Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi

Forced Labour by Charles Dick (review)

Thomas Zeller

Technology and Culture, Volume 63, Number 2, April 2022, pp. 529-530
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2022.0095

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/854046

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B O O K R E V I E W S

Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi

Forced Labour
By Charles Dick. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Pp. 280.

One of the biggest, if not the most extensive, builders of

infrastructure in twentieth-century Europe was the “Organi-
sation Todt” (OT), the construction arm of Nazi Germany.
At its peak, it employed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Euro-
pean laborers. According to Charles Dick’s important book,
185,000 people died while working for the OT. Its laborers
constructed roads, railroads, fortifications, and under-
ground 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 scho-
lars 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 arma-
ment 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 com-
mand. 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 econ-
omy to boost the war effort” (p. 33).
Before the war, the majority of the OT’s workforce was German. Dur-
ing 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 periph-
eral 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 Euro-
peans 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

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T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

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 high-
est priority to the search for materials and weapons deemed essential for
the war effort. OT laborers built roads and railroads in Norway, con-
APRIL
structed an extensive road in Ukraine, ran bauxite and copper mines in
2022 Southern Europe, and created underground tunnels for the production of
VOL. 63 ballistic missiles, to name a few activities. Whether or not in cooperation
with the German SS, OT overseers treated workers with increasing brutal-
ity 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 sys-
tematic 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 eche-
lons 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 insuf-
ficiently researched organization. It is the first scholarly book-length ac-
count of Organisation Todt in English. The only other book on OT is by
Franz Seidler, and it appears exculpatory in comparison. While Builders of
the Third Reich is not written expressly for historians of technology and
scholars of infrastructure, its conclusions offer many opportunities for
comparative and general analyses. The book examines infrastructure serv-
ing the Nazi dictatorship, but its findings are useful for research on infra-
structures, violence, and modern management in general.
THOMAS ZELLER
Thomas Zeller is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of
Maryland, College Park. His book Consuming Landscapes: What We See What We Drive and
Why It Matters is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022.
Citation: Zeller, Thomas. “Review of Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and
Nazi Forced Labour by Charles Dick.” Technology and Culture 63, no. 2 (2022): 529–30.

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