Todt Organisation

Organisation Todt (OT)
From left: Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Philipp Bouhler, Fritz Todt and Reinhard Heydrich listen to Konrad Meyer at a Generalplan Ost exhibition in Berlin, 20 March 1941
Woman with Ostarbeiter OT badge at Auschwitz
Operation
Period	1933 – 1945
Location	German-occupied Europe
Prisoners
Total	1.4 million (1944)
Deaths	varied according to different sources

The Todt Organisation (German: Organisation Todt, OT) was a Third Reich civil and military engineering group in Germany named after its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi figure. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in pre-World War II Germany, in Germany itself and occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union during the war. It became notorious for using forced labour.

The history of the organisation falls into three phases. A pre-war period lasted from 1933 to 1938 during which Todt's primary office was that of the General Inspector of German Roadways (Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straßenwesen) and his primary responsibility, the construction of the Autobahn network. The organisation was able to draw on "conscripted" (i.e. compulsory) labour, from within Germany, through the Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst, RAD).

The second period lasted from 1938, when the OT group proper was founded, until February 1942, when Todt died in a plane crash. Following the invasion of Poland Todt was named the Minister for Armaments and Munitions in 1940 (Reichminister für Bewaffnung und Munition) and the projects of the OT group became almost exclusively military. The huge increase in the demand for labour created by the various military and paramilitary projects was met by a series of expansions of the laws on compulsory service, which ultimately obligated all Germans to arbitrarily determined (i.e., effectively unlimited) compulsory labour for the state: Zwangsarbeit. From 1938–40, over 1.75 million Germans were conscripted into labour service. From 1940–42, Organization Todt began its reliance on Gastarbeitnehmer (guest workers), Militärinternierte (military internees), Zivilarbeiter (civilian workers), Ostarbeiter (Eastern workers) and Hilfswillige ("volunteer") POW workers.