Hitler's Engineers: Fritz Todt and Albert Speer - Master Builders of the Third Reich

583 Pages·2010·23.1 MB·English

by  Blaine Taylor

Page 2: Less spectacular than some of Speer’s endeavors, but enduring in their
own way, were Dr. Todt’s sprawling autobahns. A hundred years hence, Speer’s
reputation may well rest on his wartime ministry and postwar books, while Dr.
Fritz Todt will be ranked as one of the world’s most renowned road builders.
(HHA)
Page 3: Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler with his two future Armaments Ministers,
Drs. Fritz Todt (center, in civilian suit) and Albert Speer (far right, in profile) on
a 1936 visit to Düsseldorf to inspect the model of an autobahn bridge. At the
time, the much more renowned Dr. Todt was the chief building engineer for the
Third Reich, while the younger Dr. Speer was General Building Inspector for
Berlin (in 1937). (HHA)
Right: Part of Speer’s ethereal show of light and dark over top of a Nuremberg
Nazi Party Congress, 1938, which British Ambassador to Berlin Sir Neville
Henderson termed “a cathedral of ice” in his wartime memoirs. (HHA)
Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2010 by
Casemate Publishers
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and
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Copyright 2010 © Blaine Taylor ISBN 978-1-932033-68-7
eISBN 9781935149774
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CONTENTS
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Preface
Chapter One: Dr. Fritz Todt: Nazism’s Master Engineer-Builder
Chapter Two: “The Führer’s Roads”: Nazi Autobahnen Ribbons of Concrete,
1933–45
Chapter Three: The West Wall: Hanging out the Washing on the Siegfried Line
Chapter Four: Minister of Armaments and Munitions, 1940–42
Chapter Five: 1942: A Funeral in Berlin, 1942
Chapter Six: Enter Dr. Albert Speer
Chapter Seven: Nazi Rocketry, 1933–45
Chapter Eight: Speer and the German Atomic Bomb, 1942–45
Chapter Nine: Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, 1942–45
Chapter Ten: From Capture to Nuremberg, 1945–47
Chapter Eleven: Prisoner #5: from “Spandauer” to Bestselling Author, 1947–81
Bibliography
Endnotes
DEDICATION
To those who helped make this book possible: mentor P. James Kurapka, Gate
City, VA; translator Erika Burke, Pearland, TX; and photographer John Durand,
Towson, MD, all USA. Such a detailed work as this is truly the sum of all its
many parts!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study is the result of almost five decades of research, but would not have
been possible without the valuable help of many people, all of whom I want to
mention by name.
First, there is my publisher, David Farnsworth—and my editor, Steven Smith—
for agreeing to undertake the project, and for having patience with me while I
completed the book after it was due. Just as, without the engineers and architects
there would be no roads and no buildings, so, also, without them, there would be
no author, and no book. Second, there are the entire photographic staffs at both
the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and the United States National
Archives at College Park, MD, as well as many other private and museum
sources worldwide, credited where their photography and artwork appear.
The photographs would not exist without the excellent pictorial consulting of
Stan Piet of Bel Air, MD, and the artistry of John Durand of Towson, MD. Also
joining the ranks of those helping me with this project was Renèe Klish, Curator
of the US Army Combat Art Collection at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington,
DC. My friend, architect Paul Gorman of Towson, MD, aided in my
understanding of various engineering and architectural matters and terms. Lisa
Julius of Towson, MD, transcribed the captions of several wartime videos.
As with prior volumes, Mrs. Erika Burke served as my German translator, and
both P. James Kurapka of Gate City, VA, and Ray and Josephine Cowderry of
North Dakota brought important new Todt and Autobahn photo collections to my
attention. Ruth Sheppard in the UK was the copy editor, while Frank White of
Towson, MD, and Tara Lichterman of Casemate were computer consultants.
Also, kudos to the wonderful research staff at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free
Library, and Towson’s Baltimore County Library.
My thanks to them all!
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
I first began reading books on Nazi Germany about the time of the 1960
publication of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I
reviewed later in my Calvert Hall High School literary magazine. This capped
my interest in all of the various postwar movies and television documentaries on
the war and the Nazis that appeared over the previous decade. Since all of the
books that I read left many unanswered questions—written as they were either
by observers of the events or authors working with second-hand information—
by the time I reached Towson State College in 1968, I’d just begun to do what
our history professors urged us to: “Go back to the original sources,” the
memoirs of the actual participants themselves.
None were more interesting than those of Dr. Albert Speer’s, Inside the Third
Reich: Memoirs, which I reviewed for my college student paper, Towerlight. It
answered many questions—but not all. Six years later, I reviewed Professor
Speer’s second book, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, for the then Baltimore News
American newspaper, as I did his third and last postwar published book,
Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire
in 1981.
In those first readings, I was inclined to give Speer the benefit of the doubt, to
accept his account of things as the way they actually were; I even wrote to him
for an autographed picture—and received it. In the 1990s, I read all three books
over again, as well as several others debunking Speer’s own accounts. In the
preparation for the current volume, I read all of them yet a third time over.
From these multiple readings, I have come to some conclusions. Far from being
the apolitical, artistic technician that he claimed to be until the time of his death,
Speer was, in fact, a practitioner of the very highest order of Nazi politics and
manipulation. He was also an accomplished actor and liar: he knew all about the
Holocaust from the very start, as did, indeed, all the other top Nazi leaders. That
is why he was treated as such a pariah at both Nuremberg and Spandau by his
fellow convicted and accused war criminals: they knew what a phony he was,
having observed him in Hitler’s presence for almost 15 years.
Thus, the current volume will entirely dispense with all the handwringing, back-
and-forth “what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it?” soul-searching of the