Fritz Todt, Hitler’s favorite engineer and founder of Organisation Todt (OT), built his reputation as the creator of Germany’s Autobahn network, the Westwall, and sweeping reforms to increase German armaments’ production during the Second World War. He might have been remembered just for these efforts after his death in 1942 but for research in the last two decades by historians including Wolf Gruner (Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis, 2006) and Wendy Lower (Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, 2005) revealing a more sinister side to his activities. This was his ruthless exploitation of Jews as slave laborers, both to build his highways from the Reich into conquered territory and Hitler’s Werewolf field headquarters in German-occupied Ukraine. John Guse’s study on Todt’s brand of ideology for Nazi engineers, as well as Gottfried Feder’s more radical version, is therefore a welcome addition to investigations into a key member of Hitler’s elite.

Guse describes his work as a greatly modified version of his 1981 dissertation, broadly restating his thesis that Nazi ideology included both modern and anti-modern elements, while also incorporating material previously published between 2010 and 2013. Reviving his earlier work was necessary, Guse says, because little has been written about Nazi engineers in English in the interim and his material needed the context of new historical research. Among points addressed in his study, Guse lists the questions of what methods Nazi ideologues used to indoctrinate German engineers and how Nazi technical ideology prepared engineers for their roles in the German war effort and the Holocaust. In order to answer these and other questions, Guse sets out how first Feder and then Todt sought to instruct and ultimately control German engineers they saw as vital to the Nazi vision of a Volksgemeinschaft, a classless “people's community.”

In his analysis of Feder’s career as a Nazi economic theorist, Guse examines his influence as one of the earliest Nazi ideologues whose output included anti-capitalist and strongly anti-Semitic speeches and writings. Feder headed what became a principal voice of Nazi Technology, the Militant League of German Architects and Engineers (KDAI); another mouthpiece was his techno-political journal Deutsche Technik. But only just over a year after the journal’s launch in 1933, Feder was sacked as State Secretary for Economics by new Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, who as Reichsbank President in 1929 had become a dangerous foe when Feder launched a libellous assault against him. The abrasive Feder had made many enemies and was also sacked as Settlements Commissioner. He died in 1941, having failed to achieve objectives such as “coordinating” engineering societies in a single unified body under him.

Todt was Feder’s successor and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, named him in November 1934 as director of the National Socialist Office for Technology (AfT) and the National Socialist League of German Technology (NSBDT). Guse describes with admirable clarity and detail how Todt, the “skilled bureaucratic infighter” (8), forged a brilliant career from when he became Inspector General for German Highways in 1933, then Plenipotentiary for the Regulation of Buildings in 1938 to Minister for Armaments and Munitions in 1940. Like Feder, Todt helped craft the Nazi version of a racial “people's community” using his own technical ideology summarized as “man, machine and nature functioning in artistic harmony,” an ideal striven toward when constructing the German motorway system. Guse rightly contradicts historian Thomas Parke Hughes who believed Todt was not a malicious anti-Semite and merely “tolerated” anti-Semitism, but perhaps Hughes’s long outdated view could now simply have been jettisoned. Todt sought to indoctrinate German engineers in various ways, including through an institution along the lines of the “Order Castles,” the Reich School for Technology at Plassenburg Castle. He also used the journal Deutsche Technik and propagandistic “voyages of technology,” where trains laden with consumer items like a Volkswagen car, refrigerators, and radios toured Austria and the Sudetenland to promote German technological prowess before plebiscites to approve the territories’ annexations to the Reich. There was also a “speaker system” to instruct engineers during the war. However, Todt’s ideological campaign was hit by war pressures, with Plassenburg lectures curtailed, as well as the “voyages of technology,” whose planned “Southeast Voyage” through countries including Poland had to be cancelled in 1939 as Hitler prepared to invade the country. The “speaker system,” a programme of lectures, introduced after paper shortages restricted printing of journals, attracted limited interest among engineers, and were used mostly for training rather than proselytizing. When Albert Speer took over all Todt’s responsibilities after the latter’s fatal plane crash in February 1942, he subordinated his predecessor’s technical ideology to the war effort. Guse concludes that “German Technology,” as preached by Feder and Todt as an attractive component of Volksgemeinschaft propaganda, was “temporarily subordinated to the core Nazi goals: conquest of Lebensraum and destruction of the Jews” (230).

Despite all these wartime strains on the link back to Feder and Todt’s ideology instilled in German engineers, Guse concludes: “The damage had been done … By convincing engineers of their Aryan superiority, of their national destiny, of their duty to engage themselves fully to accomplish the Führer's goals, Todt's ideology groomed them to participate in heinous crimes” (244). Guse acknowledges other sources of ideological influence such as the Nazi paramilitary groups, quite apart from the barrage of indoctrinating propaganda generated by the Nazi regime as a whole. Todt himself was an SA Obergruppenführer and his OT leaders and top engineers had significant numbers of Himmler’s SS among them. Guse also points out the example of the brutal SS engineer Hans Kammler, whose elite team oversaw prisoners suffering appallingly high death rates in the Dora complex producing V2 rockets in underground tunnels in the Harz mountains. Overall, Guse conducts a meticulous examination of Nazi technical ideology and describes convincingly how it helped turn many engineers into perpetrators.