Forbidden History - Building the Nazi War Machine

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast we take a look at the dark ambitions of Hans Kammler, whose fingerprints remain on some of the Nazi regime’s most lethal projects, from the development of the V-2 rocket to the construction and operation of concentration camps. Cast List: Nigel Jones: Author & Historian Dr Michael Allen: Author, ‘The Business of Genocide’ Dr. Paul Jaskot: Author, ‘The Architecture of Oppression’ Dr. Karina Urbach: Author, ‘Go-Betweens for Hitler’ Guy Walters: Author & Historian  Dr. Katherine Sharp Landdeck: Texas Woman’s University Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz: Auschwitz Memorial Research Center Dr. Karsten Uhl: Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial Dr. Rainer Karlsch: Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. By May 1945, Nazi Germany was defeated. Adolf Hitler was dead, and the Third Reich lay in ruins. But Allied victory was by no means inevitable. I think in the efficient conduct of the war, the Nazis, in a sense,

the Second World War, until the sheer weight of numbers of allied production, of trained allied forces, got the better of them, they were winning the war. And while in the midst of conflict, it was the Third Reich that touched space, Hitler's engineers that built a jet fighter and Nazi architects that plan how future Germans would live and how millions of Jews and other minorities would die. Behind the scenes of these immoral projects were engineers like Hans Kamler. Kamler is an implementer. He's a manager.

He takes those things and he makes them into settlement projects, eventually into weapons factories. As SS chief of construction, Kamler didn't invent or build, but his cold management turned Hitler's dreams into reality. The capacity for industrial production, the capacity for industrial production, the capacity for industrial killing. You couldn't do that without engineers like Kamler. And yet his life, career, and even ultimate fate are only just beginning to be revealed.

Kamler rose without trace, and it's only in recent times that we've come to realize what a vital cog in the Nazi war machine Hans Kamler was. Hans Kamler was born in 1901 in the German Empire. It was an exciting time in the country's history, For Germany was becoming a major industrial power. Germany, her technology in development of things like steel processing, the invention of the motor car, all those things, Germany surpassed her old rival Britain, surpassed every other country in Europe,

and became a highly technological for the day society. Just as Kamler witnessed Germany rise, he also saw it fall. Germany entered the First World War a great industrial power. But after four years of brutal attrition, the sheer resources of the British and French empires, combined with the United States, proved overwhelming. For teenagers like Kamler, defeat was humiliating. Kamler was one of that generation, born in the very, very first years of the two years of the 20th century, were just a little bit young to have fought in the First World War, but ashamed

by Germany's defeat and determined to restore, as they saw it, German greatness. So they were possessed of a certain spirit of revenge. The German Empire collapsed, and the Weimar Republic took its place. But with this new democracy's armed forces ruthlessly curtailed by the Treaty of Versailles, Its focus lay on domestic priorities. One of the new Constitution's key promises was to give every German their own healthy home. And so in 1919, with Germany on the cusp of a building boom,

Kamler started studying engineering at university. But he would specialize not in construction or architecture itself, but in the management of building projects. Because the scale of production was increasing in modern industrial building, that scale of production also had to be managed from a bureaucratic end and from a strictly managerial point of view. And so Kamler really was able to learn both of these aspects really well. Revolutions in management, paper forms, statistical records, chains of command, created the stereotypical pen-pushing bureaucrats, that are with us to this day. But these often overlooked innovations

enabled building on a large scale. The revolution in modern management that was happening at this time is equally innovative, let's say in terms of modern organization as say the assembly line was for mechanical engineering technology. Comler's studies put him at the cutting edge of this new science of management, and he soon found work in the growing city of Berlin,

with loans from the United States, The city's engineers were constructing modernist, brightly lit apartments at scale, many of which still stand. He made sure that the supplies were there. He made sure that there was a labor contingent. In many ways, his work for Berlin was a really good training ground for the kind of job that he would ultimately do. In 1929, the Wall Street crash saw America call in its loans. Germany sunk into recession.

Weimar government could ill afford to provide its citizens with basic necessities, never mind their own healthy home. Building certainly continued after the Depression began, but nevertheless, the built environment, the building economy was really devastated. So that kind of idealism of the 1920s really collapsed fairly quickly in that moment. Engineers, like Kamler, once told they would build Germany's future, but now struggling to find work in that moment. struggling to find work at all, began to feel that their own government was holding them back. They think if only I was unfettered from these limitations, I and my brothers we could engineer the future. But one person did promise to free them from the shackles of economic misery to build

a positive new future. Adolf Hitler. He promised to get them finally. to turn them into these elite leaders that they wanted to be. In 1932, Kamler joined Hitler's Nazi party. They wanted to dream at the scale of the built environment that Hitler was asking them to dream. In July that same year, its growing popularity

saw it become the largest party in the Reichstag. It represented a new, progressive, modern, contemporary, way of doing things. In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. And in a few short months, Hitler outmaneuvered his cabinet to seize full dictatorial powers. Democracy ended, to the sound of thunderous applause, soon started delivering for his engineers as they were put to work, forging his new Germany.

A new road network, the Autobahn was concreted onto the landscape. A massive program of rearmament saw the building of new tanks, ships, and aircraft, as the Treaty of Versailles was torn to shreds. You have to understand with a huge military expansion, there was all sorts of construction, everything from barracks to roads to rail lines, things of that nature. This new government soon found use for Kamler's skills. He advised on the construction of a housing estate, only this time it was built on Nazi doctrine, still inhabited to this day, Krumalanka is renowned as one of the most beautiful

housing estates in Berlin, famed for design elements that hark back to the German past. But this housing estate, nestled among the pines, has a dark history. It was built for an organization of which Kamler was a member, the SS. The SS starts really small in 1929. And there's only 280 men protecting Nazi speakers at their rallies. But then, of course, Himmler takes over and he turns it into a big enterprise and the SS. Then runs concentration camps and becomes during the war Waffen SS as well, so a combat unit, and they become all-powerful.

As head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler had even greater ambitions for his organization. He wanted it to control the very way in which future Germans would live, based on the principles of blood and soil. Blood and soil was an ideology promoted by Kamler's own boss, Walter Daray, and enthusiastically adopted by Heinrich Himmler. The blood represented racially pure Germans to be reconnected almost mystically with the soil, German land, through the return to a traditional rural way of life. A book, Kamler co-wrote in 1934, is clear evidence that he too had become a disciple of this cult.

He decries the way in which houses and settlements are produced by businesses, and so just become these kind of mere commodities, you know, with a price tag on them. He hated that. What Kamler did was to contrast this with the romantic national socialist idea that houses would once again be made for the people. And there'd be once more contact with the native. soil and all this would help to bring about a strong and unified Germany. Krumalanka was blood and soil in wooden stone.

But it was more than just an eccentric eco-warrier movement. For these eco-warriers were to become soldiers, conquering territory to rebuild in their own image and slaughtering those who did not fit their racial criteria. The Kumalanka is like their little crystal from which everything else was going to grow. to grow it. They were going to remake the East in their own image as racial supremacists through this settlement project. So think about Central Europe, Eastern Europe, this is the territory that the Germans were thinking of for this

plan, just to take over that territory and kill anyone in their way. It's the most densely populated, one of the most industrialized areas of the world, and they get this brilliant idea, we're going to go settle there, right? As if there's not anyone already there. But they're planning these settlements as if it's their wild wild east, I suppose, as the wild wild west was for the United States. On the 1st of September 1939, the German War of Conquest began with the invasion of Poland. Germany's forces combined with its ally, the Soviet Union, to conquer Poland in less than

five weeks. Upon victory, Himmler asked for and received a new title. He was named a Reichs commissar for the protection of the German East. That was a title that Hitler gave him. He really wanted to build an empire, and the East was his opportunity. This new position gave Himmler the go-ahead to turn his dreams of a blood and soil future into reality. This meant rebuild the agricultural system so that it would be Germanified.

It meant the cities were going to be Germanized, and that meant getting rid of unwanted populations and create a kind of pseudo-medieval world of German purity led by the SS. It was to be a colossal task, but Himmler had a ready workforce under SS control, concentration camp prisoners. Anyone else who was less than the Germans, less than the pure Aryan race, would be used as slave labor. They want to utilize these people to work for the aims of the regimes and work them essentially until they die, because there's always going to be someone else to replace them.

But for the SS to remodel Europe on such a scale, it needed not only architects and laborers, but someone to manage construction. In June 1941, they turned again to Hans Kamler. For a guy like Kamler, who's been writing about settlements since he got out of college, that would have been the chance of a life time. This was raising him up into historical time, right?

He was going to play a role in defining his nation's history. In his new position, Kamler would plan the destruction of entire nations, histories, and cultures through cold bureaucracy. Key to turning the sprawling, inefficient SS into a building machine was the paperwork. The bureaucratization of work was not only about organizing the distribution of materials,

the distribution of materials and labor. But it was actually at the level of the forms themselves, the paperwork. And that paperwork was really, really important. Comler introduced forms that broke construction projects down into individual tasks, complex designs into standardized components, and human beings into slave work units.

You could have a form that you filled out that asked you what you what was. what kind of labor you needed, how many people you needed, the hours you needed, what are the building materials, what are the specs on the building materials. Everything had to be recorded, everything had to be put down, things that today would be done on a computer he did in forms in duplicate and triplicate. And because of this is sort of boring and bureaucratic, it hasn't attracted the attention that it should have done. Comler's piles of forms would one day lead to piles of bodies

and to the greatest crimes in humanity's history. But it rapidly became clear that to make a reimagined East a reality, the SS needed far more slave laborers. As Kamler was beginning his new role, Hitler turned against his one-time ally and invaded the Soviet Union. It gave them potentially access

to the oil fields of the Caucasus and the grain of Ukraine, And so that the capacity to really imagine and enact their goals came within their sights through that move. And as the Nazi war machine thundered through the Soviet Union, Hitler's forces captured vast numbers of Russian soldiers. Think about the work that needed to be done in the war. Taking over the Soviet Union created an opportunity for a lot more slave labor.

And that's how many of the, Soviet people and those of Eastern Europe die is through their utilization as slave labor. Himmler made a deal with the German army to transfer 350,000 prisoners of war to the SS. Kamler's new task was to find a way of housing them. He ordered the construction of two new concentration camps on Polish soil. One was Maidonik, the other, more infamously, infamously, was Birkenau. It was Hans Kamler, who informed the administration of Outfield,

the headquarters of the concentration camp, about the new plan of setting up a large POW camp for Soviets, prisoners of war. Kamla was here, and he discussed the issue of the precise location for the new camp. So the final decision was taken during this meeting. Birkenau was less than three miles west of another concentration camp, Auschwitz, originally built for Polish prisoners. But while Auschwitz held some 10,000 prisoners, Auschwitz to Burkinau, as it was termed, was designed to hold 100,000.

Hans Kamler played a very important role in the process of planning of Birkenau. He was here six times and he supervised the construction works. Drawing on past experience, Combler managed the construction of accommodation, but this time it was based on maximum brutal efficiency and could be replicated at scale. He decides how many people could be forced into each barrack. So he's got these 25 drawings, and in them he provides the construction specifications

not only for Birkenau, but for every concentration camp throughout the Third Reich. In October 1941, nearly 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived here and were put to work building the new camp. But as they toiled in the snow, they died in their thousands. Kamler returned to Berkenau, this time to solve the issue of growing piles of bodies. He ordered to move the new revolutionary crematuredia with the capacity of almost 1,500. hundred bodies a day, from Auschwitz to Birkenau, because as he expected, the average number of deaths, the bodies, would be much higher in Birkenau than in Auschwitz's main camp. Prisoner's deaths were of little concern to Kamler.

He believed that more were on the way. But by the end of 1941, it became clear that no more would be coming. Hitler had underestimated the Soviet Union. With the Russians counter-attacking, more and more German men were called up to the front lines. Soviet prisoners were assigned to take their place in the Reichs factories, and so Himmler would have to find a new population to fill his camps. He soon did. With the first serious defeat of the German army in the Battle of Moscow, Angus Himal decided that the Jews would replace the Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz

and in Birkenau. Despite the setbacks in the war, the Nazis continued to prepare to build the future using this new labor force. With a budget of half a trillion euros in today's money, Kamler was given responsibility for the detailed planning of post-war construction. He started what were called the building brigades,

and these building brigades were a flexible supply of forced labor that could be moved anywhere in the occupied territories, mostly in what is now Poland, but they really could be sent anywhere they wanted to. The brigades were essentially mobile concentration camps. They contained prisoners who had the skills for future building projects, but only a small proportion of Europe's Jewish population were to be reserved as slave labor.

And while Kamler was planning building brigades, decisions had been taken that would lead to industrialized murder. Berkenau was soon to be repurposed as a center for the Holocaust. The role changed because it was originally a concentration and work camp. The primary purpose was productivity. But when it was decided to use the gas chambers as a primary method of execution, of extermination of the Jews, it turned into the death camp. Comler's role also changed.

He would no longer solely plan the Nazi future. He would now enable the wholesale extermination of those not deemed worthy of living in it. I think an ambitious, capable young man like he was would have jumped at that chance. Because he was all in. Ideologically, he was already all in. It's not like he had to be convinced that this was a worthy project, sadly. In August 1942, nearly 4,000 miles away from Burkinau, The Battle of Stalingrad was raging. But after six months of brutal fighting,

the city that bore the name of Hitler's greatest adversary became the scene of his greatest defeat so far. The Third Reich was mobilized for total war as the Allies began bombing Germany around the clock. Himmler's concentration camp prisoners, set aside to build the future, would now be used in Germany's struggle just to survive. They're going to come and take his precious little labor force.

So fortunately, in his eyes for Himmler, he had Hans Kamler and his engineering corps. Kamler was tasked with deploying prisoners in his building brigades to repair bomb damage. But his role was soon to grow, for he was about to be entrusted with Germany's most advanced engineering project, the V2 rocket. The result of more than eight years of development at Pinamunda in nine months, northern Germany, Hitler believed the V2 was the miracle weapon that would change the course of war. But as the assembly lines began producing them in quantity, disaster struck. Pailamunda was ideal until August 1943 when the Royal Air Force visited it and bombed it. This attack threw the Nazi High Command into panic.

But it would spark Kamler's inexorable rise. To continue the production of the V2, the decision had to be made to make it safe from the RAF's raids, and the decision was made to move production underground. The site for this new underground rocket factory was to be beneath the mountains near Nordhausen in central Germany. The move to be completed by New Year 1944. It was to be a monumental task. Before summer of 1943, these tunnels

were used as a fuel depot was a very raw place. There was no electricity in the water because it was not used. Transforming a primitive fuel depot into a rocket production line would require vast manual labor and precise management.

The two would come together in the form of SS concentration camp prisoners and Hans Kamler. He chose was what he learned at university. He was very obsessed with the idea of efficiency. And he analyzed the project as a whole, using the principles of scientific management,

and divided the project into different parts. So there was the first part of transforming those tunnels into facilities for the production. And there were some part parts of the system which had to have some more boring of new meters of tunnel, so it was more complicated. Kamler's strict prioritization enabled the maximum amount of space to be made ready in the shortest amount of time. And a new concentration camp, Mittelbao Dora, was built nearby to ensure a constant supply of slave labor. Kamler displayed all his inhumanity in motivating them.

The incentive was brutal force to make the prisoners know that they could be killed in any moment if the supervisors were not convinced that the work was good. Thousands toiled to produce weapons aiming to save the very state that was killing them. Kamla didn't give us stuff for the conditions in the factories, for the welfare of the workers. He said at one stage, don't worry about the victims of this process. I'll look after that. Just worry about the product. Kamler successfully converted these tunnels in record time, and V2 production began.

The job that Kamla had done had convinced his superiors that he was the man who could do anything, that he was a superhuman. Over the bodies of more than 10,000 slaves, Kamler had delivered what had seemed to some impossible. His responsibilities would soon grow further. Above ground, the Allies had been continuing to pound German industry. And so in early 1944, Hitler made the decision to push more weapons production underground. The V-1 flying bomb and the first production jet fighter would soon,

soon joined the V2 rocket in the tunnels. Kamler, having proved himself, would be tasked not only to create their production lines, but to deploy them against the enemy. I think someone like Hans Kamler experienced that as exhilarating. I think he thought he was his best self, right? And it was in the name of saving our country, saving our great dream, hopefully at some level, building our utopia. The man who began his career managing building sites in the Weimar Republic was now the Third

Reich's greatest hope of survival. He drove his slaves to dig more tunnels into the mountainside and ordered waves of V2 rocket attacks against Allied cities. The Third Reich's jet fighter, the most advanced aircraft of the war, took to the skies even as the Allies were sithing their way through Germany. Kamler fervently believed that the future he had long for was still within his grasp. If we could just get enough of these planes, if we could just get enough of these rockets, maybe we can push them back and survive. He continues sending these telegrams to Himmler predicting exponential growth in SS construction.

Kamla has completely lost the plot. But salvation through miracle weapons proved a fantasy. By April 1945, bombs were landing on Nordhausen, and Kamler was forced to face reality. He would not, however, wait around to watch his underground factory fall into allied hands. It was becoming clear that it was, if it hadn't been clear to even the dimest intellect, that it was all up with Germany. So Kamler decides to go to possibly the most secure place from both the Red Army and the Western allies who were moving into Germany itself and that was Prague.

But on the 8th of May 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered. Perhaps because he heard this news, the very next day, Kamler took his own life. As the years went by, Kamler's story faded into history. But more recently, evidence has come to light that suggests that his life did not end in in 1945. One Piece is a document written by an investigator at the Counterintelligence Corps, an American Military Intelligence Agency that searched for Nazi criminals. In the investigation report it is clearly stated that Hans Kamla survived May 9th.

And it reads on the last page that he was captured by the CIC, the American military secret service. A further report lists him as a prisoner of the US Air Force. Here find SS Ubengruppen Fierer Kamla in the middle of the list as one of the particularly prominent prisoners. There are other documents, American documents, in which it is mentioned that Speer is to be interrogated and that there is a very and that Kamla is to be interrogated. These are documents that date from the autumn of 1945.

In my opinion, these are further evidence that Kamla survived. Rainer Kalsh believes that the U.S. sought Kamler's knowledge of underground facilities, which they feared might get into the hands of the Soviet Union. And so they spread false rumors of Kamler's death to throw them off the scent. They wanted at all costs to prevent the Russians from learning that Kamla was in the hands of the Americans. It was necessary to prevent Kamla's knowledge from being disclosed.

Further documents that may provide conclusive proof remain classified to this day. Kamler was as enigmatic in death as he was in life. But what is beyond doubt is that that his story gives us a tantalizing glimpse into the often overlooked work of the project engineers, the lesser-known management men, who did so much behind the scenes to make Hitler's dream a living nightmare

for those who lived through it. What they accomplished to conquer half of Europe, to develop things like the jet, and at the same time to be carrying out the crime of the century, the Holocaust of European Jewry, was an amazing achievement, an utterly amoral or immoral achievement, an evil achievement, but an achievement nonetheless.

In their eyes, they were the greatest generation. They just ended up the greatest loser generation, right? Because there's nothing about having your country bombed absolutely flat to give you a little bit of humble pie. Unexplored catacombs buried beneath the city, a crumbling castle perched on a mountain peak, a top secret government bunker, a cursed mansion cloaked in legend.

I'm Sasha Auerbach. Join me in Tom Ward every Wednesday and Sunday as we reveal the mysteries and histories behind these abandoned places and ask, where did everyone go? We'll hear from Sasha, who knows the history the best. In fact, there's a very famous book by a chap named Marcus Reddiker called The Many-Headed Hydra,

and he talks about pirate ships as an experiment in radical democracy. And me, who knows nothing, aeronautical scientists don't quite explain it and they say we don't actually know how it gets up there no no no how it stays up you're just not good at a science no there are explanations there are oh okay fine it's just plain physics brought to you by like a shot makers of forbidden history search for where did everyone go on your favorite podcast platform