantly foreigners, and it increasingly used forced labor, including concentration camp inmates. Their managers were German engineers and administrators as well as "racially acceptable" overseers from Western and Northern Europe. Dick aims to illustrate the OT's deep involvement in the massive mobilization of labor performed by camp inmates, Europeans classified as Jews, Slavs, and Southern and Western Europeans. As he argues, the OT was central to the Nazi machinery of exploitation, brutality, and death, not merely a peripheral unit. The author largely succeeds in making his case, even though the book's structure leads to unnecessary repetitions.

In Dick's reading, racial hierarchies, with Northern and Western Europeans at the top and Slavs and Jews at the bottom, directly translated into differing degrees of coercion and brutality. OT laborers from France and other Western European countries volunteered for work and were paid, whereas Jewish and other concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war were part of a system of forced labor, exploitation, and high mortality rates. This differential treatment based on the Nazi regime's racial politics existed for the first two years of the war, but after 1941, gave way to a more exploitative and violent treatment regardless of national and ethnic origin.

As they expanded and intensified the war, Nazi leaders gave the highest priority to the search for materials and weapons deemed essential for the war effort. OT laborers built roads and railroads in Norway, constructed an extensive road in Ukraine, ran bauxite and copper mines in Southern Europe, and created underground tunnels for the production of ballistic missiles, to name a few activities. Whether or not in cooperation with the German SS, OT overseers treated workers with increasing brutality and disregard for human life while trying to maintain standards for running their enterprises as efficiently as possible. Building on the work of Michael Thad Allen and Jens-Christian Wagner, Dick emphasizes the compatibility of modern management and the inhumane treatment of forced labor. Professionalism was not a safeguard against cruelty and systematic violence. On the contrary, the quest for "German quality labor" impelled some OT officials to exploit and abuse their laborers even more excessively. Using untapped sources, Dick asserts that the OT's top echelons were highly credentialed engineers and administrators: 41% of the senior staff had a Diplom-Ingenieur degree or equivalent (p. 40).

This book is a welcome addition to the slim historiography of an insufficiently researched...