Fritz Todt and Albert Speer – Master Builders of the Third Reich
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Hitlers Engineers text 1-61 FINAL_Layout 1 23/06/2010 16:04 Page 3 HITLER’S ENGINEERS Fritz Todt and Albert Speer – Master Builders of the Third Reich Blaine Taylor CASEMATE Philadelphia & Newbury Hitlers Engineers text 1-61 FINAL_Layout 1 23/06/2010 16:04 Page 4 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 908 Darby Road, Havertown, PA 19083 and 17 Cheap Street, Newbury RG14 5DD Copyright 2010 © Blaine Taylor ISBN 978-1-932033-68-7 Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Printworks International. For a complete list of Casemate titles please contact: CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (US) Telephone (610) 853-9131, Fax (610) 853-9146 E-mail: [email protected] CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (UK) Telephone (01635) 231091, Fax (01635) 41619 E-mail: [email protected] Hitlers Engineers text 1-61 FINAL_Layout 1 23/06/2010 16:04 Page 5 Z C ONTENTS z Dedication 6 Acknowledgments 6 Author’s Preface 7 Chapter One: Dr. Fritz Todt: Nazism’s Master Engineer-Builder 10 Chapter Two: “The Führer’s Roads”: Nazi Autobahnen Ribbons of Concrete, 1933 –45 24 Chapter Three: The West Wall: Hanging out the Washing on the Siegfried Line 62 Chapter Four: Minister of Armaments and Munitions, 1940 –42 80 Chapter Five: 1942: A Funeral in Berlin, 1942 102 Chapter Six: Enter Dr. Albert Speer 124 Chapter Seven: Nazi Rocketry, 1933–45 140 Chapter Eight: Speer and the German Atomic Bomb, 1942–45 164 Chapter Nine: Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, 1942–45 174 Chapter Ten: From Capture to Nuremberg, 1945–47 224 Chapter Eleven: Prisoner #5: from “Spandauer” to Bestselling Author, 1947–81 246 Bibliography 258 Endnotes 260 Hitlers Engineers text 1-61 FINAL_Layout 1 23/06/2010 16:04 Page 6 6HITLER ’S ENGINEERS Z D EDICATION z o those who helped make this book possible: mentor P. James Kurapka, Gate City, VA; translator Erika Burke, TPearland, TX; and photographer John Durand, Towson, MD, all USA. Such a detailed work as this is truly the sum of all its many parts! Z A CKNOWLEDGMENTS z his study is the result of almost five decades of research, but would not have been possible without the valuable help of many Tpeople, 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 Renée 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 under - standing 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! Hitlers Engineers text 1-61 FINAL_Layout 1 23/06/2010 16:04 Page 7 Author’s Preface 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 IThird 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. Hitlers Engineers text 1-61 FINAL_Layout 1 23/06/2010 16:04 Page 8 8HITLER ’S ENGINEERS 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 hand- wringing, back-and-forth “what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know- it?” soul-searching of the last few Speer biographies. Based on all of my reading from all sources, and my 63 years of military, business, and political life in a modern, industrialized, technocratic, Western state, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion: he knew . That having been said, this book marks a radical departure from all my previously published volumes in one important respect. In them, I baldly stated the facts as I found them, and then let the reader decide. I shall do the same here, but with the following major change: I shall state all sides of an issue, but also give my own considered view. The reader will still be free to make his or her own decision. I also contest Dr. Speer’s assertion that the job of Minister of Armaments found him, rather than the other way round. It is my contention that he actively sought some such high post following the great German military victories of that high tide summer of Nazi victory of 1940, realizing as he did that only through such a top position could he not only maintain his standing within the Nationalsozialistische (National Socialist or NS/Nazi) hierarchy, but actually advance it, especially in the expected postwar Nazi world order that he, and others, felt sure was coming. Therefore, he could not allow himself to remain forever simply Hitler’s architect, despite his protestations to the contrary in all his published postwar books. In addition, I have tried to accurately portray the inner sanctums of Hitler’s reign as the principals themselves viewed them; a visual recreation of their world, as seen from within.