Adolf Hitler described the Organisation Todt as ‘the greatest construction organisation of all time'. In 1945, British intelligence credited it with having carried out in little over five years ‘the most impressive building programme since Roman times'. It was from this organisation, headed by Albert Speer, that Hitler enlisted the nation's leading engineers and architects to build his empire. In time, it became an indispensable partner to the SS and the Wehrmacht and led to the deaths of millions. Why, then, have so few heard of it?
In Unknown Enemy, Charles Dick reveals for the first time the full extent of the Organisation Todt and its long arm across Europe and the Reich. In wartime, its operations relied mainly on Germany's slave labour system, the largest such exploitation of foreign labour since the end of the Transatlantic Slave Trade - and one in which millions of civilians, Jews and prisoners of war lost their lives. Dick takes us inside the OT's vast building projects throughout German-occupied Europe, from the Arctic circle to the Balkans and deep into what the Third Reich termed its ‘eastern Lebensraum', to tell the story of how engineers and builders - so-called ‘ordinary men' - perpetrated some of the gravest war crimes under its banner.
Despite its extensive network, the Organisation Todt largely managed to slip under the radar of war prosecutors after Germany's defeat. Drawing on extensive new research, first-person accounts and survivor testimony, Unknown Enemy finally unearths its dark story.

Portrait

Charles Dick is an independent scholar who obtained his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. He was a journalist for Reuters News Agency (later Thomson Reuters) in North Africa, Bonn, Paris, Vienna and London over a thirty-five-year career. He lives in London.