The published version of this article appeared in

History and Technology: An International Journal

Volume 26, Number 1 (March 2010)

link:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341510903545557

Nazi Technical Thought Revisited

Abstract: Nazi technical thought was not uniform throughout the Third

Reich, but rather dependent on the very different visions of Gottfried

Feder, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer. Feder and his circle proposed a

“völkisch technocracy” that implied a radical socio-economic transformation

of Germany unacceptable to Hitler and German elites. Thereafter, Todt's

“technopolitical” approach embraced the holistic “spiritual revolution”

of the regime -- man, machine and nature in aesthetic harmony -- and

developed administrative tools to propagate it among German engineers and

the broader public. Speer, however, jettisoned the regime’s commitment to

a specific Nazi technical ideology in favor of the war effort. The

“reactionary modernist” element in Nazi ideology, personified by Todt,

disappeared due to the war. The role of technology in Nazi thought is

best judged by pre-war Germany.

Keywords: technology, Nazi ideology, engineers, technocracy, Gottfried

Feder, Fritz Todt, Albert Speer, reactionary modernism, Volk community.

Where does technology fit in the conglomerate of ideas that we

call National Socialist ideology? How did Nazi engineers wish to

1

integrate technology into German society? Given the complex nature of

Nazi Germany, these are questions not easily answered but significant

nevertheless. To grasp how the Nazis viewed technology is critical to the

seemingly endless debate about whether they, wittingly or not,

“modernized” Germany.1 Nazi ideology and propaganda outlined the form

that the Nazis desired for German society and had a profound impact on

social and political structures in the Third Reich. In particular, the

concept of a “people’s community”, a Volksgemeinschaft, was crucial to Nazi

popularity, and thus understanding the role that Nazi ideologues reserved

for technology in that community is important.2

In the more than three decades since Karl-Heinz Ludwig published

his classic study of engineers in the Third Reich and Thomas Parke Hughes

drew attention of American historians to the role of engineers in

National Socialist ideology, our understanding of the place of technology

in Nazi ideology has grown significantly.3 A major finding of this

research is the way that that Nazis fused an interest in modern

technology with their essentially irrationalist world view. Three

examples illustrate how our understanding of this complex phenomenon has

evolved.

With his groundbreaking study of engineers in Weimar and the Third

Reich, Jeffrey Herf showed that Nazi ideology contained a strand of

thought that welcomed technological advance while paradoxically rejecting

the rationalist Enlightenment basis from which it sprang.4 Herf

underlined the significance of this “reactionary modernist” tradition

among right-wing intellectuals throughout the Weimar Republic and its

continued relevance in the Third Reich. These intellectuals succeeded in

2

combining a romantic cultural revolt against urbanization, capitalism and

bourgeois values with a celebration of modern industrial technology. He

concluded that the Nazis adopted the basic tenants of “reactionary

modernist” thought, and in so doing, sought to integrate engineers into

the Volk community. At the same time, the irrational underpinnings of

reactionary modernism limited German technical advance during the Second

World War.5 For Herf, German engineers subscribing to this tradition

steadily gained authority in the Nazi power structure and were only

prevented from reaching their technocratic goals by the self-destructive

nature of National Socialism.6

In an influential collection of essays on science and technology

under National Socialism, Mark Walker and Monika Renneberg identified a

technocratic grouping of scientists and engineers who included

“technocrats” from the various power blocs in the “polycratic” structure

of the Third Reich --Party, SS, Four Year Plan, Armed Forces, Armaments

Ministry – and whose influence, they argue, grew dramatically from the

spring of 1942. They concluded that technocracy “was one of the most

powerful and last pillars of the National socialist state.”7

More recently, Michael Allen has convincingly demonstrated the

modernist orientation of SS engineers, civil construction engineers in

particular, who espoused a productivist ethic in which progressive

technological and organizational methods were wedded to radical Nazi

ideals, their purpose being to create a collective national identity.8

Although specific tasks shifted over time, and significant variations of

ideological commitment were evident among SS engineers, Allen argues for

a continuity that allowed modernist impulses to take precedence in the

3

Nazi total war economy, as exemplified by the cooperation between Hans

Kammler’s SS engineers and Karl-Otto Saur's “Fighter Staff” under Albert

Speer.9

As a result of the work of Herf, Walker, Renneberg, Allen and

others, Nazi engineers, symbolic of Nazi modernity, are credited with a

relatively uniform “reactionary modernist” ideology which extended from

the beginning to the end of the Third Reich. Historians now tend to

identify influential wartime Nazi engineers and “technocrats” with this

ideological tradition, whose culmination is a frantic search for “wonder

weapons” and the mechanized horror of Auschwitz.

It is the purpose of this essay to suggest another possible

interpretation, which will focus on three key Nazi decision makers –

Gottfried Feder, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer --and their immediate

entourage.10 These Nazi “chief engineers” held positions within the Party

that enabled them to wield broad influence in integrating the role of

technology with political ideology. This paper argues that the Nazi

ideological approach to technology was neither uniform nor continuous

through the Third Reich. Rather it depended on the vision and political

power of the individual charged with overseeing German engineers,

chronologically Gottfried Feder, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer, and on the

willingness of the regime to actively foster that vision in the context

of changing historical events.

This variability over time confounds any uniform interpretation

of the relation among ideology, technology, and modernity. Gottfried

Feder and his circle first integrated technology into the Nazi world

view. Influenced by the international Technocracy movement, they

4

proposed a form of “völkisch technocracy” that implied a radical socio-

economic transformation of Germany unacceptable to Hitler and German

elites. Thereafter, Fritz Todt's “technopolitical” approach embraced

both the “reactionary modernist” tradition and the “spiritual

revolution” favored by the regime. He provided an acceptable

technocratic impulse untainted by Feder's anti-urbanism or anti-

capitalism. The highpoint of “reactionary modernism” in the Third Reich

was neither the search for wonder weapons nor the radicalized modernism

of the SS, but rather the holistic technical ideology espoused by Fritz

Todt and the methods he used to indoctrinate both engineers and the

German public in a unique Nazi outlook on modernity. With Todt's death

in February 1942, the regime, under Albert Speer's leadership,

jettisoned its commitment to proselytizing a specific Nazi technical

ideology in favor of the war effort. Despite some plans for technocratic

control of the post-war German economy and increased wartime authority

for certain engineers, the Nazi technopolitical ideology was diminished

rather than enhanced under Speer.

Contrary to Herf's argument, the reactionary modernist tradition,

as exemplified by the organizations and propaganda tools set up to

develop it, indeed did fade away under the conduct of the war.11 Even the

technologically “modern” eastern settlements of Himmler's “New Order”

were reluctantly put on hold for the needs of the war.12 In an

increasingly desperate situation the regime was simultaneously grasping

at utilitarian straws by allowing serious scientists and specialists more

independence, while at the same time falling back on its most radical

ideological elements. The last years of the war, when the regime was

5

becoming both more pragmatic and more radical, are a misleading basis on

which to judge Nazi technical thought. The fact that Todt’s ideology

vanished in the war leads one to question the relative importance of the

“reactionary modernist” element in Nazi ideology and to wonder whether or

not a victorious Nazi state would have taken a technocratic form. It is

best to judge Nazi technical thought on the basis of the pre-war years.

A word about terminology: part of the confusion regarding

engineers in the Third Reich is an issue of vocabulary. The term

“technocrat” is now often used to mean simply “specialist” or “expert”,

with the negative connotation of an individual working blindly within

one’s area of specialty. For example, Götz Aly and Susanne Heim refer to

a broad spectrum of young German experts implicated in the Final Solution

(sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, statisticians,

economists, agrarian and demographic planners) as “technocrats.”13 As

Thomas Hughes pointed out regarding engineers, historians often confuse

technocracy with simple enthusiasm for technology or with the desire of

engineers to enhance their status.14 In this essay, we will try to use the

term “technocrat” as it would have been understood by an engineer in the

Third Reich, namely to refer to in individual who adheres in some form to

a belief in “technocracy.” At its broadest “technocracy” means “a

government and social system controlled by scientific technicians,” or

“management of society by technical experts.” It implies active

engagement by the “technocrat,” who has reflected on how, under the

leadership of engineers, technology can best be used to benefit society

as a whole.

6

I

Gottfried Feder, the self-styled Nazi Party Programmatiker, is

remembered as an eccentric NSDAP economist, best known for contributing

the concept of combating “interest slavery” to the Party program.15 He and

his circle are also, however, the source of many of the Nazi attitudes

toward technology, and Feder symbolized the resentments and concerns of

politically conscious technicians attracted to National Socialism.16 For

our purposes, what is of interest is less his corporatist economic

theories per se and more the role that Feder foresaw for technology in

German society– and how his ideas related to the international

technocracy movement among engineers.

A good example of Feder's approach is a radio interview he gave in

1932, in which he presented his thoughts on the major problems facing

technology in a future National socialist society.17 Technical

achievements since 1918, including electrification, the radio, and the

automobile industry were positive developments, said Feder, for they were

“authentic Volks-economic improvements”. One needed to differentiate

between machines that serve the general good and those that lead to

useless unemployment – these could be “temporarily or permanently” shut

down.18 The laissez-faire liberal economy failed to control and use

technology; it was senseless to become modern-day “machine breakers”, as

the enemies of man were not technology or technical inventions, but

rather “the misuse of technology for capitalist purposes.” The German

economy was to be “educated” to follow the Nazi principle of “the general

good before individual good” and technicians and engineers had a leading

role to play in the planned use of technology by the state, because they

7

understood its implications better than businessmen, lawyers or bankers.

“According to the National Socialist principle by which only he who

thoroughly understands a thing can be Leader,” concluded Feder, “the

proper place must and will be conceded to technology.”

Feder thus believed that technology must be used for the welfare of

the collectivity, that its misuse could be laid at the feet of

capitalists, and that only the engineer was truly qualified to reorganize

its proper use (Einsatz). Because the so-called “technocracy” movement,

whose most well-known manifestation was in the United States during the

winter of 1932-1933, voiced very similar concerns, it is useful to

consider in what ways Feder’s ideas agreed with, or differed from, those

of international "technocracy".19 By so doing, we can place the emergence

of Nazi technical thought in the broader context of contemporary

reflections on technology and society.

“Technocrats” and the Nazi engineers around Feder held several

ideas in common. They attacked traditional engineers as highly

specialized robots living in an intellectual vacuum, without social

perspective or political activism. They emphasized creating a new

“consciousness” among engineers and demanded that engineers be given a

larger political voice and enhanced social status. Seeing the wider

engineering community as crassly materialistic and enslaved to big

business, they stressed the role of debt in reducing production and

tended to urge corporatist solutions. Desiring to take decision-making

out of the hands of “dirty” politicians, they held a nostalgic view of

World War I as a “managed crisis” whose lessons could be applied to a

“war” on the Depression. They wished to reduce class conflict and create

8

social harmony through technology, believing that future technological

reorganization could be based on making “machines serve men”.20

Given this commonality of attitudes, can we classify the Nazi

engineers around Feder as “technocrats”? Not without considerable

qualification. Both American technocrats and their German counterparts

rejected many of the ideological components that animated Nazism.21 German

engineers identified as technocrats subscribed neither to the racist

ideology of the Nazi's nor to the threat of future conflict that it

implied. They were anti-capitalist and anti-materialist, but also

internationalist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist, preaching a form

of utopian “technical humanism” which went as far as rejecting the

concept of a Volk.22 As a consequence, they did not last long in the Third

Reich.

Reform-minded German engineers had banded together as early as

November, 1918, to seek a larger voice for engineers in the nascent

Weimar Republic, forming the nucleus of what became the Reich League of

German Technology (Reichsbund Deutscher Technik). By 1932 the RDT was in

the forefront of German engineering groups devoting articles to American

technocracy, and by 1933, a German Technocratic Society published its own

journal, Technocratie.23 In the same year, however, the Nazis dissolved a

Technocratic Union formed by technocrat engineers, and its successor

German Technocratic Society (DTG) lasted only to 1936.24 As Heinrich Adolf

says, German technocrats were neither politically engaged enough to be

useful to the Nazis nor ideologically neutral enough to be ignored.25 The

German technocracy movement died in the Third Reich, but its aspirations

for technocratic solutions had influenced Feder and those around him.

9

Feder and Nazi engineers sympathized with certain goals of the

technocrats -- creation of a Ministry of Technology, for example -- but

castigated them for excessive corporatism, apolitical naiveté and

utopianism. The solution, they wrote, was to combine technocratic ideas

with National Socialist dynamism within the framework of Nazi ideology.26

From its inception under Feder, Nazi technical thought contained an

ideological emphasis on “spiritual regeneration” to serve the Volk which

was at least as strong as the impulse for technical control over the

society. This ideological orientation, which accelerated under Fritz

Todt, distinguished Nazi technocracy from other “apolitical” technocratic

movements. Like race, nation, blood and soil, technology became an

element in the Nazi world view.

In August, 1931, Gottfried Feder co-founded with the architect Paul

Schutze-Naumburg and the turbine engineer Franz Lawaczek the “Militant

League of German Architects and Engineers” (Kampfbund der deutchen

Architekten und Ingenieure, or KDAI). The KDAI, which had its origins in

Alfred Rosenberg's “Militant League for German Culture”, became the early

voice of Nazi technology and, along with the “Technical Engineering

Department” of the Party, founded at the same time, laid the basis for

organizations that sought to control engineers in the Third Reich.27

Feder, Schultze-Naumburg and Lawaczek each represented an

ideological current in early Nazi technical thought. These “left-wing”

Nazis, two engineers and an architect, proposed a form of völkisch

technocracy.28 They were not Luddites: when they attacked “the machine” it

was to assert that it had been used incorrectly – for the profit of

capitalists and Jews.29 They associated the rise of the machine with a

10

decline in “spiritual values.” They hoped to infuse society with these

lost values by making the “machine serve man” rather than the inverse.

And their programs were frankly technocratic in conception: all three

envisioned a decisive role for engineers in a National Socialist state.

Architecture, technology and economics were to serve the “welfare,

civilization and grandeur of the nation”, technology being an “essential

means of salvation from economic chaos and political misery.”30

A close friend of Nazi “blood and soil” theorist R. Walter Darré,

Paul Schultze-Naumburg was the foremost Nazi authority on architectural

theory.31 He brought to the formation of Nazi technical thought the

outlook of the völkisch architect and artist: anti-liberal, anti-urban,

opposed to contemporary art and generally hostile to modernity.32 He

applied blood and soil ideology to architecture and deplored the “nomads

of the metropolis”, who had lost their concept of homeland and whose

buildings were the antithesis of the German house “rooted in the soil”.

Bauhaus functionalism threatened the German soul with “unlimited

materialism.” Drawing inspiration from walled medieval cities, he

proposed a spiritual unity of architectural form within the national

community, where the inner Volk unity found expression in architecture,

despite functional differences for the buildings.33 (Schultze-Naumburg's

application of these völkisch principles to virtually all types of

construction later ran afoul of Hitler's willingness to have form follow

function, notably when Hitler rejected his designs for both a

reconstruction of Nuremberg opera house and for a party forum in Weimar,

effectively ending Schultze-Naumburg’s influence.)34

11

Franz Lawaczek, an internationally known turbine engineer, was

Feder's advisor on energy matters in the Militant League for the Breaking

of Interest Slavery.35 Fiercely opposed to big business, Lawaczek defended

the lower middle class and small enterprises threatened by cartels and

the economic crisis. He developed an employment program based on the

premise that the Depression and unemployment were the result of an energy

monopoly by large capitalists whose desire for profit kept energy costs

high. Work and growth would be re-established by reducing the cost of

energy, especially to small businesses – made possible through the proper

application (Einsatz) of technology. His plan was to lower the price of

electricity by transforming industrial society through the use of turbine

power in a multitude of forms. River channels would be divided into long

(five kilometer) steps with “mini-dams” equipped with turbines producing

electrical power, supposedly reducing the price of electricity by one-

third to one-half and eliminating a grasping, capitalist electricity

monopoly. In addition, river reconstruction would stabilize river depths

to allow for year-round river traffic, creating jobs. Excess electrical

current would be used for water electrolysis, creating a vast hydrogen

gas industry, with low-cost hydrogen used to stimulate agriculture

through dehydration of vegetables, thereby reducing the cost of their

transport. Lawaczek foresaw a variety of uses for technology, the goal

being industrial decentralization: breaking up large urban agglomerations

and developing small industries “organically” tied to the soil – thus

participating in the mystical values of Nordic ruralism. A balance would

be created between city and countryside in a type of medieval, corporate

“artisan economy” (Handwerkwirtschaft). Engineers would play a key role in

12

the new state by extending the potential for technology, allowing small

enterprises to compete with big industrialists. Significantly, Lawaczek

also incorporated Nazi anti-Semitism and imperialism, arguing that a

successful socio-economic transformation would allow for Germany's

Lebensraum to push eastward against the “inferior races”.36 Given

widespread international interest in using electrification to help solve

the Depression, Lawaczek, although considered by some engineers a

“turbine fanatic”, cannot be simply dismissed as an economic crank.

Indeed, the ultimate failure of his and Feder's plans was due less to

their impracticality and more to the opposition of traditional elites –

and Hitler -- to such a radical approach.

Gottfried Feder proposed a massive de-urbanization and industrial

decentralization program for Germany, as is best illustrated by the plans

he developed as Reich Settlement Commissioner from March to November,

1934. Metropolitan centers were to be broken up in order to halt the

falling birth rate in urban areas, with new cities built in the

countryside, thus re-creating the “feeling for home” (Heimatgefühl) which

had been lost in the metropolis. Feder wished to reduce excessive

industrial concentration in areas like the Ruhr by displacing industries

which did not exploit the specific raw materials of a locality, such as

iron, coal or oil. Industries would be relocated in new towns in the

countryside, each with a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. A

town founded on the site of an oil well, for example, would not be simply

a “company town” of oil workers and officials, but rather the core of an

entire settlement of differing professions, with the “export” of oil

helping pay for the “imports” needed by the town. A town center would

13

serve for public and commercial activity, surrounded by single or

multiple family dwellings, each with its own garden. The factories would

be in the eastern suburbs and the stadiums, hospital and Festhalle in the

western (windward) suburbs. Feder foresaw the construction of one

thousand such new towns in Germany, each with 10-15,000 inhabitants, in

the following fifty years.37

Feder's rhetoric mirrored the anti-urban, völkisch concepts of “blood

and soil” ruralism and middle-class socialism in early Nazism.38 Yet Feder

was not proposing a pastoral paradise, but rather advocating a form of

völkisch technocracy.39 He was not the “technophobe” recently described by

historian Helmut Maier.40 To make viable his decentralization program, he

relied on an extensive technological infrastructure – in communications,

energy and transportation. He advocated the construction of railroads and

Autobahnen as prerequisites for settlement, and he argued that the

management of energy, of gas, light water power and electrical energy was

“of decisive importance for the creation of new settlements.”41 With such

settlements, “the proper use of technology for the common good” would be

insured for the first time.42 Feder desired the break-up of large cities

and the dispersal of industries in order to inculcate völkisch values

throughout German society – the new rur-urban settlements giving physical

expression to the “People’s Community” -- while at the same time using

modern technology to make possible this new socio-economic system.

Feder's völkisch technocracy contained both an ideological interest in re-

orienting German values and, at the same time, specific plans for a

socio-economic transformation of German society to facilitate such a

change.

14

Feder reached the apogee of his political career in October of

1932, when he controlled the Party office for “state economic” policy,

the office for employment, the Party “Technical Engineering Department”

and the KDAI. With the Nazi electoral loses of November 6 and the

subsequent Party crisis leading to the resignation of Gregory Strasser,

Feder's demise began. His anti-capitalist, corporatist, technocratic,

völkisch approach complimented Strasser's, and the two men proposed similar

decentralizing, state interventionist projects.43 Forced to choose between

Hitler and Strasser, Feder – perhaps after tendering his own resignation

– declared loyalty to Hitler.44 In fact throughout his career, Feder’s

survival had been due to his loyalty to Hitler in times of crisis and

Hitler's reciprocal unwillingness to part with an old comrade who always

fell on the “right” side of the fence.45 Reduced to handling employment

policy and technical problems in Rudolf Hess' new Central Political

Commission and to heading a new Office for Technology under Robert Ley,

Feder's authority was significantly reduced.46 He was drawn into disputes

between Hess and Ley, as well as between Alfred Rosenberg and Josef

Goebbels, in addition to being the longstanding enemy of both Julius

Streicher and Helmut Schacht --which was to prove politically fatal after

Schacht became Minister of Economics in July, 1934.47

After the “Seizure of Power”, Feder failed in three attempts to

augment his authority: first he failed to “coordinate” the chief

engineering societies into a single unified body under his direction;48

second, he failed to create a “Reich Technical Chamber” to oversee the

technical professions; lastly, he was unable to get support for his de-

urbanization and industrial decentralization plans, with key

15

industrialists, army leaders, Schacht and Hitler in opposition. Feder’s

völkisch technocracy implied a socio-economic transformation far too

radical for Hitler and the traditional German elites in 1934. In addition

to which, as Adam Tooze points out, the regime was unwilling to finance

Feder's projects.49 Even prior to the creation of an Office for Technology

and the replacement of the KDAI by a National Socialist League for German

Technology in May, 1934, Fritz Todt had began to usurp Feder's authority

as the chief Nazi engineer – in the process slowing Feder's technocratic

ambitions, in particular his desire for a Technical Chamber.50 Driven from

office by a combination of personal, political and ideological enemies,

Feder was relieved of his posts in late November - early December 1934.51

Feder's demise an example of the internal power struggles in the

NSDAP, but more importantly for this essay, it is indicative of the

ideological place that Hitler and the NSDAP foresaw for technology in a

National Socialist state. Feder had shaped the basic Nazi approach to

technology, placing technology within the larger Nazi world view, and,

mirroring the Technocracy movement, had struggled to attain a leading

role for engineers in the Third Reich. However, his anti-capitalism and

re-settlement plans had alienated both the majority of apolitical

engineers and the economic and political elites on whom Hitler was

building his state. His völkisch technocracy contained both an abstract

concern for altering values and concrete plans for a radical socio-

economic transformation of Germany. With Feder's departure, the concrete

proposals for altering German society were rejected, leaving only the

ideological emphasis on a “spiritual revolution” of values.52 From this

point, Fritz Todt and like-minded Nazi engineers imposed their own

16

conception of a distinctly National Socialist technology. With Feder

gone, only the metaphysical interest in value transformation – and an

underlying technocratic impulse – remained: völkisch technocracy evolved

into Nazi technology.

II

In November 1934, Fritz Todt replaced Gottfried Feder as Director

of the National Socialist Office for Technology (Amt für Technik) and the

National Socialist League of German Technology (NS Bund Deutscher Technik),

the Nazi engineering association.53 In addition, Todt was Chairman of the

Reich League of Technical-Scientific Labor (RTA), which grouped together

most non-Nazi engineering societies, and he held unique authority as the

Inspector General for German Highways. Todt thus became the most powerful

engineer in the Third Reich, with a foot in two antagonistic camps: the

Nazi Party, where he was a favorite of Hitler and a protégé of Rudolf

Hess, and the RTA, where he was considered a more competent engineer and

less radical politician than Gottfried Feder.54 When Todt later combined

these offices with the posts of Plenipotentiary for the Regulation of

Construction (1938), Inspector General for the Four Year Plan (1940);

Minister of Armaments and Munitions (1940) and Inspector General for

Water and Energy (1941), as well as directing the Organization Todt

construction organization, he oversaw an empire to rival the major

fiefdoms of the Third Reich.55 To the German public and the international

engineering community, Todt, builder of the superhighway system,

exemplified the Nazi engineer. He used his position to politicize the

German engineering professions and to develop a specific National

Socialist technical ideology.

17

Todt differed from Gottfried Feder in several respects. A less

caustic, combative individual, Todt had fewer personal enemies inside and

outside the NSDAP.56 Not identified with the left wing of the NSDAP, Todt

was less dogmatically anti-capitalist than Feder and less attached to

theoretical corporatism.57 He was also a less outspoken technocrat than

Feder - in the sense of the contemporary technocracy movement -- although

Nazi engineers quietly attained a greater policy-making role in his

Armaments Ministry than they had with Feder's ill-fated schemes for a

Technical Chamber or a Ministry of Technology.58 Above all, Todt was

committed to a less völkisch vision of the place of technology in a mature

National Socialist society.

Fritz Todt was the foremost contributor of two important elements

to the Nazi technical ideology: an “ecological” insistence on the harmony

of man, nature and technology, and a preoccupation with unifying

technology and art. Both reflect the collectivist impulse of Nazi

ideology to integrate all parts of society into a Volk community – a

community in harmony with its natural surroundings.59

Autobahn construction was where Todt most clearly expressed his

conception of a unique National Socialist technology, one that created an

“organic” harmony of man, technology and nature. As Karl-Heinz Ludwig

says, the Autobahnen have probably been “over-interpreted” by historians

and critics, but it is nevertheless important to remember that Todt was

the moving force behind the form which they took.60 Todt defined

technology as the ability of man to compel the forces of nature to serve

him, but harmoniously. “It would be paradoxical,” he wrote, “if the works

of technology stood in contradiction to nature in their outward

18

expression since the real essence of technology is a consequence of the

laws of nature. Therefore an outward form needs to be found for the works

of technology which expresses this inner essence. The works of technology

must be erected in harmony with nature; they may not be permitted to come

into conflict with nature as thoughtless, egotistical measures.”61 He

argued that:

“The aim has been to build this huge network of roads not only

with the mechanical instruments of the real builder, but also with

artistic feeling and a love of nature and her soothing influence.

The deeper and spiritual movement of the National Socialist

revolution, which signifies a psychic and cultural renovation of

the German citizen, is plainly detectable in this undertaking. The

white ribbons of the motor roads are carefully embedded in the

landscape, and their lay-out is harmoniously adapted to

them...These efforts to make out of nature and technique one perfect

unit characterizes the work of the Reich motor roads as one of great

importance...Technique and art, nature and life are to take on a

new form as a result of this creative spirit...The new roads lend a

new character to the German landscape. The open, stretched lines

which pass through the landscape force the eye to follow in their

direction and the starting place and destination are more clearly

marked...German men and women will see these roads and the vastness

of the scene will help them to think on broader lines than was

heretofore possible”62

Influenced by his rather eccentric “Reich Landscape Attorney”,

Alwin Seifert, a Munich landscape architect charged with advising

19

highway engineers, Todt became a pioneer in harmonizing superhighway and

landscape, adopting roads with long, gentle curves, using local stone and

heavily planted with local flora, and for building waterways bordered by

trees. The use of plantings native to an area carried the “blood and

soil” connotation of re-creating a true “German” landscape.63 Not to be

confused with conservationists, Seifert and most of his “landscape

attorneys” desired a new landscape, using “organically” modern techniques

to create the holistic expression of the German character.64 Thomas Zeller

argues that the “landscape attorneys” were often marginalized by the

construction engineers in Todt's administration, their Wandervogel

romanticism clashing with the overriding priority to create straight

roads and panoramas for the motorist.65 Nevertheless, Todt clearly

believed in an idealized symbiosis of technology and nature66 – with one

important qualification: as Helmut Maier points out, Todt was willing to

sacrifice the harmony of technology and nature when military exigencies

came to take precedence, namely in the construction of the Westwall in

1938-1939 to protect Germany’s western frontier.67 This foreshadows the

complete abandonment of Todt's technical ideology by Albert Speer.

The second contribution Todt made to Nazi technical thought was his

insistence on the creative interplay of art and technology.68 For Todt,

the engineer was to become an artist and the artist was to make

technology a subject of his work. “There exists a National Socialist

conception of technology,” he wrote, “It is a turning away from pure

materialism toward an emphasis on the creative and a close reliance on

the artistic.”69 For Todt, National Socialism had brought a new spirit in

which “the artist will be inspired by the enormous, heroic conception of

20

the technical problem, the highway construction engineer draws his

inspiration by viewing the entire landscape with the eye of the artist.”70

The goal became what Erhard Schultz and Eckhard Gruber refer to as a

“völkisch collective work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) reconciling technology,

culture and nature.71

A good expression of Todt's influence on conceptions of technology

and art is contained in Art and Technology, published by the Party technical

publishing house in 1941, with reproductions of 50 paintings, graphics

and statues. In the introduction Dr. Wilhelm Rüdiger used the example of

Leonardo's notebooks to argue against art and technology as separate

spheres of creativity, saying that what interested Leonardo was to find

the inner force that held the world together, being indifferent to

whether he worked as an artist, researcher or engineer. Rüdiger felt that

contemporary artists were unable to handle technological subjects because

they distinguished between the “organic” and the “inorganic”, viewing the

highway, the machine, the cylinder as “dead” - hence the tendency to

minimize or camouflage the technical and emphasize the “living”, even in

dealing with technical subjects: the fire in the rolling mill, for

example, or steam from the locomotive. Rüdiger's comments typify the

approach taken by Todt and the Nazi engineers: technicians must undergo a

spiritual renewal and artists must alter their perceptions.72

The paintings and graphics in the collection reflect a concerted

effort by a number of artists to put into practice the new ideology. They

portray technical works, especially the Autobahnen, as emerging from, and

in harmony with, nature. This is particularly true of Ernest Huber, the

official Autobahn painter, and of Albert Birkle and Wolf Panizza, who won

21

a Gold Medal in Paris in 1937 for “Reichs Autobahn Crossroads.” Others,

like Bodo Zimmermann, Anton Leidl, Paul Hermann Schoedder, or Oscar Graf

(the most propagandistic of the lot) emphasized the technical object

itself – machine, foundry, bridge – portraying the power and majesty of

the technical process.73

For a brief time after his death in February, 1942, the “synthesis

of art and technology” advocated by Todt and Nazi engineers continued to

be heralded as a ground-breaking change, with a large retrospective in

Munich in September of that year. Only in contemporary times, it was

argued - with a nod to the Italian futurists – was technology neither

demon nor angel, but rather integrated into a new way of life. Todt was

credited as the originator of this change, unifying man, nature, the

machine and art into a collectivist whole.74

Todt's innovations fall well within the reactionary modernist

tradition in German engineering, as described by Jeffrey Herf. Unlike

engineers in the Weimar Republic, however, Todt and the Nazi engineers

were in a position to use of the tools of state and Party – propaganda,

political compulsion, force or threats thereof – to sway engineers and

the German public to accept their unique technical ideology. To

politicize the German engineering associations and to indoctrinate

engineers in National Socialist technical thought, Todt and his

colleagues used a variety of organizations controlled by the Nazi Party.

Among these were:

-- the Office (later Central Office) for Technology

-- the NSBDT: the Nazi engineering association

22

-- the Plassenburg, or “Reich Castle of Technology”: a political

school for engineers

-- Deutsche Technik: a “technopolitical” engineering journal

-- a “speaker program” of ideological lectures at the district and

local levels during 1941-1942.

In addition, “Voyages of Technology” were sent into Austria and

Czechoslovakia for propaganda purposes in 1938. The link between these

organizations and Todt's technical ideology is important, because when

Albert Speer succeeded Todt in 1942, he sharply curtailed or terminated

entirely their function as ideological organs of the National Socialist

Party. We shall examine each of these tools briefly.

The principle administrative structures used by Todt were the

Office of Technology (after November 20, 1936, Central Office for

Technology) and the National Socialist League of German Technology

(NSBDT), the Nazi engineering association. Both were created on May 31,

1934, as part of a move to shift responsibility for the “coordination” of

German engineers away from Gottfried Feder.75 The Office of Technology

replaced Feder's Sub-Commission for “Economic Technology and Employment”

and the NSBDT replaced the Militant League of German Architects and

Engineers (KDAI), founded in 1931 by Feder, Franz Lawaczck, and Paul

Schultze-Naumburg.76 Initially Feder remained titular head of the Office

for Technology and the NSBDT, but when he was dismissed from his Party

offices in late 1934, Todt assumed leadership of both.

In 1934 the 33,000 member NSBDT was theoretically restricted to

Nazi party members, although SS, SA, SA-Reserve and NS War Victims

Association members were allowed to join as of early 1935.77 Most of the

23

other non-Nazi engineering associations, led by the prestigious

Association of German Engineers (VDI), were grouped together under the

banner of the Reich Community of Technical-Scientific Labor (RTA). Todt

was also President of the RTA, which, under the leadership of the VDI,

maintained a status quasi-independent of Nazi Party control until 1937.

By that time, however, the exigencies of the Four Year Plan, Todt's

increasing personal power, and the Party's command of traditional elites,

led the Nazis to retract their initial willingness to maintain a certain

distance from the engineering societies. With what was termed the

“Reordering of Technology” in April, 1937, the RTA was abolished and its

various engineering societies, including the VDI, were all transferred to

the NSBDT. This was an important step towards the politicization of the

engineering professions and structurally the last step in the

“coordination” of German technology.78 There remained only for Todt to

personally assume the Chairmanship of the VDI, which he did on January 1,

1939.79

Todt differentiated between the responsibilities of the Central

Office for Technology and the NSBDT: the Central Office was responsible

for the “proper application” (Einsatz) of German technology in its widest

sense, whereas the NSBDT was to handle specific professional questions

such as promotion and training, regulation of professional standards, and

technical education.80 As Todt put it on becoming Chairman of the VDI, the

Central Office for Technology assured “political leadership” and the

NSBDT “political unification and education.”81 The NSBDT was divided into

divisions corresponding to the major branches of engineering, with the

direction of each given to the leading professional association in the

24

field.82 With the “reordering of German technology” in 1937, the NSBDT

ceased to function simply as a cadre organization for Party members and

became an umbrella organization for all the major technical societies. As

of September, 1937, Todt estimated that thirty-seven per cent of the

220,000 engineers in Germany were grouped under the NSBDT. “We leave

membership voluntary,” said Todt, “Two hundred thousand passive hangers-

on are less important than eighty thousand active collaborators.” Of the

81 000 NSBDT members, only twenty-seven per cent were members of the Nazi

party – which Todt considered “serviceably good.”83 Despite the fact that

less than ten percent of all German engineers were Nazi Party members by

the fall of 1937, the NSDAP had a workable cadre of engineers which they

clearly considered sufficient to influence, and as far as possible, to

control, the technical professions.

The person who had played a key role in the “bringing into line”

(Ausrichtung) of the engineering societies was Todt's influential chief

assistant in the Central Office for Technology, Karl-Otto Saur. A trained

technician, Saur also directed the “Houses of Technology” association.84

Brusque of manner and highly ambitious, Saur was the éminence grise behind

much of Todt's political maneuvering.85 He is best known as the ruthless

head of the “Fighter Staff” (Jaegerstab) in Albert Speer’s Armaments

Ministry in 1944.86 Saur was viewed by the more traditional engineers as a

“radical” or a “revolutionary” in the mold of Feder, and a number of

chairmen and directors of technical-scientific associations saw him as

the decisive representative of the Nazi Party in the Office for

Technology.87

25

Education was another tool used by Todt for ideological

indoctrination. As Todt himself put it: “Technicians themselves are ...

not the people with whom one can realize the highest political mission

(Einsatz). For that it is necessary to form and educate engineers

politically.”88 Typical of Todt's approach was his emphasis on developing

“leadership qualities” among engineers through ideological education. At

the 1937 Nürnberg Party Rally he told the assembled Nazi engineers that

the principle task of the Nazi engineering association was not to seek

greater influence for engineers. Rather, Todt concluded, “I am inclined

to the view that a greater recognition of engineering in the technical

civil services must be attained through heightening the personality

traits of engineers. Hence, it is first of all an educational task.” The

educational function of the NSBDT, the “cultivation, promotion and

heightening of a National Socialist attitude,” would be furthered by

regular technopolitical courses at Plassenburg Castle near Kulmbach in

Lower Bavaria. Technical knowledge, political attitude, personal values

for leadership and physical training would be stressed equally, said

Todt.89

On the pattern of other Nazi “Order Castles” (Ordensburgen),

Plassenburg Castle, the old Franconian seat of the Hohenzollerns, was

renovated for use as a Reich School. This “Reich Castle of Technology”

became the symbol of the new Nazi technology – literally grounding the

“spiritual revolution” of modern German engineers in a medieval castle.

For Todt, just as “Nürnberg” had come to symbolize the Party Day and

“Nürnberg Laws” a readily identifiable concept, so too “Plassenburg”

26

would encapsulate in one word Nazi technology, namely a “higher cultural

perception (Auffassung) of technology.”90

The first technopolitical course, for Office of Technology regional

directors and representatives of the technical associations, was held on

June 15-20, 1937. Presentations were divided between lectures on purely

technical topics, such as iron smelting and zeppelin construction, and

those on ideological subjects, like “Weltanschauung and Technology”, in

which engineers were urged not to “encase” themselves in their specialty,

but rather to recognize the “interrelationship of the whole, of which

technology is only a small part.” Other lectures dealt with “The

Foundation of Social Policy” and “Race as a Shaping Force in History.” In

his opening remarks Todt described the Plassenburg course as a miniature

Volk community in action, where the future National Socialist engineer

corps would be created. In its editorial commentary, Deutsche Technik, the

Nazi technopolitical journal, wrote that such courses would draw

engineers out of their specialist approach and create harmony between

technology and the entire German Volk, adding that the perceived

antagonism between technology and nature would disappear.91 In addition,

anti-Semitism was far from forgotten at the Plassenburg; even Feder’s old

nemesis Julius Streicher was invited to speak on “The Jewish Problem.”92

Reflecting the militarism inherent in Nazi values, the four-day

technopolitical courses at the Plassenburg took place in a militarized

fashion. Participants met at the railroad station and marched in unison

to the castle. Uniforms were required, with Party members wearing their

official brown shirts; others were issued blue shirts and black ties.

Courses followed a regimented schedule, beginning with morning

27

gymnastics. Meals were held in common and nights spent in two barracks-

like sleeping quarters.93 Cultural evenings included music recitals and

poetry readings. “At the Plassenburg,” commented one of Todt's admiring

associates, “German highway and hydraulic engineers were pledged to

beauty and culture for the first time.”94 Within Todt's technical

ideology, Plassenburg courses were to infuse German engineers with

devotion to the Volk community, make them sensitive to the aesthetic

potential of technology, and awaken them to the harmony of man, machine

and nature.

Emil Maier-Dorn, the young director of the Plassenburg, was

responsible in great measure for the ideological tone of the Plassenburg

courses. Not a trained engineer, Maier-Dorn's academic background

included university studies in German, history and geography, subjects

reflected in his lectures on “The Papacy in the Middle Ages” or “Race as

the Shaping Force in History”.95At the “Special Day of Technology” during

the 1938 Party Rally, Maier-Dorn spoke on “Technology and the Fate of

Nations”, arguing that the rise and decline of civilizations often

depended on how effectively they used technology, particularly military

technology. Denying what he called an “apolitical vision” of

technological development, he admitted that modern technology had broken

down the patriarchal stability and the simplicity of rural life, but this

could lead to either positive (Nazi Germany) or negative (Marxist Russia)

reactions. The real danger, said Maier-Dorn lay with those dangerous

parasites, the Jews, who had corrupted technology for the purposes of

enriching themselves. “The Aryan Prometheus had brought the world the

fire of creativity – technology- the gift of the gods. But Jehovah had

28

cut his throat and the Jewish vulture tore out his liver.”96 On another

occasion, Maier Dorn told his Plassenburg listeners: “The thousand fold

connections between politics and technology, the reciprocal relationship

between Weltanschauung and technology, must become as much a part of the

rudiments of a technical education as the Pythagorean theorem or Ohm's

law.” For Maier-Dorn, the Nazi world view found expression in its

affirmation of technology.97

The two themes which Todt and his collaborators continually

stressed regarding the “re-education” of engineers were: first, the need

to broaden the engineers cultural-political awareness beyond mere

technical specialization -- the technician was no longer merely a

specialist, but a “techno-politician”, a many-sided, enlightened engineer

who could fulfill the tasks set down for him by the Führer.-- and second,

the increase in efficiency (Leistungsteigerung) to be attained by enhancing

the engineers' “personal qualities” through technopolitical training.

This follows naturally from Nazi racial theory, with its emphasis on the

superiority of the individual, creative Aryan. Thomas Rohkrämer makes the

point that, unlike Weimar technocrats, the Nazis relied on the willpower

of gifted personalities to control and guide technology.98

In addition to the Plassenburg, Todt had other means at his

disposal to indoctrinate German engineers in this Nazi technical

ideology, most notably the technopolitical journal of the NSBDT, Deutsche

Technik. Founded by Gottfried Feder in September, 1933, the journal carried

a combination of ideological and purely technical articles for engineers.

Deutsche Technik became the purest expression of National Socialist

technical thought, its orientation mirroring the emergence of Todt and

29

the Central Office engineers. Its technopolitical articles by minor Nazi

engineers/ideologues stressed themes consistent with Todt’s technical

ideology: the uniqueness of German technology and the German creative

spirit, the wedding of technology to nature, the misuse of technology by

Jewish capitalists, and the integration of technology in into the

cultural totality of the Volksgemeinschaft.99 Helmut Maier says that during

its first three years of publication, readers of Deutsche Technik were

overwhelmed with so many articles on the cultural, historical, racist,

ecological (Naturethik), liberating and politicizing impact of National

Socialist technology that they could easily conclude: German technology

was “cultural fertilizer” for the entire earth.100

Todt saw indoctrinating engineers as only half of the

“educational” process. The other half consisted of heightening public

awareness of the advantages of modern – Nazi – technology. Another tool

used by Todt was to develop propaganda specific to this purpose. A good

example is the “Voyages of German Technology” in 1938, when exhibition

trains were sent into the newly acquired territories of Austria in March-

April and the Sudetenland in November-December.101 On both trips German

innovations were presented so as to arouse admiration for technological

progress under National Socialism and to offer technology – especially

Autobahn construction – as a panacea for unemployment. The progressive,

modern nature of National Socialist society was stressed, and little was

said that can be interpreted as traditional völkisch propaganda. Anti-

Semitism, and in the case of the Sudeten voyage, anti-Czech prejudices,

were however encouraged. It appears that Todt's technical ideology was

30

sufficiently accepted by the Party leadership by 1938 that it could be

presented as the Nazi view of technology.102

Press releases from these voyages reflect the National Socialist

emphasis on “humanizing” technology and broadening contacts between

technicians and laymen.103 To attain Volk harmony technology would be

transformed in two ways. On the one hand, the technician himself would

become a full member of the Volk community by acquiring a new

consciousness of life beyond his specialization. Transformed into a

political being, he would actively strive to attain the goals which the

Party established for the nation. On the other hand, non-technicians would

be educated to the value and importance of technology. The common

interest between technicians and the general public would be made evident

by showing how technology served the entire community and by bringing the

technician into direct contact with the people. Engineers were to take

their place in a collectivized yet hierarchical Volk society, with

technology as an integral component of the Nazi world view. The engineer

would stand with the soldier and the peasant farmer as a necessary, if

less traditional, member of the community. His values reoriented, he

would be an active, politically conscious comrade, benefiting from direct

contact with the masses he served. Symbol of a desirable modernity, his

place was secure.

In the spring of 1941, Todt and the Central Office for Technology

developed a final tool for spreading Nazi technical thought under the

growing constraints of the war.104 They laid the groundwork for a “speaker

program” (Rednerwesen or Vortragswesen) to systematize and coordinate

lectures given to groups of engineers at the regional (Gau) and local

31

levels. This program fulfilled three purposes: 1) it provided technical

information and continuing education to engineers at a time when

professional journals were being curtailed due to the war-time paper

shortage, thus helping engineers become more effective participants in

the war effort, 2) it allowed the Nazis to catalog and control technical

speakers at the local, regional and national levels, and 3) it provided

further ideological indoctrination of engineers – despite the war – and

laid the basis for continued politicization in the post-war period.

The Central Office for Technology provided a list of potential

speakers to the Gau offices in May 1941, requesting that information be

provided about each individual's membership in the NSBDT and the Party,

his political and professional reliability, and the themes on which he

would likely speak, especially if techno-politically oriented. The

circular ended with the admonition that verified speakers list “must be

ready by the end of the war.”105 The official charged with organizing the

program stated that the postwar goal was a “speaker corps” controlled by

the NSBDT, thus fulfilling the “totalitarian demands” (Totalitätsanspruch) of

the Party. By furthering “a certain political or techno-political way of

thought” among engineers, technology would obtain the place it deserved

based on its importance in the life of the Volk, namely «the leading

place”.106

That the Central Office for Technology was serious in its political

effort is demonstrated by letters from regional offices complaining of

the steps necessary to get political clearance for potential speakers and

directives from the Central Office that certain speakers were

unacceptable. For example, in October 1941, Gau Magdeburg-Anhalt

32

complained that too great an interest in the party activities of a

potential speaker was unnecessary.107As late as September, 1942, the

managing director of the NSBDT construction association denounced six to

eight week delays in obtaining approval for speaker candidates, in part

because any lecture using slides needed to be approved by the Propaganda

Ministry.108

The speaker program demonstrates two important aspects of Nazi

relations to the engineering profession: the continued commitment of Todt

and the Central Office of Technology engineers to furthering their

technical ideology, even in the face of the war, but also the limits of

this politicization process in 1941-42. The actual functioning of the

speaker program varied widely from region to region and was far from

heavily ideological. Lectures identified as “techno-political” --

ideological -- tended to either support Nazi ideology in its widest sense

(“The Economic and Political Re-Ordering of Europe”; “The Buildings of

the Führer”; “Technology and Economics in the East”) or an aspect of

Todt’s technical ideology (“The Role of the Engineer in the Volk”;

“Weltanschauung and Research”; “The Autobahn as Artistic Creation”). From

October through December, 1941, only 5.7% of all lectures can be

considered ideological in orientation, rising to 9.6% in the period from

January to June 1942, the high point of the program.109 And these

percentages varied widely among the regions. For example, during the

winter and spring of 1942, eight regions had over 20% technopolitical

lectures (one over 30%), while 15 regions were under 5%. Only three of

nearly five hundred lectures in Berlin were technopolitical and none of

seventy-three in Mecklenburg and Styria. This pattern is confirmed by the

33

catalog of lecturers approved to speak in seventeen regions (plus the

Auslandsorganization) by December, 1942: of 553 speakers, only 5.2% spoke on

topics specifically identified as technopolitical, and again with a wide

discrepancy between regions.110 One can conclude that technical

associations could be “coordinated” and technology made to serve the Nazi

state, but that many engineers at the regional and local levels may have

been little affected by Nazi indoctrination.

As for the Reich Speaker List, namely those individuals acceptable

to the Central Office of Technology to speak anywhere throughout the

Reich, only 15.8% were prepared to speak on technopolitical themes. Of

significance is the fact that only half (102 of 202) of the Reich

Speakers belonged to the Nazi Party and only 127 were NSBDT members.

Nearly one quarter of NSBDT members did not belong to the Party and

almost 15% of the Party members were not in the NSBDT.111 Clearly, an

engineer was not forced to join the Party to actively participate in the

NSBDT speaker program nor was the NSBDT a thoroughly politicized Party

appendage in 1942.

During Todt's stewardship of the German armaments ministry, Nazi

engineers had obtained a significant share of authority, leading to the

resurfacing of the technocratic aspirations so evident under Gottfried

Feder. It seems clear, as Albert Speer indicates, that the goal for Todt

was a powerful post-war Ministry of Technology.112 Proof is a plan for a

“Higher Office for Technology and Economics” drawn up in the spring of

1941 and signed by Saur, but whose existence was probably not made known

to Hitler until near the end of the war.113 The director of this Higher

Office for Technology and Economics would advise the Führer on all

34

activities concerning technology and economics; would oversee the

management of the German economy and German technology (including

technopolitical education); would grant permission for the construction

of new factories and energy facilities. It was a blueprint for sweeping

technocratic powers.

Even the concept of a technical transformation of the countryside

re-emerged, although in a far less radical form than Gottfried Feder's

version. Reporting on technical developments in Gau Bayreuth in June

1942, Joseph Greiner of the Central Office for Technology described how

rural regions of Germany were being transformed by technology, in this

case by the transfer of joiners' workshops and small factories into the

forested areas of eastern Bavaria -- to avoid bombardment.114 Rural areas

were being exposed to motors and machinery for the first time. The

technical expertise gained by soldiers from rural areas would prepare

them for “the coming rural industrialization,” because they would

understand both the land and technology. Mocking “backward-looking”

solutions (i.e. völkisch projects to bind the peasant legally to the land),

Greiner foresaw technically experienced war veterans finding new

employment possibilities with the spread of technology to the

countryside. The Nazi technical ideology, as expressed by Todt and the

Nazi engineers, thus envisioned centralized technocratic control at the

national level, including maintaining the modern industrial sector, while

also extending the benefits of technology to the most technologically

backward areas.

However, at the same time that these projects were emerging, the

Nazi technical ideology and its supporting structures began to lose

35

precedence to the war. This trend was greatly accelerated when Albert

Speer expanded and intensified Todt's initial reorganization of war

production into a “total war” effort. Little room was left for exercises

in ideological indoctrination. Given the rapid suppression of Todt's

technopolitical apparatus by Albert Speer and the more limited

assumptions about technical and economic control exhibited by Heinrich

Himmler's SS,115 it is far from certain that Todt's integrative

technocratic vision would have been applied in a victorious Nazi empire.

Fritz Todt was genuinely attached to his profession and convinced

of the superior efficiency of engineering methodology. He saw himself as

the voice of German engineers and the guardian of the technical

professions.“For eight years,” wrote Todt shortly before his death, “I

have tried hard to preserve the technical-scientific associations and,

through their gradual transfer into the NSBDT, to find another way of

proceeding than that of doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc., whose earlier

associations were all dissolved and replaced by purely National Socialist

organized and affiliated associations.” His efforts, he felt, had not

been supported by a portion of the technical associations.116 Todt could

not understand what he perceived as the ingratitude of the technical

societies, for he pictured himself as a moderate, loyal to both Party and

profession. A convinced National Socialist, Todt was not the “acquiescing

auditor” once pictured by Thomas Hughes. He was politically engaged, an

ardent advocate of transforming the apolitical indifference of the

technical professions into political commitment based on National

Socialist principles.117 Unlike Albert Speer, he saw the essence of

36

National Socialism as a “spiritual revolution”118 It was precisely Todt's

attachment to Nazi ideology which differentiated him from Speer.

III

On February 8, 1942, Fritz Todt was killed in an airplane crash

shortly after take-off from Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters. Coming as

it did on the day following a probable confrontation between Hitler and

Todt over Germany's war-making capacity (not the first such

disagreement ), Todt's death remains controversial, leading some

historians to suggest that Hitler rid himself of his pessimistic

armaments minister -- unlikely, as Ian Kershaw points out -- or that Todt

may have been killed by the SS, Göring or even Speer himself. 119 Whether

accidental or premeditated, Todt's death marked an important watershed in

the regime's commitment to a specific Nazi technical ideology.

Immediately Hitler appointed Albert Speer as Todt’s successor. Speer, the

“Führer’s architect,” had displayed his talent not only in building

edifices for the Third Reich, but had gained increasing authority as

planner of future “Führer cities,” beginning with the reconstruction of

Berlin. Speer was given all of Todt’s responsibilities: for armaments and

munitions, for energy, for fortifications and construction – and for

technology, as head of the Central office for Technology and the NSBDT.

Albert Speer was an ambitious acolyte of Hitler, but he was not an

ideologue.120 Barbara Orland, following Joachim Fest, points to Speer’s

“colossal indifference” to anything beyond pure efficiency – including

indifference to terror and concentration camps.121 As Konrad Jarausch puts

it, he was “less interested in ideology than performance.”122 This does

not mean that Speer was an “unpolitical agent of technocratic

37

efficiency”.123 Mathias Schmidt, Gitta Sereny, Dan van der Vat, and even,

to a degree, Joachim Fest have destroyed Speer’s self-made – and for

him, life-saving – claim to be apolitical.124 It is now clear he was a

highly political opportunist. And, as Jost Dülffer, Susanne Willems and

Heinrich Schwendemann, among others, have shown, Speer was not only

knowledgeable about, but criminally responsible for, the expulsion of

Jews in Berlin and the use of concentration camp inmates and foreign

“slave labor” in armaments production.125 Speer may have been indifferent,

but not to his own career and interests.

Speer’s claim to be a “technocrat” should also be qualified. Speer,

unlike Fritz Todt, was neither by training or by temperament committed to

the engineering professions or their technocratic aspirations.126 He held

the title of Diplom-Ingenieur, but his course of studies had been in

architecture, not engineering. Speer himself arrived at a definition of

“technocrat” that equates simply as “expert” or “specialist”.127 There is

no question that Speer, as Todt’s successor, surrounded himself with

specialists and experts – including a high reliance on engineers.

Indeed, knowing the Führer’s penchant to admire expertise, one of his

successful ploys for obtaining Hitler’s assent to projects was to arrive

at meetings with a whole array of “experts”.128 If we accept what Richard

Overy calls Speer’s “capacity for stripping issues down to their

technical core”, then Speer is a “technocrat” – but only in the sense of

a narrowly focused specialist.129 Speer was not, however, a technocrat in

the fashion of Fritz Todt and like-minded Nazi engineers whose technical

ideology reflected many of the earlier aspirations of the Technocracy

movement. Speer does not voice the traditional concerns of technocratic

38

engineers for a less materialist, less capitalist-driven society, one in

which politicized engineers would play a lead role in making “machines

serve men”.

In his later, post-prison ruminations Speer said that he had a

“schizophrenic” attitude toward technology: both fascinated and horrified

by its potential. “Romantic on the one hand, enthusiastic partisan of

technology on the other: I am both,” he said. He claimed that his

buildings were a “romantic protest against technology and its invasion

into the traditions of our life.”130 This is an ironic comment from the

creator of technologically innovative “Cathedrals of Ice” – using

searchlight beams to create the illusion of mile-high pillars for Nazi

Party rallies.131 Speer’s paradoxical combination of romanticism,

particularly his certifiable love of nature, and his simultaneous desire

for technological modernization, has led Barbara Orland to call Speer a

“reactionary modernist”.132 This hardly seems justified. Speer does not

-- unlike Todt -- exhibit the hallmarks of a true reactionary modernist,

combining the romantic revolt of German nationalists against capitalism,

materialism and modernism with visions of a technologically advanced

authoritarian state.133 Prior to his post-war defense and musings, he had

little to say on the relationship between culture and technology, on how

the nation could be both technologically modern and “true to its soul.”134

Only an aestheticization of work in the so-called “Beauty of Labor”

program under his direction can be termed vaguely reactionary modernist,

and even there Speer was little engaged in actively directing the

program.135 In sum, Speer, the politically astute pragmatist, was neither

as much an avowed technocrat nor as much a Nazi fundamentalist as Todt.

39

Speer's attitude was clear from the beginning of his ministry. On

February 24, 1942, he told an assembly of Gauleiter that “all activities

that are not essential to the war effort ...will be postponed.” He had no

time for political infiltration of production, by which he meant Todt's

program for developing “leadership qualities” among engineers in order to

increase efficiency, managerial efficiency being linked to political

indoctrination. “Increasing efficiency,” warned Speer “is chiefly a

technical and economic matter. Therefore it is ...the task of the Party

and its organizations to be active in this area only if I think it

necessary.”136 This is not to imply that Speer singled out only the

Central Office for Technology and the NSBDT for restrictions: Speer had a

rubber stamp made for office use with the message: “Return to sender –

irrelevant to war effort.”137

Only seven days after Todt's death, the Office for Technical

Science in the Labor Front, of which Todt had been nominal head, was

forced to turn over its functions, particularly its work with inventions

and patents, to the Central Office for Technology.138 Martin Bormann

proclaimed Hitler's intention that “also within the Party there is only

one bureau handling technical questions and particularly questions of war

technology, and that is the Central office for Technology under Party

Comrade Speer.”139 Speer later claimed that he had not wished to become

Director of the Central Office for Technology and of the NSBDT –

ostensibly because he considered the posts “beneath him” as a Reich

Minister – but was persuaded to do so by Karl-Otto Saur and then quickly

relinquished the actual management of both organizations to Saur.140 This

apparent victory for Saur and the Central office for Technology

40

nevertheless signaled Speer's wish to concentrate all technical activity

under his ministry.

Speer proceeded to limit or to dismantle the institutions which

Todt and his collaborators had designed to control and politicize the

engineering professions. It was not long before the engineers of the

Central Office were being shunted aside in favor of Speer's colleagues

from the Armaments Ministry. Bit by bit, functions that had been located

in the Central Office for Technology headquarters in Munich were

transferred to Speer's ministry in Berlin.141

By the following year, the scope of action of the Central Office

for Technology had been sharply curtailed. In February 1943, Speer

ordered the directors of the Offices for Technology in the regions to

“align their activities solely to the tasks given them by the Reich

Minister of Armaments and Munitions in their capacity as District

Commissioners for the armed forces.” Both the technical-scientific

associations and the Houses of Technology (hitherto instruments for

political/ideological indoctrination) were to be “geared exclusively to

the demands made by the war”. A large number of technical-scientific

journals were halted -- most significantly Deutsche Technik, which had been

the principal voice for the Nazi technical ideology. To compensate, the

“Speaker Program” developed by Todt in 1941 to provide lectures to

technicians on the local and district level was to be intensified. Yet

here, too, Speer placed his emphasis on purely technical lectures

designed to keep technicians abreast of knowledge needed for the war

effort; he made no reference to technopolitical themes.142

41

In June 1943, the Central Office for Technology was reduced, its

headquarters limited to a skeletal six-person staff operating six bureau

and overseeing “techno-political leadership activities essential to the

war.” Other personnel were released for military service. All

organizational activities not linked to the war were stopped, as well as

any political press activity “not of decisive meaning for the war,”

including work on a central catalog of lecturers. Instead, the NSBDT

“Speaker Program” was transferred entirely to the regions and to district

representatives of the technical associations.143

The end of a centrally controlled system of lecturers, coming as it

did on top of the closing of Deutsche Technik, meant that the Central office

for Technology had lost not only its most important vehicle for printed

propaganda, but also was deprived of the program designed to supplement

it –or replace it -- with the spoken word. In effect, from June, 1943,

the Central office for Technology could no longer function as the major

advocate of a unique Nazi technical ideology. It had become mute,

silenced by the expanded war effort undertaken by Albert Speer. The Third

Reich's active commitment to propagate a reactionary modernist technical

ideology ended by the summer of 1943.

Further evidence of a shift away from active Nazi pursuit of a

technologically advanced Volksgemeinschaft toward wartime expedients is the

curtailment of SS “New Order” settlements in the East. As Michael Allen

has shown, the shift to a total war economy forced Heinrich Himmler and

the SS leadership to put into abeyance plans for ethnic German and police

settlements that combined Nazi racial supremacist ideology with

technologically innovative living spaces.144 To be sure, SS engineers and

42

businesses saw this shift as temporary, with Himmler repeatedly arguing

that peace would see a return to settlement construction. And the total

war effort clearly provided the opportunity for SS planners and

engineers, in cooperation with Speer's Armaments ministry, to gain

increased political authority – what Allen refers to as “the hour of the

engineer” -- while reinforcing both their murderous sense of racial

supremacy and their technocratic desire to lead post-war German

modernization.145 Yet the facts would not seem to warrant Jeffrey Herf's

claim that “the reactionary modernist tradition reached its end point in

the SS”146- at least not if one seeks to understand how the Nazis wished

to integrate technology within the Volk community. “Slave labor”

construction of rockets and aircraft , undertaken by the most radical of

Nazi organizations and in the narrow context of a desperate, coercive war

economy -- indeed relying chiefly on (slave) labor-intensive techniques

rather than machines147-- does not reflect the overall Nazi vision of the

role of technology in German society. More convincing are the plans for

Himmler's “New Order” settlements. But, like the Office for Technology

publications and Speaker Program, they were stopped for the sake of the

war effort.

Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker argue that an alliance of

scientists and Nazi technocrats gained power continually after 1936 and

especially after the winter of 1941-42.148 This is true from the

standpoint of authority for engineers, as the regime came to seek more

immediate and “efficient” solutions to both its most radical racist

objectives and its declining fortunes in war – from genocide to “wonder

weapons.” Yet to label wartime engineers in the Party, the SS, Speer's

43

ministry or the Four Year Plan all “technocrats”, as have Renneberg and

Walker, is to ignore how varied were their ideological persuasions and

how uncertain their commitment to a future society based on Todt's

model.149 After reviewing the ambiguous attitude of the SS leadership

towards technology, Hermann Kaienburg concludes that “the SS cannot be

said to have given any meaningful impulse to technical modernization.”150

The desperate search for a technological breakthrough in weaponry was

not, as Jeffrey Herf put it, “the fitting culmination of the reactionary

modernist tradition.”151 Rather, it was a radical, utilitarian reduction

of a broad ideological program. Technocratic aspirations had re-emerged

under Fritz Todt, but his ideological vision of the role of technology in

society was much more complex than simply claiming authority for

engineers. After his death, the ideological objective of integrating

engineers into a Volk community that valued their technological

contributions was set aside – at least temporarily. The narrow wartime

emphasis on results overshadowed the vision of harmony as articulated by

Todt and his Office of Technology engineers.

IV

In the last issue of Deutsche Technik (February 1943), Walter Oswald

reflected on ten years of technology in the Third Reich. For Oswald there

existed a unique National Socialist technology, and technical advances

like the Volkswagen, aircraft construction, color photography and

synthetic fuels and fibers had all contributed to “NS prosperity.” This

prosperity, however, was not due to changes in technique, but to an

inner, spiritual revolution whereby engineers had developed an “inner

self-confidence” and a new “legitimacy” and “recognition”, becoming

44

“full-fledged co-workers in the Volk community.” The Autobahnen were again

proclaimed symbolic of a new “striving for totality (Ganzheitsbestreben),”

combining technical, economic, political and cultural concerns.152

It is significant that one of the last public pronouncements by the

official Nazi organ for technical propaganda restated so clearly the

technical ideology that had grown to maturity under Fritz Todt. At the

heart of Nazi ideology laid an integrative impulse: the desire to bring

together all those deemed legitimate members of the Volk, including the

“apolitical” technical professions. Todt's plan to integrate – both

spiritually and physically – man, machine and nature was a natural

extension of this integrative impulse. Nazi propagandists stated their

intention to implement Todt's vision of a harmonious technological

society. They were submerged, however, by the wartime need to place

purely technical concerns, particularly as defined by Albert Speer, ahead

of ideological aspirations.

The end of the Nazi regime was marked by two simultaneous and

contradictory tendencies, neither of which represents Fritz Todt’s

beliefs. On the one hand, desperate to reverse the military situation,

the regime rejected certain components of its ideology and emphasized

utilitarianism, as exemplified by Speer. As Alan Beyerchen, Mark Walker,

Margret Szöllösi-Janze, Kristie Maracas and others have shown, the

increased independence and authority afforded scientists from 1942 is a

reflection of this tendency.153 On the other hand, the regime became

increasingly radical -- what Hans Mommsen describes as a return to the

concepts of the Nazi “Time of Struggle” mentality and pre-1934

revolutionary objectives, including cleansing the society of all

45

opponents.154 Here the most extreme elements of Nazi ideology were

emphasized, the most obvious one being its racist, genocidal foundation.

Given this dichotomy, the assumption that the Nazi regime was profoundly

“reactionary modernist” from beginning to the end is misleading – it was

only truly so under Todt – and assurances that the Nazis aimed for a

technocratic postwar society are at least open to question.

One conclusion that could be drawn is that the regime's commitment

to Todt's technopolitical ideology was basically insincere or

superficial, and that the self-destructive “warrior/slave state” that

emerged at the end represents the only true National Socialist society.155

Hans Mommsen argues that “in its eclipse the true nature of the Nazi

regime was exposed.”156 If so, the reactionary modernist tradition, as

exemplified by Todt, was but one strain among many within the Nazi

worldview, and not one, like anti-Semitism, to which the regime clung

despite the pressures of fighting a total war. To accept this argument,

however, is to accept that National Socialism can be reduced solely to

its irrational, self-destructive, racist dynamic. Such a narrow

definition of Nazi ideology vitiates the significance of the broader Nazi

world view and undermines the scholarship that says that the “people’s

community,” with all its ideological trappings, was fundamental to

creating German identity in the Third Reich.157

Thomas Klepsch's excellent model suggests a more productive line

of interpretation. He argues that Nazi ideology had a racist, anti-

Semitic, anti-Bolshevik “gravitational core,” with other peripheral

elements as “satellites” whose importance was pragmatically determined by

historical circumstances.158 Heinrich Adolf’s analysis, cited earlier, and

46

the argument of this paper propose that technology is one such peripheral

element.159 The technological component in Nazi ideology – reactionary

modernism -- drifted rapidly away from its gravitational core after

Todt's death, just as after having orbited briefly in the Nazi

ideological universe, “German physics” slipped away as the regime

recognized the wartime utility of traditional science. Similarly, as

Norbert Frei has shown, threat of defeat narrowed the social cohesion of

the “people’s community”, the Volksgemeinschaft, diluting its ideological

importance.160 Quite simply, the war warped the essential characteristics

of an ideologically projected Nazi society beyond recognition,

diminishing the significance of ideological components like the

Volksgemeinschaft and technology while exposing Nazism’s brutal, racist

core. Therefore, if one seeks to understand society as the Nazis

ideologues themselves envisioned it, and the role of technology in that

society, one should concentrate on the period 1935 to 1942 – that is,

post-Feder and pre-Speer. Nazi technical thought is best understood on

the basis of pre-war Germany.

47

1 The debate has ranged from post-war historians (Henry Ashby Turner, Fritz Sternand George Mosse) arguing

that Nazism was quintessentially “anti-modern”, through scholars (Ralf Dahrendorf ,

Hans Mommsen) for whom the Nazis embraced elements of modernity in spite of

themselves, to historians (Götz Aly, Sigmund Bauman, Detlev Peukert) who saw the

Nazis actively contributing to modernity – albeit a frightening one-- on to

scholars (Rainer Zitelmann) viewing the Nazis as positive modernizers. See

Allen, ‘Modernity, the Holocaust, and Machines without History,’ 181-184. A full

discussion and extensive bibliography in Bavaj, Die Ambivalenz der Modern im

Nationalsozialismus. See also the special edition of Central European History 30 (1997)

and the review by Roseman, ‘National Socialism and Modernization.’

2 On renewed interest in ideology, propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft, see Herf,

The Jewish Enemy; Herbert, ‘Ideological Legitimization and Political Practice;’

Koonz, Nazi Conscience; Frei, ‘People’s Community and War;’ Barkai, ‘The German

Volksgemeinschaft.’

3 Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich and Hughes, ‘Technology’ and ‘National

Socialist Ideology and German Engineers.’

4 Herf, Reactionary Modernism. See also Herf's article ‘Der nationalsozialistische

Technikdiskurs,’ in Emmerich and Wege, Der Technikdiskurs in der Hitler-Stalin-Ära. Thomas

Rohkramer rejects Herf's paradox as non-existent, since technology is often

embraced by illiberal forces: ‘Antimodernism, Reactionary Modernism and National

Socialism,’ 31, 49.

5 Herf and Ludwig point out that Nazi devotion to the irrational elements of

their technical ideology made German technology less efficient. Herf,

Reactionary Modernism, 202; Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 254-255.

6 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 215-216, and ‘The Engineer as Ideologue,’ 643-644.

7 Renneberg and Walker, ‘Scientists, engineers and National Socialism,’ 8-9.

Margrit Szöllösi-Janze accepts their argument in her historiographical overview,

‘National Socialism and the Sciences,’ 11-12. See also, by the same author,

“‘Wir Wissenschaftler bauen mit’: Universitäten und Wissenschaften im Dritten

Reich,” 165.

8 Allen, Business of Genocide.

9 ibid., 232-239. On the Fighter Staff, see Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 627- 634. A

dated description in Zilbert, Albert Speer and the Nazi Ministry of Arms, 239-248.

10 Space does not allow an in-depth analysis of the many minor Nazi ideologues who

presented their views in Party-sponsored publications and journals – the

interested reader is directed to the brief overviews presented by Helmut Maier

and Jeffrey Herf: Maier, ‘Nationalsozialistiche Techkikideologie,’ and Herf,

Reactionary Modernism, 186-213.

11 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 215.

12 Allen, Business, 202, 241.

13 See Aly and Heim, Architects of Annihilation, 284-289.

14 Hughes, ‘Technology,’ 172.

15 Feder's Manifesto for the Breaking of Interest Slavery was written after the war and

published in 1919; it, plus an article entitled ‘The Social State’ in Dietrich

Eckert’s anti-Semitic journal Auf Gut Deutsch (1919) , reprinted in The Struggle against

High Finance (1933), and The German State on a National and Social Basis (1933) contain the

essence of his economic theories. He also published a number of essays and

speeches, among them: Der Staatsbankrott. Die Rettung (1919); Das Kommende Steuerstreik

(1921); Der Dawespakt (1929); Die Wohnungsnot und die social Bau-und-Wirtschaftsbank (1929);

Die Juden (1933 ed.); Wirtschaftstechnik und Arbeitsbeschaffung. Clausthaler Vortrag (1933)

Wirtschaftsführung im Dritten Reich (1935); Arbeitsstätte-Wohnstätte (1939), and, with Fritz

Rechenberg, Die Neue Stadtsversuch. (1939 ed.), in addition to numerous articles,

particularly in Deutsche Technik.

16 On Feder's career see Guse, ‘The Spirit of the Plassenburg,’ Chapters 1-3, and

for a very different interpretation Tyrell's articles ‘Gottfried Feder and the

NSDAP’ and ‘Gottfried Feder: the Failed Policy-maker.’ See also the introduction

to Lane and Rupp, eds., Nazi Ideology Before 1933.

17 ‘Funkzweigespräch über die Zukunfts-Aufgaben der Technik zwischen

Staatssekretär Gottfried Feder und Dr. Carl Westphal,’ Deutsche Technik, February

1934, 283-284.

18 Feder used the example of machines in the cigar industry. In one of the only

examples of technological reversal in the Third Reich, cigar making machines

were indeed replaced by human labor.

19 The key historical analyses of American technocracy are Eisner, The Technocrats:

Prophets of Automation and Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream. See also Layton, The

Revolt of the Engineers and Armytage, The Rise of the Technocrats. On technocracy and National

Socialism see Renneberg and Walker, ‘Scientists, engineers and National

Socialism,’ 4-9.

20 Synthesis based on Akin, Technocracy; Elsner, The Technocrats; opinions expressed in

Feder's economic writing and speeches, and articles by Feder and other Nazi

technicians, especially in Deutsche Technik.

21 Stephen Willeke has documented the relationship between American and German

technocrats in Die Technokratiebewegung in Nordamerika und in Deutschland.

22 Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 55-58, and ‘Die wolreflektierten 'Errinerungen',

428; Willeke, “Die Technokratiebewegung zwischen den Weltkriegen und der

‘Kulturfaktor Technik’,” 215.

23 Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 35-58, 123-124. See also an analysis of Technocratie

in Renneberg and Walker, ‘Scientists, engineers and National Socialism,’ 5.

24 Willeke, ‘Die Technokratiebewegung in Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen,'

230-234, and “Die Technokratiebewegung zwischen den Weltkriegen und der

‘Kulturfaktor Technik’,” 216-219. In the latter, citing conflicting sources,

Willeke hesitates between 1936 and 1937 for the end of the DTG.

25 Adolf, ‘Technikdiskurs und Technikideologie,’ 440.

26 See Martin Holzer [Joseph Bader], ‘Führertum in der Technik,’ Deutsche Technik,

September, 1933, 5-7; Professor Waffenschmidt, ‘Selbstsändigkeit der Technik,’

Deutsche Technik, March 1934, 327-328; and book reviews of R. Erich Kraemer, What is

Technocracy, in Deutsche Technik, September 1933, 46, and of Dr. Julius Weiner,

Technocracy, in Deutsche Technik, October 1933, 65.

27 On the KDAI and Feder’s evolution within the NSDAP see Guse, ‘Plassenburg,’

chapters 1-3. See also Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, chapter 3. On Rosenberg's

cultural league: Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner, 19ff, and Lane, Architecture

and Politics in Germany, 148ff.

28 The anti-capitalist, “radical” left wing of the Nazi party, most often

identified with the SA, firmly opposed big business and intended a “second

revolution ”after the Nazis came to power that would benefit shopkeepers, small

businesses and peasant farmers.

29 Fritz Todt also voiced this position, Bundesarchiv (hereafter BArch),

Schumacher Sammlung / 280.

30 ‘Aufruf’ in Völkischer Beobachter, August 26, 1921, BArch, Schumacher Sammlung /

280.

31 Taut, Architektur im Dritten Reich, 63n, and Lane, Architecture and Politics, 156-160. “Blood

and Soil” refers to the romantic, racist Nazi belief that the foundation of

German society was the mythical tie between German blood and the land. Blood and

Soil ideologues deified the German peasant and looked upon urbanization,

industrialization and modernization as influences corrupting the German soul.

32 Schultze-Naumburg's works include Kunst und Rasse; Kunst aus Blut und Boden and Der Kampf

um die Kunst.

33 Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, 5; ‘Vom Ausdruck unserer künstigen Bauten,’

Deutsche Technik,

March 1934, 328; ‘Städtebau und Liberalismus,’ Deutsche Technik, July 1936, 319-320,

and his introduction to Straub, Die Architektur im Dritten Reich, reproduced in Teut,

Architektur, 62-64.

34 Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 285, 318-319, 341. See also Speer, Inside the

Third Reich, 103.

35 Deutsche Technik, September 1933, 55, and Denenger, ed., Wer Ist's, 1935.

36 Lawaczek, Technik und Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich, 3, 7, 9, 10-13, 72-73, 92. See also

Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 87-90, 96-97, 146-148. A brief analysis of Lawaczek's

contribution in Adolf, ‘Technikdiskurs und Technikideologie,’ 434-435.

37 ‘Kundgebung des Reichssiedlungskommissar Gottfried Feder über das deutsche

Siedlungswerk,’ Deutsche

Technik, July 1934, 548-550 and presentations made by Feder to several forums held

in Berlin in October 1934, in BArch, R41 (Rep. 318) 347, Hefte 1-3.

38 For Feder's anti-urbanism, the article cited ibid. and ‘Das deutsche

Siedlungswerk,’ Deutsche Technik, May 1934, 434.

39 See also Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 189-192.

40 Maier, ‘Nationalsozialistische Technikideologie,’ 256-257.

41 Feder to representatives of the technical universities, October 30, 1934, in

BArch, R41 (Rep. 318) 347, Heft 2.

42 ‘Kundgebung des Rechsiedlungskommissars...,’ Deutsche Technik, July 1934, 549.

43 Lane, 'Nazi Ideology,' 18, 21; Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 101.

44 Otto Wagener told historian Martin Brozat that Feder wrote a letter of

dismissal which Hitler rejected so as not to seem faced by a “revolt”, Institut

für Zeitgeschichte, ZS 1732, 10. The last unpublished sentence of Feder's

loyalty letter nevertheless emphasized Feder's preeminence as Party Progammatiker

(“In steadfast loyalty to the program formulated by me and sanctioned by you”.),

Tyrell, ed., Führer befiehl, 350-351. See also Horn, Führereideologie und Parteiorganiation in

der NSDAP, 365ff.

45 This interpretation differs from Albrecht Tyrell, who sees Feder as an

inflexible outsider used by Hitler for propagandistic purposes, Tyrell,

‘Gottfried Feder,’ 76ff. See also Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 95.

46 Feder to Rosenberg, Feb. 28, 1933, BArch, NS 8 / 122, 159.

47 Often Feder's ideological opponents were also his personal enemies; for

example, Schacht had sued Feder for libel in 1929, BArch, NS 26/1346. On Schacht

vs. Feder, Evans, Third Reich in Power, 354. On the NSDAP reorganization and Hess-Ley

rivalry, Diehl-Thiele, Partei und Staat im Dritten Reich, 202ff, and Orlow, History of the

Nazi Party, 103-104, 133-134.

48 On Feder's bungled attempt to take over the German Engineering Society (VDI),

see Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 113-116; Jarausch, Unfree Professions, 122;

Hortleder, Das Gesellschaft des Ingenieurs, 114ff; Manning, ‘Der Verein Deutscher

Ingenieure,’ 163-187; and Hughes, ‘National Socialist Ideology.’

49 Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 159-160.

50 See Todt's speech in Leipzig, March 1934, ‘Generalinspektor Dr.-Ing. Todt auf

der Kundgebung in Leipzig,’ Deutsche Technik, April 1934, 428.

51 Hess Verfügung, November 26, 1934, BArch, Schumacher Sammlung / 280; Berlin

Document Center, personal file Feder. Georg Seebauer, Feder's Administrative

Director in the Office for Technology, later claimed that a jilted mistress

informed the Party hierarchy of Feder's complaints that Hitler was merely the

“noisy drummer” of his (Feder's) ideas; supposedly this proved the final straw

for Hitler. Interviewed by John Guse, July 30, 1975, and correspondence with

Manfried Riebe, August 28, 1977.

52 Herbert Mehrtens traces a similar shift from völkisch to Dienst am Volk science:

“Das ‘Dritte Reich’ in der Naturwissenschaftsgeschichte,” 47ff.

53 Stadtarchiv München, NSDAP 219.

54 See the Chronik des Vereines deutscher Ingenieure in der Amtzeit des Vorsitzenden Dr.-Ing. H. Schult,

1933 bis 1938 and Schult, ‘Erganzungen zur Chronik des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieurs

1933-1938,’ copies in the VDI-Archiv, Düsseldorf. Heinrich Schult was the (Nazi)

chairman of the German Engineering Association (VDI) from 1933 to 1938 and

figured prominently in creating an accommodation between the VDI and the NSDAP

in 1933, thus preventing a direct takeover by Gottfried Feder and more radical

engineers. The ‘Erganzungen’ was written to supplement the official Chronik and

then rewritten in 1945, supposedly due to destruction of part of the original.

It is a self-serving attempt to exonerate Schult and the VDI, but remains an

important source for the history of VDI-NSDAP relations.

55 The most complete biography of Todt is Seidler, Fritz Todt.

56 On Feder's personal disputes see the NSDAP court file on Feder in the Berlin

Document Center and the numerous libel suites against Feder described in BArch,

NS 26 1346. Also Tyrell, ‘Gottfried Feder and the NSDAP,’ an account which

exaggerates Feder's dogmatism and underestimates his political flexibility.

57 Feder's anti-capitalism – in the sense of opposing big business and profit-

making through charging interest – is evident in his economic writings,

especially Kampf Gegen die Hochfinanz, a compilation of his earlier publications. For

his corporatism: ‘The Social State’ in Nazi Ideology before 1933, 33-40.

58 Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, Chapter 9. Todt was certainly not as anti-

technocratic as portrayed by Hughes: ‘Technology’' 172, 176. Konrad Jarausch

argues that the goal of a ministry of technology is virtually achieved in

military form under Todt, The Unfree Professions, 179-180, and Helmut Maier reaches

the same conclusion, ‘Nationalsozialistische Technikideologie,’ 263.

59 A similar argument in Adolf, ‘Technikdiskurs und Technikideologie,’ 442.

60 Ludwig, ‘Politische Lösungen,’ 336.

61 Fritz Todt, ‘Plassenburg-Worte des Leiters des Hauptamtes für Technik und

Reichwalters des NSBDT, Generalinspektor Dr.-Ing. Fritz Todt,’ BArch, NS 14/78.

These ‘Plassenburg Quotations’ are a brief compendium of Todt's technical

philosophy.

62 Todt, ‘The Motor Highways built by Herr Hitler,’ in Germany Speaks, copy in the

Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. See also ‘Adolf Hitler und seine Strassen,’

in Adolf Hitler: Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers, 78-84.

63 Zeller, ‘Landschaften des Verkehrs,’ 329.

64 Schütz and Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn, 127-128, and Zeller, ‘Landschaften des

Verkehrs,’ 339.

65 Zeller, ‘Landschaften des Verkehrs,’ 326-330.

66 Seidler, Fritz Todt, 112-120. Albert Speer testified to Todt's clashes with

Bormann over despoiling the

landscape around Obersalzberg, Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 261. (This may have been

the source of disgruntled tension displayed in a well-known photo of Speer and

Hitler on an Obersalzberg park bench: Fest, Speer, 392n.)

67 Maier, ‘Nationalsozialistische Technikideologie,’ 262-263.

68 Todt himself had a range of cultural interests and is said to have remarked

that had his piano teacher been more energetic, he would have become a

professional musician: Siedler, Fritz Todt, 18, and Hughes, ‘National Socialist

Ideology,’ 25.

69 Todt, catalog to the exhibition ‘Kunst und Technik.’

70 Todt, introduction to Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers in der Kunst.

71 Schütz and Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn, 124.

72 Rüdiger, Kunst und Technik, part of a series entitled The Books of German

Technology.

73 On the artistic expression of Autobahn aesthetics, see especially Schütz and

Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn, 103, 112-114.

74 ‘Vor einer neuen Synthese von Kunst und Technik: Bericht mit 11 Reproduktionen

aus der Grossen Deutschen Kunstausstellung München 1942,’ Deutsche Technik,

September 1942, 367-371.

75 Deutsche Technik, July 1934, 587. See Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 170-175.

76 ‘Aufruf' in the Völkischer Beobachter, August 26, 1931, copy in BArch, Schumacher

Sammlung / 280.

77 Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 130.

78 Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, contains a detailed description of the

“coordination” of German engineers.

79 Schult, ‘Ergänzungen,’ 41.

80 ‘Zur Neuordnung der deutschen Technik,’ Deutsche Technik, May 1937, 209-214.

81 ‘Schöpferische Gestaltungskraft, Gemeinschaftsleistung, nationalsozialistische

Grundeinstellung – die

Grundlagen technischen Schaffens’' VDI-Jahrbuch, 1940, 278-282; Ludwig, Technik und

Ingenieure, 173.

82 Deutsche Technik, April 1937, 203.

83 ‘Hauptamtleiter Generalinspektor Dr.-Ing. Fritz Todt: Die Gemeinschaftsaufgaben

der deutschen Techniker im NSBDT,’ Deutsche Technik, October 1937, 469-472.

84 Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 171, 175.

85 During the war, Saur was named to head the Technical Department in Speer's

Ministry for Armaments and

War production and became Deputy Chief of the Armaments Staff (Rustungsstab).

Hitler went so far as to refer to Saur as the “genius” of the armament ministry

and to name Saur to replace Speer in his political testament. Institut für

Zeitgeschichte, ZS 565, 00043; Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 202, 411, 450, 465,

469; Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 280n., 527. Hitler's testament in Maser, Hitler’s

Letters and Notes, 358.

86 On Saur as head of the Fighter Staff (Jaegerstab) see Allen, Business, 232ff, and

Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 560, 628-634.

87 Schult, ‘Erganzungen,’ 36-38.

88 ‘Techniker mitten im Volk: NSK-Unterredung mit Hauptdienstleiter Dr. Todt,’

Nationalsozialistische Partei-Korrespondenz (Folge 115), May 17, 1939, 3, copy

in BArch, NS 14/5 Heft 1.

89 ‘Hauptamtsleiter Generalinspektor Dr.-Ing. Fritz Todt: Die

Gemeinschaftsaufgaben der deutschen Techniker im NSBDT,’ Deutsche Technik, October

1937, 469-472.

90 BArch, NS 14/78, also quoted in Seidler, Fritz Todt, 59.

91 ‘Erster Reichsschulungslehrgang der deutschen Technik,’ Deutsche Technik, July

1937, 360-361, 364.

92 ‘Programm Für den 8 Reichsschulungskurs der Deutschen Technik (Sonderlehrgang

für die Mitarbeiter im

deutschen Österreich) vom 17. mit 22. Mai 1938,’ BArch, NS 14/88.

93 ‘Merkblatt für Lehrgangsteilnehmer auf der Plassenburg,’ BArch, NS 14/88 (also

in NS 14/91).

94 Schoenleben, Fritz Todt, 7. On Schoenleben see Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 206.

95 Berlin Document Center, personal file Maier-Dorn; ‘Erster

Reichschulungslehrgang,’ Deutsche Technik, July 1937.

96 Deutsche Technik, October 1938, 479-486, 509-510.

97 ‘Technik und Persönlichkeit,’ Deutsche Technik, July 1939, 313-314.

98 Rohkrämer, ‘Antimodernism,’ 45.

99 Herf provides a brief analysis of Deutsche Technik in Reactionary Modernism, 205-211,

in which he reviews briefly minor ideologues like Joseph Bader, Richard Grun and

Fritz Nonnenbruch, who were frequent contributors.

100 Maier, ‘Nationalsocialischtische Technikideologie,’ 259-260.

101 Detailed descriptions of these propaganda voyages are contained in BArch,

NS14/5, Hefte 1-2. See Guse, ‘Plassenburg,’ chapter 5.

102 It was in May, 1938, that Todt developed plans for a “House of German

Technology” in Munich, also to serve for propaganda. The plans came to naught.

See Seifert, Fritz Todt, 67-70.

103 Documentation in BArch, NS 14/5, Hefte 1- 2.

104 The origins of this program go back to a Todt circular of October, 1940,

proposing a speaker program for the newly acquired Reich territories. Hauptamt

für Technik, Order 3/40, October 8, 1940, Barch, NS 14/10.

105 Hauptamt für Technik, Amt 1 circular, May 31, 1941, in BArch, NS 14 /49, Heft

2.

106 ‘Aufbau des Rednerwesens im NSBDT,’ April, 1942, BArch, NS 14/53, Heft 2.

107 Gauamtsleiter, Amt für Technik, Gau Magdeburg-Anhalt to Hauptamt für Technik,

Oct. 9, 1941, BA, NS

14/50, Heft 1. Also Otto Streck, Leiter des Amtes I, Hauptamt für Technik, to Amt

für Technik, Gau Steiermark, July 14, 1942, BArch, NS 14/52, Heft 2.

108 Hauptgeschäftsführer, Fachgruppe Bauwesen, to Otto Streck, Sept. 9, 1942,

BArch, NS 14/52, Heft 2.

109 Complete lists in BArch, NSD 52/27 and 52/28. The “techno-political” nature of

a lecture is determined by its

title; for a full discussion of the speaker system, Guse, ‘Plassenburg,’ 239-257.

110 BArch, NS 14/53, Hefte 1-2.

111 Reichsrednerlist der NSBDT, BArch, NS 14/47.

112 Speer, Inside, 263. See also Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 192ff.

113 BArch, NS 22/330; Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure, 198.

114 NSBDT ‘Themen-Dienst der Technik’ (5. Folge), June 25, 1942, in BArch, NS

14/10. Evidence is insufficient to determine whether or not this is the same

engineer Josef Greiner who published the now-discredited Das Ende des Hitler-Mythos in

1947.

115 Michael Allen demonstrates that, with the exception of an emergent technocratic

impulse in the 1944 “Fighter Staff”, the thrust of an SS modernization effort

had been aimed at the eastern settlements of the “New Order” and not at creating

an SS industrial empire as feared by Albert Speer. Allen, Business, 135-138, 238,

193-201.

116 Todt circular, October 28, 1941, in BArch, NS 14/10.

117 Hughes, ‘Technology,’ 173. In 1923 Todt founded a local NSDAP chapter, and he

was arrested during the

Parteiverbot in 1924 for illegal political activity. Berlin Document Center, personal

folio Todt, articles from the Völkische Beobachter (Vienna edition), February 9,

1942, and from the Hamburger Fremdenblatt, February 12, 1942.

118 See Todt's speech announcing the “reordering” of the German Technical

professions, April 3, 1937, cited in ‘Zur Neuordnung der deutschen Technik,’

Deutsche Technik, May 1937, 209-214.

119 Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis, 503. On Todt's death see Seidler, Fritz Todt, 365-

384; Hansen and Muller, ‘Der Tod des Reichsminister Dr. Fritz Todt,’ 602-605;

Thorwald, Die ungeklarte Fälle, 133-154.

120 Fest, Speer, 342-343; Schmidt, Albert Speer, 63-65.121

122 Jarausch, Unfree Professions, 195.

123 The phrase is Adam Tooze’s, who also rejects Speer’s claims to be apolitical.

Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 669.

124 Fest, Speer; van der Vat, The Good Nazi; Sereny, Albert Speer; and Schmidt, Albert Speer.

125 Dülffer, ‘Albert Speer;’ Willems, Der entsiedelte Jude; Schwendemann, “Der

‘entgrenzte’ Architekt.” 

126 Orland, ‘Der Zweispalt zwischen Politik und Technik,’ 276.

127 Speer, Immoralité, 34-35.

128 van der Vat, Good Nazi, 153.

129 Overy, Interrogations, 448.

130 Speer, Immoralité, 41. See also Speer, Spandau, 435.

131 The term is Sir Neville Henderson’s. Speer, Spandau, photo caption, 250ff.

132 Orland, ‘Der Zwiespalt,’ 291.

133 See Herf, ‘Reactionary Modernism Reconsidered,’ 133-134.

134 ibid., 134.

135 Rabinach, ‘Aesthetics of Production,’ 191.

136 BArch, NS 26/1188.

137 van der Vat, Good Nazi, 133.

138 On Nazi inventor policy, Gispen, Poems in Steel.

139 Clearly, Speer was unwilling to allow a long-standing feud between the Central

office for Technology and the Labor Front to continue. NSDAP Anordnung A6/42

Feb. 15, 1942 in BArch, NS 14/10.

140 Speer interview with John Guse, October 23, 1974.

141 Janssen, ‘Todt et Speer,’ 42.

142 Speer Anordnung 1/43, Feb. 22, 1943, BArch, NS 14/10. Herf incorrectly states

that Deutsche Technik continued to publish through 1944: ‘Engineer as Ideologue,’

642.

143 Haupamt für Technik, ‘Durchführungsbestimmung zur Anordnung 1/43,’ June 18,

1943, BArch, NS 14/10.

144 Allen, Business, 98-99, 108-109, 202, 241.

145 ibid., 241, 246, 238.

146 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 213.

147 Allen, Business, 206. See also Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 622-623.

148 Renneberg and Walker, ‘Scientists, engineers and National Socialism,’ 11.

149 Renneberg and Walker, ‘Scientists, engineers and National Socialism’, 8-9.

150 Kaienburg, Die Wirtschaft der SS, 1010-1017.

151 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 214.

152 Walter Oswald, ‘Die ersten 10 Jahre Nationalsozialistischer Technik nach der

Machtüberahme Adolf Hitlers: Was die nationalsozialistische Revolution aus der

deutschen Technik gemacht hat. NS-Technik,’ Deutsche Technik, February, 1943, 48-

50.

153 Szöllösi-Janze, ‘National Socialism and the Sciences,’ 12, and ‘Wir

Wissentschaftler bauen mit,’165; Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika, 153, 204; Walker,

German National Socialism, 66, 229; Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler, 188.

154 Mommsen, ‘The Indian Summer,’ 116-117.

155 Albert Speer first used the term in his exculpatory essay The Slave State.

156 Mommsen, ‘Indian Summer,’ 110.

157 On the Volksgemeinschaft: Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass., 2003) and

Norbert Frei, ‘People’s Community and War.’

158 Klepsch, Nationalsozialistische Ideologie, 246-247

159 Adolf, ‘Technikdiskurs und Technikideologie,’432. Zeller label’s Todt’s ‘German

Technology,’ a ‘peripheral

Ideological segment,’ with anti-Semitism linking it to Nazism’s ideological core.

Driving Germany, 68-70.

160 Frei, ‘People’s Community,’ 73.

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