The brutal men who built Hitler's war machine

Telegraph

22-05-2025

The title and sub-title of Charles Dick's well-researched and scholarly book, Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force that Built the Third Reich, do him, and it, no favours. Yes, Dick has studied, in depth, the Nazi machine – Organisation Todt (OT), named after its founder Fritz Todt – and which Hitler charged with over­seeing the infrastructure of the new Germany.
But OT was not an unknown enemy, and it certainly isn't after much scholarship on it. Dick ­himself published a book on it three years ago, though for an ­academic market, of which this appears to be in effect a 'popular' version, and it is 15 years since Blaine Taylor's Hitler's Engineers: Fritz Todt and Albert Speer – Master Builders of the Third Reich.
As well as books, there are numerous articles in learned ­journals. But then this is a book for the mass market, which is not credited with too much intelligence; early on, we're told that the Red Army answered to 'Soviet ­dictator Josef Stalin'. (We are, at least, spared the formula 'Nazi ­dictator Adolf Hitler '.)
Todt was a highly qualified engineer who had fought in the Great War and joined the Nazi party early on. Hitler had great regard for him, not because he was a sycophant – he was far less of one than many who greased up to the Führer – but because he was exceptionally good at his job. He took a realistic view of what his organisation could do, and never overpromised about the speed at which it would do it. ­Hitler's first great dream in transforming Germany was to improve the roads, so OT built the autobahns. Hitler also regarded them as essential to get his troops to all ­corners of Europe swiftly, in order to discharge his acts of conquest.
When the Second World War came, OT had new priorities: the Atlantic Wall, submarine pens, mines for raw materials, bunkers for command posts and, after the devastating RAF raid on Peenemünde in summer 1943, huge underground factories in which to develop the V-2 and also to build Messerschmitts. This is where Dick lifts up the stone: much of what OT achieved, or tried to achieve, required slave labour. As such, OT played its part in the Final Solution and other war crimes. This book is a depressing reminder that most of the leaders of the organisation, and the chief brutes who worked under them, got away with it.
Todt himself did not live to have judgement passed on him: he was killed in a plane crash just after meeting Hitler at his eastern command post in 1942. There have been conspiracy theories ever since that the plane was sabotaged on Hitler's orders. Todt, who had a remarkable grasp of realism in a movement characterised by blind fanaticism, had been to tell his Führer that the war against the Soviet Union was unwinnable, and the Germans should offer peace terms before the conflict broke the Reich's economy. Dick discounts the theory and is right to do so, given the absence of evidence. He points out that if ­Hitler wanted to be rid of Todt, he had plenty of other means by which to do so.
Todt was succeeded by Hitler's blue-eyed boy, Albert Speer. Speer later served 20 years in Spandau for war crimes but managed to charm some of the judges at Nuremberg into believing he should not be hanged. However, his responsibility for OT, the orders he repeatedly gave for the urgent completion of infrastructure projects, whatever the cost, and the bestial conditions in the labour camps for which he was responsible suggest a rope round his neck was the very least he deserved. He compounded his offence by continuing to lie about what he knew – or didn't know – in the 15 years between his release in 1966 and his death in 1981. Dick highlights some of the discrepancies in the stories he told at various times, and his apparent unawareness that a sustained act of genocide was happening.
Dick presents the story often from the point of view of the enslaved: Jews for whom getting on an OT work detail was a possible escape from the gas chambers, ­Russian prisoners of war, Poles and others from the overrun territories of the East. There were also German criminals, hauled out of jail and put to work on lethal projects such as the railway in north Norway that could help ship iron ore to the Reich. Those from western Europe whom the Nazis considered racially superior – French, Dutch, Danes – had better treatment, but the management and overseer class were almost entirely German, and contained the usual quota of sadists and psychopaths.
Dick does highlight the odd more humane SS officer, but they were rare birds. What he also makes clear was that OT leaders did not merely work their charges to death, they beat them to death, shot them and sometimes even buried them alive if it suited them. They deserve their place in infamy, but the question of how so many of them got away with their hideous crimes shows just how ineffective the restoration of order in post-Nazi Germany really was.