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 book breaks 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.

“An intriguing account of two of Nazi Germany’s top architects” and how their work prolonged the war for months—includes hundreds of photos (WWII History). A Selection of the Military Book Club. While Nazi Germany’s temporary ascendancy owed much to military skill, the talent of its engineers not only buoyed the regime but allowed it to survive longer than would normally be expected. This unique work focusing on Fritz Todt and Albert Speer is based on many previously unpublished photographs and artwork from captured Nazi records. Todt was the brilliant builder of the world’s first superhighway system, the Autobahn, and the architect of the German West Wall, the Siegfried Line, that predated the later Atlantic and East Walls. The builder of each of the wartime “Führer Headquarters,” as well as the submarine pens, Todt was killed in a still-mysterious airplane crash that may well have been a Nazi death plot, though he was given a state funeral by Hitler. Todt was succeeded as German Minister of Armaments and War Production by the Führer’s longtime personal architect, Albert Speer, who was described by the Allies after the war as having prolonged the conflict by at least a year. Called a genius by Hitler, Speer designed and built the prewar Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress rally stands and buildings. More importantly, amid the constant rain of Allied bombs and the Soviet advances from the East, Speer managed to keep the German industrial machine running until the spring of 1945, though it was driven ever further underground. He also allocated resources to fortifications and counterattacks, like the V-missile installations, against both West and East, in attempts to stave off defeat. Convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg, Speer served twenty years at Spandau Prison and remained a Nazi apologist who died in London in 1981 on the anniversary of the German invasion of Poland. Together, Todt and Speer were the pillars that propped up the Third Reich through the vicissitudes of battlefield fortune. With over three hundred photographs, this is the first work that examines their role in history’s most terrible war.

Based on declassified wartime reports, this in-depth dossier details the inner workings of the Organisation Todt which not only built the Autobahns, but also Germany's Siegfried Line and Atlantic Wall.

From 1933 onward, Nazi Germany undertook massive and unprecedented industrial integration, submitting an entire economic sector to direct state oversight. This innovative study explores how German professionals navigated this complex landscape through the divergent careers of business managers in two of the era’s most important trade organizations. While Jakob Reichert of the iron and steel industry unexpectedly resisted state control and was eventually driven to suicide, Karl Lange of the machine builders’ association achieved security for himself and his industry by submitting to the Nazi regime. Both men’s stories illuminate the options available to industrialists under the Third Reich, as well as the real priorities set by the industries they served.

The author of Secret Wartime Britain examines the architecture left behind after the Nazis were defeated in World War II. Hitler’s Reich may have been defeated in 1945, but many buildings, military installations, and other sites remained. At the end of the war, some were obliterated by the victorious Allies, but others survived. For almost fifty years, these were left crumbling and ignored with post-war and divided Germany unsure what to do with them, often fearful that they might become shrines for neo-Nazis. Since the early 1990s, Germans have come to terms with these iconic sites and their uncomfortable part. Some sites are even listed buildings. Relics of the Reich visits many of the buildings and structures built or adapted by the Nazis and looks at what has happened since 1945 to uncover what it tells us about Germany’s attitude to Nazism now. It also acts as a commemoration of mankind’s deliverance from a dark decade and serves as renewal of our commitment to ensure history does not repeat itself.

A look at Adolf Hitler’s residences and their role in constructing and promoting the dictator’s private persona both within Germany and abroad. Adolf Hitler’s makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler’s bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator’s three dwellings—the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg—to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler’s interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources. At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler’s homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler’s domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book’s rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler’s homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him. “Inarguably the powder-keg title of the year.”—Mitchell Owen, Architectural Digest “A fascinating read, which reminds us that in Nazi Germany the architectural and the political can never be disentangled. Like his own confected image, Hitler’s buildings cannot be divorced from their odious political hinterland.”—Roger Moorhouse, Times

The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.