Bloomsbury Academic Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour

This is the first comprehensive critical study of the Organisation Todt (OT), a key institution which oversaw the Third Reich’s vast slave labour programme together with the SS, Wehrmacht and industry. The bookbreaks new ground by revealing the full extent of the organisation’s brutal and murderous operations across occupied Europe and in the Reich. For the first time, Charles Dick provides a strong voice for camp survivors overseen by the OT, drawing on an extensive collection of personal accounts and analysing the violence they endured. Builders of the Third Reich shows Hitler used the OT, which had a labour force of around 1.5 million people in 1944, as an instrument of subjugation and occupation to project German imperial power. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, it demonstrates how the organisation participated in the plunder of Europe’s raw materials and manpower, greatly boosting the German war economy. The book reveals how OT staff shot, beat or worked tens of thousands of prisoners to death, both within the SS-run concentration camp system and outside it, with analysis of OT operations showing that where it had sole, or very high levels of control over camps, prisoner death rates were extremely high. Examining how engineers and builders, individuals who fitted the category of ‘ordinary men’ as precisely as any other group so far examined by historians, perpetrated war crimes, this volume reflects on how few OT personnel were interrogated or came to trial and how the organisation passed largely under the radar of post-war prosecutors, researchers and the general public. Review Drawing on work about Nazi building and infrastructure and the role of these projects in the expansion of the Reich together with work on perpetrators, Dick makes a valuable contribution to the evolving discourse on Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the “banality of evil” and of “ordinary men” who were “just following orders.” --Canadian Slavonic Papers Incisive and original, this remarkable account explores what British intelligence regarded as the “most impressive building programme since Roman times.” The master builders of the Third Reich constructed the motorways, fortifications, and mines of the racial state with the axioms of the racial state. Charles Dick explains how engineers and architects drove hundreds of thousands of slaves as they executed their blueprints. With great authority, he tells us the story of both groups, the drivers and the slaves, who inhabited this vast, terrifying construction site in twentieth-century Germany. --Peter Fritzsche, Professor of History, University of Illinois, USA Builders of the Third Reich offers the first sustained scholarly analysis of the Organisation Todt. Assiduously researched and carefully argued, the book studies Nazi forced labour projects from the Balkans to the Arctic Circle. Dick’s sensitive analysis of life and death at Organisation Todt worksites makes an important and original contribution to scholarship on forced labour in occupied Europe. --Christopher Dillon, Senior Lecturer in Modern German History, King's College London, UK About the Author Charles Dick is an independent scholar who obtained his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, UK. He was a journalist for Reuters News Agency (later Thomson Reuters) in North Africa, Bonn, Paris, Vienna and London over a 35-year career.