Forbidden History - Fritz Todt: The Man Who Built Germany’s Roads and War Machine

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Fritz Todt was responsible for overseeing major engineering projects such as the autobahn, the West Wall defenses, and more. But in 1942, he died under mysterious circumstances… Cast List: Jadwiga Korowaj: Local Guide, in collaboration with Wolf’s Lair Museum Nigel Jones: Author and Historian Guy Walters: Author and Historian  Dr. Christian Packheiser: Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History John Guse: Author, ‘Plassenburg Spirit: Nazi Technology’ Dr. Paul Jaskot: Author, ‘The Architecture of Oppression’ Shalina Patel: Historian Vincent Schmitt: Location Guide, in collaboration with The Museum of the Atlantic Wall  Dr. Magnus Brechtken: Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History 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. D-Day, the 6th of June 1944. As Allied landing craft neared the French coast ready to take the fight to Hitler, the imposing coastal defenses known as the Atlantic Wall came into view. If you want a symbol of Nazi-controlled Europe, this is it.

this foreboding wall looking out across the English Channel and it's saying, don't you try it? At D-Day, they did break through, but there was a huge amount of sacrifice that came with that. Thousands died during the landings, and this wasn't the only defensive line blocking the route to Berlin. In Nazi Germany, the job of building such colossal projects fell to organization Tutt. Fritz Tot was chosen by Hitler to carry out the most important engineering tasks. Most people haven't heard of Fritz Tote, but he was one of the most important figures in the whole build-up to war. Tot was not merely an engineer. He was a Nazi ideologue who placed engineering at the heart of the Third Reich.

He demonstrated that a modern engineer must think in large-scale terms. It's not just the project. It must be aligned with the power of the state. What he's trying to do is to have the engineer be one of the pillars of the Third Reich. He would die in suspicious circumstances, but what he'd created outlived him and transformed Europe. These concrete structures always become a symbol of Nazism, a permanent and indelible stamp of authority and ownership on the land. The concrete is not just concrete. It keeps.

carries an ideological message. On the evening of the 7th of February, 1942, Fritz Tott, Germany's Minister of Armaments, met in private with Adolf Hitler at the Eastern Front headquarters, the Wolf's Lair. While there is no official record of what was discussed, it's believed that Tot expressed severe doubts about the direction of the war.

According to some historian that discussing was about that probably German army will be defeat in East Front. He wanted to tell Hitler, admitted that it's no chance because Fristad knew that a German army couldn't be successful. A strong advice was to Hitler to seek what peace terms he could with Stalin while he was still in a relatively strong position. Accounts reportedly from AIDS positioned outside the room suggests Hitler did not welcome Tot's assessment.

Our knowledge is maybe not so huge, but some source told us that Fritz Thot didn't agree with Hitler, so there was a quarrel. Early the next morning, Tot boarded a flight bound for Berlin. Minutes after takeoff, the plane exploded. There were no survivors. Tote's plane blew up after he had reportedly had this disqualify.

agreement with Hitler, and Hitler is not a man who likes being spoken to in certain ways. So of course, the timing of that raises quite a few questions about maybe this wasn't an accident. Hitler's most highly valued engineer was dead, and Tot's name would soon be overshadowed by others. But what Tot had achieved by this point would prove to be a vital importance to any future hopes of Nazi victory. Hidden across Germany are remnants of a construction project that helped establish Hitler's leadership, a new highway network, the Autobahn. The Nazi party had once opposed the building of such roads. But when Hitler seized power, he saw an opportunity. In 1933, Germany was still reeling from the Great Depression and struggling with mass unemployment.

we're now more new slagherl to build. We have four years, that was out of these four years ... Recognizing the potential propaganda value of such a large public works program, Hitler reversed the party's policy, claimed the Autobahn project as his own,

and raced ahead. But to create this nationwide network, he needed a skilled organizational leader. This was the beginning of the political career of Fritz Tott. Fritz Tug was what the Nazis called an Alta Kempfer, an old fighter, because he joined extremely early in 1922. I think his number was 2000 and something, which is very low. But I think he had a real drive into Nazi ideology. This is resembled in his dedication to his work.

As well as being a committed Nazi, Tott was a decorated war hero, and a qualified engineer working for a Munich-based road building firm. But it was one document in particular that brought him to the attention of Hitler at the end of 1932, his so-called Brown Memorandum. It revealed that Taut was the man to realize Hitler's vision. He says that he can put 600,000 workers back to work over five years and correct what's incorrect about the way highways have been built in Germany. But as Hitler already had an eye on the future,

there was something else in the proposal that caught his attention. And here he adds a component which lots of historians have claimed is really the most important part of this memorandum, which he says that the highways would be excellent for defense and military purposes. Tott's proposal suggested that with new roads, 300,000 troops could be moved across Germany in just two nights of driving. In June 1933, Tott was made Inspector General

for German roadways. I think Hitler saw in Tult a true believer, someone he could trust, at the same time someone who was already part of a world in which construction was really a core value. This was something that would naturally draw him to Hitler in the inner circle. Today, a number of the modern autobans stand above those original Nazi roads. Hitler originally planned to carve out 3,700 miles worth of new routes connecting the country.

And once other territories were conquered, the Autobahn would grow beyond the borders. But for now, the priority was to show that the Nazis were tackling more pressing issues. One aspect of these programs was not to use a lot of machines, but to use human workforce, which was quite inefficient, but especially helped the propaganda to claim or to show, yeah, these people have jobs right now. They are way from the streets. The auto barns are like a concrete expression of the success of Nazi Germany.

This government would not be able to build autobarns unless they were doing well economically. It became a propaganda showcase for the Nazi regime and its modern technological achievements. Todd was the man who did that and did it supremely well. Tot was giving Hitler an important propaganda victory. He was showing that the Nazi future was being built today. But beneath the surface, not everything was what it seemed. It is often said that the construction of the ardubarn, that its main goal, was to reduce unemployment and that it had strong military aspects in it. As we know today, none

of them were really true. While Nazi propaganda capitalized on the images of the 600,000 jobs promised by TOT, only around a fifth of them ever materialized. And as for the military aspect, when the war eventually came, most troop movements would rely upon on the railways, not the road network. It is more reasonable that Todd emphasized this point, especially the military point, to convince Hitler to choose his brown memoranda. Once at the helm, Tot set to work

establishing strong relationships with private construction firms. This was the basis from which his own organization grew. And here, he'd utilize them in his effort to place the engineer here at the heart of the Third Reich. When war broke out, around half of the intended Audubon network had been built. Many sites were quickly abandoned.

These routes actually reveal how Taut hoped to cement his own ideology directly onto German soil. The whole blood and soil component, which Todd himself doesn't talk a whole lot about necessarily, but the idea of being bound to the soil and that the soil and the landscape and all of that create the basis on which the Aryan race develops is clearly an underlying component in this.

But Taut added to this, he wedded Nazi ideology with the need for technology, demonstrating how vital engineers were to the regime. Toad argues that the Audubon represent this harmony of man, machine, and nature. Taut's roots did not simply go from A to B. They were designed to complement the beauty on display, flowing through the countryside,

connecting cultural and political landmarks, inspiring travelers to fall in love with their homeland. He keeps arguing that engineers have never understood what it meant to really take a task and look at it with the eyes of an artist. And he says this is the way that they should be looking at the construction of the Audubon. At the Nazi Party rally in 1937, Tots set out how he'd deliver for Hitler in the future.

Rather than targeting all of Germany's engineers, as head of the Nazi Party organization for engineers, he'd focus on turning its members into his loyal followers. He says, I'm much more interested in having 80,000 activists than I am in having 200,000 hangers on. And that's what he sees. he's trying to develop this sense of activism, which he thinks is going to make the engineers more effective within the society. To accelerate this transformation, Taut established an institution with this goal at its heart. The site he chose was Ploszenberg Castle in northern Bavaria.

Under Tott's authority, it became known as the Reich Castle of Technology. A central focus was on educating attendees about the latest technologies and techniques. But Tott also wanted it to do something further. He wanted it to win over the well-educated engineer to the Nazi cause. Engineers were notoriously apolitical in Germany, and the idea here was to create this atmosphere and create these model engineers that would go on to influence others and so on. Inside, artworks hung on the walls and exhibitions were hosted.

Everything was intended to appeal to the senses of the cultured, educated attendees. They would do concerts, there were poetry readings, there were all kinds of general cultural events that took place there in which the engineers had to engage, and this becomes part of this process of drawing the person out. But culture wasn't the only tool used to influence them. From the moment the engineers stepped off the train in the town below, they were actively made to feel a part of something larger.

They think that they're just going for a four-day course, but then they quickly find, oh, we're marching from the station to Plasenburg. It was run on a kind of militaristic basis. They had to be in uniform. There was a morning sport process. You couldn't leave the castle to go downtown. to go downtown. If the connection to history, the atmosphere, the cultural events, and the exhibitions were

all intended to help draw out the individual, then once this was achieved, the attendees would be more responsive to the next stage of Tots' plan. It's an interesting note that some of the courses are heavily anti-Semitic, and even Julius Stryker, who is the most vehement anti-Semite and a Nazi, party is invited to the Plasenberg to talk about the role of the Jews and so on. So it's not necessarily a sort of high-flying ideological approach, man, machine, and nature and harmony, which is part of it, but that whole ideology of Tots. Plasenberg is an opportunity for the Nazis to ensure that whilst they're bringing people

together for scientific purposes, there's an ideological undercurrent to that, the entire way through. The more of these committed Nazi engineers that Todd can manage to develop, the more that he can push forward his technical ideology, and the more that technical ideology will come to play a decisive role as we move into the Nazi future. Todd hoped Plassenberg would create Nazi engineers ready to build the Third Reich's glorious future. But their true capabilities would be tested far sooner.

In early 1938, Hitler's foreign policy showed that before the Nazi dream could be made a reality, a vital first step must be taken. He's made it explicit by re-inhabiting the Rhineland. He has started his demands towards land, for example, the Sudetenland. So he's really clearly gearing up for war. With the endgame coming into view, Taut would now be drawn to the war. be drawn more directly into the fight.

The West Wall transforms the engineering of the Ottoman into an overt military goal. And I think that transformation was really crucial to showcase that Germany had the capacity to wage war. Facing France's own Maginot line, the West Wall was an almost 400-mile-long deterrent that would allow Hitler to move east into Czechoslovakia while keeping the West secure. The West Wall or the Seekreed Line, as it became known by the Allies, was a huge commission.

You've got tank traps, you've got these things called dragons teeth, you've got bunkers, and you've got these really cleverly designed areas that looked weaker in order to kind of tempt the enemy to funnel in close, and then you could ambush him. For me, the importance of Toldt is exactly that he proved the ability of Germany to plan and implement large-scale construction activity. Not only that, he argued for its importance and why it was something not merely for job creation, but something essential to the modern German state. As the rapid construction of the West Wall continued, it appeared that Taught was because of the moment. coming indispensable to the Fuhrer, who that year sang his praises to the German public.

He has, through the craft of his organizational genies, one of the greatest of all the time, but Hitler went a step further. For the first time in public, he referred to Tots' workforce as organization Taut. Hitler announces the organization Tot, which was a real honor for to have an organization named after yourself in the Third Reich. There weren't many. Tot's position was secure. In effect, he had become Hitler's chief engineer. Hitler always intended to build for centuries. You can't have an empire that lasts for a thousand years if you don't build. and the primary purpose of the total organization was to build. My take is that he was extremely ambitious.

As he moves forward and as more and more successful, I think the ultimate goal was he wanted to be in a post-war period to have a kind of role as Minister of Technology with a major say in terms of the German economy. With war fast approaching, the regime's need for him and his organization would only grow. But TOT's efforts to push his own technical ideology would soon have to be sidelined, giving way to cold, efficient military necessity.

As Europe descended into war, Tots' priorities shifted. Organization TOT's main task was to march behind the advancing armies and to do pioneer works like railway construction, like repairing damage roads and bridges. and this was very vital for logistics and transport and to keep up the supply of the Wehrmacht. In March 1940, TOT was promoted to Minister of Armaments and Munitions. Keeping the German war machine stocked with shells, tanks and weapons was now an extra responsibility of his.

After conquering Poland, Hitler's forces next pushed north and west, invading Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Organization taught followed close behind. His power now stretched over the German borders to the occupied countries and territory. Such was Germany's success that by the end of the 4th of June,

the evacuation of Dunkirk was complete, and the majority of Allied forces had been driven out of mainland Europe. Less than three weeks later, the French government surrendered, central to the next phase of Hitler's campaign, of Hitler's campaign was construction on an epic scale. And one of the first tasks would be to prepare for a major offensive operation

codenamed sea lion. Organization TOT would lead the charge. In the north of France, Organization Taut set to work building emplacements for guns capable of firing an 1,100-pound shell over the English Channel. But the construction of these batteries was just one again. was just one example of what organization TOT would be called upon for during the war years. As Germany conquered more and more territory,

the fortifications, the airports, the gun emplacements, the simple barracks, the concentration camps, all these building projects were given over to the TOT organization. Hitler was directly involved and interested in many construction sites and buildings, organization Todd came up with like the submarine bunkers or later on the Atlantic Wall. Organization Tots operations expanded across Europe and all the way north to the Arctic Circle.

But to achieve this, it needed vast amounts of labor, whether paid, forced, or enslaved. Foreign labor was central and crucial for the way organization TOT operated and became more and more crucial part of it, especially in the later stages of the war. Prior to the war, TOT had overseen a German workforce of around 350,000 people. But as organization TOT transformed during wartime, that number grew to around 1.5 million, mainly foreign workers. If it comes to the question on forced labor, of course, Todd knew what was going on, and Todd was clearly aware that this organization couldn't work without the use of forced laborers.

The worst excesses of this came after Todd's death, but the framework had been established. I think Todd cared for human life as later on did Speer, not because he felt sympathy with the individuals, but he cared for their working and living conditions to keep their main power and their work power intact. In the end, the batteries at Cape Grimei were never used for the invasion of Britain. With the Luftwaffe's failure to destroy the RAF and Britain's superior naval power still in evidence, Operation C-Lion was indefinitely postponed. Instead, Hitler's attention turned east, and with that, these batteries were repurposed for Germany's defense. In order to reach Moscow, Hitler had decided to redeploy these men. But at that time, it was also necessary to provide a defense.

And so Hitler's directive back then was to create what is called the Atlantic Wall, a bit like the West Wall opposite the Maginolai. And so he asked Fritz Todd to take care of the Atlantic Wall. Taut, however, would not live to see that happen. From late 1940 in the Missourian Woods of Poland, organization Tott had been secretly constructing Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters, the Wolf's Lair. On the 24th of June the following year,

Hitler visited for the first time. The attack on the Soviet Union had begun two days earlier. Operation Barbarossa is the Nazi invasion of the USSR, and the key thing there is that this is a breakaway from the Nazi Soviet pact. Hitler intended for this to be a swift campaign, and it began with the Nazis rapidly advancing towards Moscow. But as winter approached, the push forward ground to a halt. It does not go well for the Nazi.

For many reasons, the Nazis are famously delayed, so they get stuck in freezing conditions that they're not used to. And there's also a scorched earth policy that Stalin puts in place. So it means that even when the Nazis have managed to break into certain parts of the country, there's nothing there left for them to take. As the war dragged on, both sides suffered horrendous losses. Hitler would end up spending over 800 days at the Wolf's Lair. Tott, however, had seen it all coming, and he was one of only a handful who dared to question the Fuhrer's decisions.

He was quite courageous, and if he believed that Hitler was taking a wrong decision, he was prepared to stand up to him and tell him so. It's believed this was what Tott discussed with Hitler on the evening of the 7th of February, 1942. Initially, Tote was very much on board and very much part of this incident. initiative. However, by early 42, he seems to have realized the problem with supply chains, the problem with overextension of the military drive. He stated openly to Hitler that his analysis of the resources of the two sides and the fact that they had failed to subdue Russia in the first six months of the campaign meant that the war could not be won.

that indicates his engineering role. He can't just promise productivity. He can't just promise results. He's got to think about the complexity and the interaction of all of these elements of the production process. So this was not, I would say, from his perspective, an anti-Nazi or critical point of view.

It was much more about how do we achieve our goals within the context of the conditions we have. And how do we do that strategically now so that we can build for the future goals at some later date? While Tot may have spoken his mind, he was also loyal. By using his connections to private firms, he had already begun making plans to restructure the armaments industry for a long, drawn-out war.

But he wouldn't be there to see those plans through. This is an aerofield for Wolfsler. And Fritzthod had plans. had planned to back to Berlin early morning in the 8th of February. The weather wasn't nice. There was snowing, cloud was very low, and also was very, very windy.

Taut was a pilot. But on this occasion, he was not at the controls, and this was not his usual plane. The plane takes off. It flies out about three kilometers and reaches the height of about 200 meters. And then all of a sudden banks sharply to the left and comes back towards the airport. Obviously the pilot planning on making an emergency landing.

And when he accelerates again, there's an explosion. Flames shoot up from the front of the aircraft and the plane crashes. There was a big fire and there was a problem because the plane had got a lot of petrol, 3,000 liters. So all people were killed. TOT was honored with a state funeral, but definitive proof of what caused the accident has never been uncovered.

So actually about Fritzthold's death, there are questions and different versions. So we don't know what is really true story. Tott had rivals. He'd had a heated disagreement with Hitler, and Albert Speer, the man who succeeded him had originally intended to join him on the flight. All of this has fueled suspicion over the years. Quickly there came up rumors about Todd's death and it was assumed

that maybe Todd died because of assassination. But these arguments can't be proven. If you ask me direct, I think these speculations are absolute nonsense. It was not in Hitler's interest. to get someone like Todd out of the way because in the end Fritz Todd was always loyal to Hitler and as far as we know would have always stayed loyal with Hitler. The most common theory to my knowledge is that there is a self-destruction mechanism on the plane which by accident they triggered and that was the reason why it then crashed. Taut was dead, but the organization he had created lived on, keeping the name of its founder. In March, Hitler officially issued a directive to build what would soon be called the Atlantic

Wall. With the gun emplacements at Battery Tott, covered over by 10 feet of reinforced concrete, they became one of the links in the chain of defenses that stretched from France's border with Spain up to the north of Norway. Todd had established the framework of an organization for building anything that needed to be built. He built up this organization composed of the centralization of private companies

into one umbrella organization, and it survived him. Taut had established the foundation. But his successor, Albert Speer, undoubtedly left his own mark upon the organization. And in the role of armaments minister, while Speer went on to achieve great successes, again, Tott had helped pave the way. Many of the reforms, Fritz Tott already intended, Speer adopted or only slightly modified them. For example, Speer later was known for involving the private industry into the production, into the war economy.

the war economy. A lot of this is already foreshadowed within Todd's own reforms. I think if Todd wouldn't have died in a plane accident, as an armaments minister, he would have become as successful as Albert Speer was. Following the hard-fought success of the D-Day landings in June, 1944, Allied forces marched east towards Berlin. But in their way stood the West Wall. In some areas the Allies traversed the defenses easily.

In others, heavily rearmed and expanded zones of defense saw bloody fighting for months on end. The cost of progress was high. Estimates suggest the U.S. alone suffered 140,000 casualties in their efforts to break through. Although it was built as a deterrent and a propaganda statement, Tots West Wall provided a deadly form for the defense of Germany. It was extraordinary what Todd and what his organization achieved. By increasingly ruthless methods, it's true. We remember the name of his organization.

We don't remember him so much as a person because he wasn't involved in the end of Nazi Germany when it crashed into the abyss. In 1945, British intelligence services suggested that organization taught had carried out the most impressive building program since Roman times. The result of much of this is still with us today. In terms of the way that the end of the war took place, the foundations that he built for Speer were perhaps the greatest historical significance in a sense. But I don't think that's the way Hibder would have seen it. I think he had lost a loyal and very effective compatriot in the process.

I think for Hitler, that was the most important. 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 Rediker called the Many Headed Hydra, and he talks about pirate ships as an experiment in radical democracy. And me, who knows nothing, aeronautical scientists can't quite explain it. They say, we don't actually know how it gets up there. How it stays up?

You're just not good at a science. No, there are explanations? There are explanations. 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.