Organisation Todt - 1942-1945: The OT Under Albert Speer

1942-1945: The OT Under Albert Speer

Despite the death of its namesake, the OT continued to exist as an engineering organization and drew multiple further assignments. At the beginning of 1943, in addition to its continuing work on the Atlantic Wall, the organization also undertook the construction of launch platforms in northern France for the V1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket. In the summer of that year, following the increasingly defensive course of the German war effort, the organization was further charged with the construction of air-raid shelters and the repair of bombed buildings in cities within Germany and with the construction of underground refineries and armaments factories (Project Riese).

Administratively, however, the organization was effectively incorporated into Albert Speer's Ministry of Armaments and War Production in 1943. Speer's concerns, in the context of an increasingly desperate Germany in which all production had been severely impacted by materials and manpower shortages and by Allied bombing, ranged over almost the whole of the German war-time economy. Speer managed to increase production significantly, at the cost of a vastly increased reliance on compulsory labour. This applied as well to the labour force of the OT.

By the end of the war, the compulsory state service for Germans had been reduced to six weeks of perfunctory military training and all available conscript German manpower diverted to military units and direct military support organisations. From the beginning of 1942 at the latest, their place was increasingly taken by prisoners of war and compulsory labourers from occupied countries. Foreign nationals and POWs were often, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as "foreign workers" (Fremdarbeiter). In 1943 and 1944 these were further augmented by concentration camp and other prisoners. Beginning in the autumn of 1944, between 10,000 to 20,000 half-Jews (Mischlinge) and persons related to Jews by marriage were recruited into special units.

By the end of 1944, of approximately 1.4 million labourers in the service of the Organisation Todt overall, 1% were Germans rejected from military service and 1.5% were concentration camp prisoners; the rest were prisoners of war and compulsory labourers from occupied countries. All were effectively treated as slaves and existed in the complete and arbitrary service of a ruthless totalitarian state. Many did not survive the work or the war.