The German construction industry and industrial self-responsibility in occupied Europe, 1939–45

ABSTRACT

This article enquires into the role of private German businesses in the administration of Nazi-occupied Western and Northern Europe during the Second World War. It is argued that the National Socialists were able to rule over occupied Europe with a remarkably low number of administrative personnel because they trusted private industry with central administrative responsibilities and tasks. The focus will be on the German construction industry working under the paramilitary construction unit Organisation Todt, as no other sector relocated its activities to such a degree to the occupied territories. Under the slogan of ‘industrial self-responsibility’, German construction firms played a crucial role as bridgeheads and mediators, especially in the early phase of the occupation, helped to draft procurement contracts for construction projects, to control prices and entrepreneurial profits, to supervise local sub-contractors, and finally, to recruit and supervise forced labour. By investigating these aspects, the article adds not only to our understanding of the German administration of occupied Europe, but also of the functioning of the Nazi state in general. Moreover, the article highlights the consequences of industrial self-responsibility for state-business relations in the Third Reich.

KEYWORDS:

• Construction industry
• Industrial self-responsibility
• Occupied Europe
• Organisation Todt
• Second World War

JEL CODES:

• D73
• D80
• L74
• N44

Between 1939 and 1945, German-occupied Europe resembled a giant construction site. The Germans ordered the construction of military and industrial infrastructure to secure both the mobility of their troops and the economic exploitation of the territories they had conquered. Construction alone represented half of the volume of German orders executed by the French industry, and more than a fifth in the case of Belgium (Dickert, 2014, pp. 155–156). Local construction businesses experienced an unprecedented boom in all occupied countries of Western Europe. Since the 1990s, a small but growing literature has focused on these activities, often with an emphasis on forced labour (Andersen, 2005; Barjot, 1992; Desquesnes, 1987; Spazzali, 1998; Voldman, 1994). However, as the sheer number and complexity of these projects soon overburdened the local industry, the German authorities mobilised thousands of German construction firms as well. The German companies’ presence in occupied Europe has only recently attracted historians’ attention, although no other sector of the German economy relocated its activities to the occupied territories to such a degree as construction (Gogl, 2020; Lemmes, 2009). According to a contemporary estimate, half of German construction workers were working outside the Reich in 1943.¹

At the same time, however, historians have repeatedly noted that the Germans managed to rule over occupied Europe with a surprisingly small number of administrative personnel (Boldorf, 2015). This raises the question of the relation between the German administration and its German contractors. How was it possible for a regime that claimed unconditional leadership and control in the economic sphere to organise the deployment of thousands of German construction companies all over Europe using a comparatively small administrative apparatus?

In this article, I seek to address this question by focusing on the German construction industry working in occupied Western Europe. The aim of my analysis is to illuminate the relation between this branch of industry and the administration on a micro level. In doing so, I hope to contribute to research on the relation between state and industry and the German occupation of Europe. More generally, I want to add to the debate on the nature of National Socialist rule, a debate that has regained momentum in recent years due to the contributions of Sven Reichardt, Wolfgang Seibel and Rüdiger Hachtmann, among others (Hachtmann, 2011; Hachtmann & Süß, 2006; Reichardt & Seibel, 2011).

Since the 1990s, there has been a boom in research on German businesses under the Nazi dictatorship (Banken, 2020; Frei & Schanetzky, 2010). This research has shown that a large number of German firms were active in occupied Europe and there is evidence that these firms took over crucial administrative functions, for example in the system of Auftragsverlagerungen, the placement of German orders with local firms (Dickert, 2014, pp. 113–131; Radtke-Delacor, 2000; Scherner, 2012). However, a systematic study of the integration of private business into the occupation administration has not been carried out thus far. Moreover, the literature to date has focused primarily on the armaments industry and excluded construction for the most part.

The extensive research on German-occupied Europe has highlighted the fact that the Nazis to a high degree were dependent on local administrations and their willingness to cooperate. Most studies on the occupied countries have pointed out the limited size of the German administration, control deficits and the need for cooperation with local administrations, although not always explicitly establishing a link between these observations (Bohn, 1997, 2000; Deák, 2017; Giltner, 1998; Herbert, 1996/2016; Hirschfeld, 1988; Jäckel, 1966; Klinkhammer, 1993, pp. 75–82, 246–247; Liberman, 1996, pp. 47–50; Mazower, 2009, pp. 230, 237–238; Umbreit, 2015, pp. 138–143; Weber, 1978, pp. 179–180). Economic historians in particular have shown how local administrations and local private business helped to keep economic life going after the invasion (Boldorf & Okazaki, 2015; Frøland, Ingulstad, & Scherner, 2016). However, German contractors in occupied Europe only worked for German clients and dealt with German authorities for the most part. Their activity thus remained a blind spot of a historiography that focused primarily on local businesses and institutions. Therefore, this part of the literature likewise provides only few answers to the question raised here.

In this article, I will employ sources unused thus far, primarily those of the most important German client in wartime Europe, the paramilitary construction unit Organisation Todt (OT). The article will mostly rely on the exceptionally rich source material of OT’s mission in Norway and Denmark, which has survived the war largely intact. It provides a unique insight into the German construction activities and can thus serve as a key to a better understanding of other OT missions, too. The findings are carefully compared to sources and literature on other territories, particularly France and Italy, to ensure that the conclusions of this article can be considered valid for occupied Europe in general.

I hypothesise that Germany’s colossal construction activity was only possible because the state granted its German contractors a high degree of industrial self-responsibility and transferred central tasks to private business. Without the latter, it would have been impossible to maintain what the National Socialists called Aufsichtsverwaltungen, supervisory administrations, in Western Europe for more than five years. The ‘outsourcing of policy’ secured the functioning and the flexibility of an administration that was under ‘permanent stress’ (Reichardt & Seibel, 2011), making the amalgamation of state bureaucracy and industrial self-responsibility one of the pillars of the occupation regimes in Western Europe. However, this granted private business a significant amount of entrepreneurial room for manoeuvre, which allowed firms to pursue interests that did not necessarily conform with those of the state.

The rest of the article is divided into three sections. First, I will illustrate the limited capacity of the civil German occupation administration in general and of OT’s apparatus in particular. Subsequently, I will provide an in-depth analysis of how German construction firms were integrated into the administration under the guiding principle of industrial self-responsibility. I will discuss five dimensions that became particularly important in the field of construction: German firms serving as bridgeheads and mediators, especially in the early phase of the occupation; their role during the drafting of procurement contracts for construction projects; the controlling of prices and entrepreneurial profits; the supervision of local subcontractors; and finally, the recruitment and supervision of forced labour. In the third section, I will reflect on the wider implications of my findings and identify some aspects that further research may address.

1. Occupation administration and industrial self-responsibility

In his illuminating 1981 article on the relation between industry and Nazi state, Hans-Erich Volkmann already showed how German big business assumed the responsibilities of the public administration during the Second World War to reduce the burden upon military and political authorities (Volkmann, 1981, pp. 87–116). Leading Nazis like armaments minister and head of OT Fritz Todt, and after Todt’s death in 1942 his successor Albert Speer, regarded industrial self-responsibility as the most effective tool for mobilising German industry for the war effort, as Speer never tired of proclaiming publicly (Speer, 1943, 1944). Arguing mostly on a macro level and with regard to the armaments sector, Volkmann noted that it corresponded with National Socialist economic views that self-responsibility would yield better results than administrative control. The industrial associations and committees grew into administrative functions, became representatives of the regime and the military occupying power, and participated in their power. Borne by a far-reaching identity of interests, a ‘new statehood’ (Rüdiger Hachtmann) emerged in which organisational hybrids such as OT were able to rely upon the industry’s inventiveness, flexibility and experience. They put industrial self-responsibility at the centre of their self-conception, as did the head of the OT-headquarters, Xaver Dorsch, in 1943 (Dorsch, 1943). I argue that this modus operandi was a major reason for OT’s growing dominance in the field of construction. Although the construction offices of the Wehrmacht continued to award contracts to private construction businesses throughout the war, they were increasingly superseded and even absorbed by the OT. Therefore, the article will focus on the OT as the driving force behind industrial self-responsibility in wartime construction. Unfortunately, our knowledge on the Wehrmacht construction offices is very limited due to a lack of sources, and accordingly, literature. Wherever possible, however, I will draw comparisons to the situation of German firms working under the Wehrmacht.

The National Socialists did not adopt a consistent mode of administration in countries that had fallen victim to their aggression in Western Europe. Despite all institutional peculiarities, however, these territories shared a common feature: the Germans governed them with a surprisingly small number of personnel. Over the course of the war, the German administration thinned out as its sphere of control became bigger, while civil servants were called up to the Wehrmacht. At the height of its power, Nazi Germany ruled over approximately 166 million people in occupied Europe, 93 million of them in the western half of the continent (Umbreit, 2015, p. 11). By contrast, the German central administrations in those territories were quite lean, as Table 1 illustrates.

Table 1. German central administration in German-occupied Western Europe (autumn 1941, Italy: 20 February 1944)^a and local population (December 1943)^b.

	Type of administration	Number of personnel	Population (in millions)
France (without Alsace, Moselle, Nord-Pas-de-Calais)	Military administration	1489	36.1
Belgium with Nord-Pas-de-Calais	Military administration	1166	11.4
The Netherlands	Reich Commissariat (civilian)	1596	9.1
Italy	Military administration	934	30
Norway	Reich Commissariat (civilian)	806	3
Denmark	Reich Plenipotentiary (diplomatic)	89	3.9

^a Sources: (Collotti, 1963, p. 476; Liberman, 1996, p. 48).

^b Source: (Umbreit, 2015, p. 11). Note that unlike Umbreit, this table subsumes the c. 3.2 million inhabitants of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region under Belgium, not France.

With the exception of Denmark, economic or technical departments were established as parts of the central administration. In all occupied territories, these departments initiated construction projects immediately after the invasion, as did the construction offices of the three Wehrmacht branches. More and more often, however, it was OT that coordinated construction activities in the occupied territories and awarded contracts both to German and local construction firms. Organisation Todt soon became one of the biggest and most important protagonists in the ‘occupied economies’ as it absorbed more and more civil and military construction offices over the course of the war. It is estimated that up to 2 million (mostly forced) labourers worked on OT’s construction sites (Handbook of the Organisation Todt, 1992, p. 3).

OT’s administrative personnel is not included in the figures in Table 1. In the spring of 1943, approximately 40,000 men and women worked in OT’s administration all over Europe.² The Organisation’s power peaked in the summer of 1944 when it took over the construction offices of the air force and navy. In Western Europe, OT already became active in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in 1940 and in Norway in 1941 with a small unit. When OT’s founder and leader, Fritz Todt, died in February 1942, his successor as armaments minister and head of OT, Albert Speer, immediately initiated the establishment of task forces, so-called Einsatzgruppen. Although subordinate to a central headquarters in Berlin, the Einsatzgruppen worked quite autonomously: Einsatzgruppe West in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Einsatzgruppe Wiking in Norway and Denmark and, from September 1943 onwards, Einsatzgruppe Italien in Italy (Gogl, 2020; Lemmes, 2009; Sæveraas, 2016; Seidler, 1987/1998). The task forces’ organisational scheme had several levels. The basic operational units were the regional Oberbauleitungen (OBL), which contracted and supervised firms. The OBL had sub-sectors, Bauleitungen (BL), which again could have local sub-sectors, the Abschnittsbauleitungen (ABL), monitoring the actual construction sites.

Very soon, OT and other German awarding authorities began to mobilise large numbers of German construction firms. The latter became sought-after partners due to their know-how, machinery and skilled workforce. From the construction industry’s perspective, working in occupied Europe offered a chance to stay in business. Unlike in other sectors, the German domestic demand for construction works dropped after the outbreak of the war, putting construction businesses under considerable structural pressure. However, historians have shown that they normally applied for missions in the occupied countries voluntarily and often pro-actively, because contracts also promised healthy profits, gave them privileged access to scarce construction machinery, and prevented their skilled workers from being drafted into the Wehrmacht (Gogl, 2020, pp. 235–250). Non-economic motives are harder to identify but still occasionally perceptible in the archival material, such as a sense of commitment to the nation at war and the cause of National Socialism, which certainly had a bearing in the context of forced labour, for instance.

Both the German construction administration and the number of firms grew significantly after the formation of OT’s Einsatzgruppen. Many German firms arrived in the West, especially when activity on OT’s biggest construction project, the Atlantic Wall, peaked in 1943; this activity remained relatively high in 1944, too. Probably more than 800 German firms worked under Einsatzgruppe West in France alone. In Norway, an estimated 500 German firms worked under Einsatzgruppe Wiking between 1942 and 1945 (Gogl, 2020, p. 240; Lemmes, 2009, p. 393). The latter’s most important projects were the fortification of the Norwegian coastline as part of the Atlantic Wall, the construction of a railway in Northern Norway and several other military and industrial projects. Many German firms also worked under Einsatzgruppe Wiking in Denmark, as well as in Italy, where OT established an Einsatzgruppe right after German troops had occupied parts of the country in the autumn of 1943. The figures for Denmark and Italy are fragmentary. Sources mention 49 firms under Einsatzgruppe Wiking in Denmark for December 1944, and 40 firms participating in a meeting of OT contractors in Venice in June 1944.³

There are very detailed figures on Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s personnel structure in Norway, Denmark and Finland for late August 1944.⁴ At this point in time, the task force’s administration had reached its maximum size. It had overseen the army’s construction projects since 1942 and, as in all other parts of occupied Europe, taken over the administration of navy and air force construction in the summer of 1944. OT’s previously independent unit Einsatz Finnland had become part of Einsatzgruppe Wiking around this time, too. The administration consisted of 6096 men and women (4516 in Norway, 890 in Denmark and 690 in Finland) before construction activities were reduced significantly and firms relocated to Germany.

Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s staff was simultaneously manning various other agencies related to construction. Most importantly, the Reich Commissariat’s Main Department for Technology (Hauptabteilung Technik), which was responsible for the Reich Commissariat’s construction activities, as well as the office of the General Commissioner for the Regulation of the Construction Industry (Generalbevollmächtigter für die Regelung der Bauwirtschaft) in Norway, another institution led by Todt and later Speer. The Reich Commissariat’s regional offices concerned with construction were merged with Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s OBLs in September 1942.⁵ This means that by August 1944 virtually every German construction firm in Northern Europe was contracted and supervised by this administrative body. The overlaps in staffing help to explain why there is no real contradiction between the well-known notions of an ‘inflation of authorities’ (Reichardt & Seibel, 2011, p. 13) and polycratic chaos (Umbreit, 1999) in Nazi-occupied Europe and findings about an increasingly overstressed and thinned-out administration.

At first glance, the number of more than 6000 staff members suggests a massive apparatus that should have been able to monitor its contractors closely. It is somewhat misleading, though. First, of the 6096 men and women, 30 percent (1854) were non-Germans, most of them Norwegians, Danes and Finns. This again underscores the importance not only of the local administration of the occupied countries, but also of locals within the German administration. Second, the figure contains a significant number of staff that were employees of the construction firms. Their exact share is not given, but a comparable statistical overview of January 1944⁶ shows that 36 percent of Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s staff were actually employees of private construction firms. What is more, the remaining 64 percent, identified as genuine OT personnel, still included an undisclosed number of persons who came from private construction firms and were only temporarily on the state’s payroll.⁷ Some scholars have suggested that these men and women expected to return to their companies after the war and hardly would have pursued any policy that would have harmed their industry (Streb, 2003, pp. 46–47). From the states’ perspective, one cannot overestimate how important this feature of the OT apparatus was in a time of scarce manpower. It made the OT an attractive client in the eyes of the Nazi leadership compared to the more traditional administration of the Wehrmacht construction offices.

In Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s headquarters in Oslo, two small departments were responsible for all aspects of contracting, pricing and controlling the firms’ book-keeping. Department XIa (later VA1) under architect Josef Fröhler was leading the negotiations with the construction firms and consisted of 10–11 persons, including the typists, in 1943–44. The number of personnel in department XIb (later VA2), which was concerned with accounting and headed by Fritz Motsch, varied from six to nine.⁸ The two departments were supported by a handful of officials placed with the OBLs around the country. Most of the work, however, seems to have rested on the shoulders of the staff in Oslo. Negotiations on contracts and prices, for example, were often carried out by Josef Fröhler in person. Again, figures for other Einsatzgruppen are more fragmentary. But they, too, prove the paramount importance of private industry’s personnel within the OT apparatus. Of the German personnel of Einsatzgruppe Italien’s Einsatz Seefalke, consisting of three OBLs that operated in the area around Rome, 243 men and women were genuine OT staff, while 729 men and women were employees of construction firms.⁹

Thus, the state’s limited administrative capacities should be a central aspect of any discussion of entrepreneurial freedom of action under the Nazi dictatorship, particularly with regard to occupied Europe. Sometimes, OT offices were run by a single German officer with some local co-workers, as in the Italian town of Brescia (Savegnago, 2012, p. 34). OT members often complained about the low level of staff. In a telegram to Einsatzgruppe West sent in early 1943, the head of OBL Holland, Kurt Wiendieck, complained about the catastrophic lack of personnel in his area of responsibility.¹⁰ Around the same time, Fritz Köbele, Fröhler and Motsch’s superior in Oslo, had to fight attempts to transfer the only remaining typist from his already overstrained accounting department.¹¹

Pressure on the awarding authorities increased significantly over the course of the war. As the tide turned against the Wehrmacht in the East, the German administration was combed for any man fit for military service. Ministries within the Reich were urged to release officials to the Wehrmacht and rely more on older men and women. The multitude of agencies at the intermediate or regional level and the duality of state and party were identified as particularly problematic (Caplan, 1988, pp. 302–320; Rebentisch, 1985, pp. 768–770). But the two Führer decrees on the simplification of administration of 25 January 1942 and on the ‘comprehensive deployment of men and women for Reich defence duties’ of 13 January 1943 affected the German administrative bodies in occupied Europe, too (Moll, 1997, pp. 231–233, 311–313). Regional offices were merged, posts were cut and working procedures simplified. After the merger with the Wehrmacht construction administration in mid-1944, OT had to release another 30 percent of their staff to the military.¹² There are indications that the situation was hardly better in the construction offices of the Wehrmacht. In September 1942, for example, the Wehrmacht in occupied Norway refused the introduction of new regulations for the calculation of entrepreneurial profits and accounting on its construction sites due to the lack of personnel.¹³

It therefore comes as no surprise that the few civil servants were forced to rely on private industry, under the slogan of industrial self-responsibility, throughout the entire occupation. For an administration that suddenly had to cover huge occupied areas while it was repeatedly decimated by the Wehrmacht’s draft calls, the concept was simply a necessity. In 1944, Albert Speer explicitly referred to industrial self-responsibility as a means to free up personnel in the ranks of the awarding authorities.¹⁴

2. Industrial self-responsibility in construction

As the article has shown so far, German construction firms were of paramount importance for an administration that struggled with staff shortages throughout the entire occupation. Having assessed the phenomenon in quantitative terms, in the following I will take a closer look at the various dimensions of the integration of industry into the construction administration in occupied Europe.

2.1. Bridgeheads and mediators

In the early phase of the occupation in particular, some major German contractors served as bridgeheads that provided their expertise to both the occupation administration and other firms. In occupied Norway, for instance, a handful of major German firms such as Straßenbau AG (Strabag), Ed. Züblin and Hermann Möller already arrived shortly after the invasion in 1940. By October 1941, their number had risen to at least a dozen.¹⁵ These contractors were often referred to as ‘Norwegenkenner’, that is, experts on the conditions in Norway. In the spring of 1940, it was one firm in particular that served as a bridgehead, namely Fritz Todt’s former employer Sager & Woerner. Todt sent his personal friend and director of the company, Anton Woerner, to Norway to investigate the conditions for road construction projects. In the following years, firms such as Sager & Woerner provided valuable information to their association, the Construction Industry Group (Wirtschaftsgruppe Bauindustrie) and to other firms that were less familiar with local conditions. In doing so, the ‘Norwegenkenner’ also eased the burden on the Reich Commissariat, which operated several regional construction offices around the country. In early 1942, the offices in southern Norway consisted of 10–15 people only, including auxiliary staff, typists and Norwegian drivers and interpreters. Further north, the situation was even more problematic. Organisation plans for the Hammerfest office, for example, in fact reveal only six persons. In spring 1942, the office in Kirkenes consisted of four men.¹⁶

It was similarly important that entrepreneurs such as Anton Woerner maintained business contacts in Norway established during the interwar period and seem to have served as a kind of mediator during the crucial first months of the occupation. Sager & Woerner and Strabag, for instance, established contact with Norway’s largest construction company, A/S Høyer-Ellefsen, which had been asked to carry out construction works for the Wehrmacht. The Oslo-based firm was reluctant to take over projects that clearly served the military needs of the occupying power. Thus, Woerner proposed establishing a working combine between Sager & Woerner, Høyer-Ellefsen and Strabag, which allowed the Norwegians to work on the air force construction sites without having to deal directly with their German military customers.¹⁷

After the war, former members of the Wehrmacht (Thomas, 1966, p. 210) and the Reich Commissariat¹⁸ also reported that they had used business leaders from various sectors to activate business contacts from the interwar period and build trust among the local industry in the early phase of the occupation. The situation was similar in occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1940 and 1941, when the OT apparatus had not yet established its final form, major contractors like Strabag more or less ran the Organisation while control by the local OT headquarters was rather weak (Handbook of the Organisation Todt, 1992, p. 8). Here, too, major construction firms from France and Germany reactivated business contacts from the interwar period. This accelerated and facilitated the mobilisation of the French construction industry in the early phase of the occupation (Lemmes, 2008, pp. 168–169, 2009, pp. 398–399). The situation thus resembles that described in the case of Auftragsverlagerungen, when German firms participated in ‘information journeys’ to reconnoitre local firms before reactivating business contacts and placing orders with these local firms (Dickert, 2014, pp. 175–176, 191; Homburg, 2005, p. 536).

Furthermore, the Construction Industry Group’s so-called liaison offices, established in Paris, Oslo and the Italian town of Sirmione, were important mediators throughout the occupation. The offices were manned with employees of major German construction firms. In 1944, the construction office at the military administration in Paris, which at the same time represented the General Commissioner for the Regulation of the Construction Industry in France, tried to recruit French construction firms for projects in southern Germany. The construction office asked Günther Naschold from the construction industry’s liaison office in Paris to get in touch with the representatives of the Comité d’Organisation du Bâtiment et des Travaux Publics and test the waters, as the mission was supposed to be voluntary and Naschold ‘knew the gentlemen of the Comité better’.¹⁹

2.2. Designing contracts

Secondly, the construction industry was closely involved in designing Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s and Einsatzgruppe West’s framework contracts in 1942–43. A classical approach adopted in the literature on state-business relations under the Nazi dictatorship is to assess the state’s ability to monitor and steer private business and to map the industry’s room for manoeuvre accordingly (Scherner, 2017). Less frequently, however, historians have investigated how companies and industrial associations were already able to exert influence during the formulation of the terms and conditions of state-industry relations.

The establishment of Einsatzgruppe Wiking in spring 1942 would have not been possible without the expertise provided by major contractors, the Construction Industry Group in Berlin and its liaison office in Oslo. In order to be able to start construction work as fast as possible, the Einsatzgruppe, together with the Reich Price Commissioner²⁰ in Berlin, had to develop a so-called cost-plus contract under which the Organisation simply reimbursed all of the firms’ expenses and granted them a certain mark-up for overheads and profit. Unsurprisingly, these profit rates had been and remained the subject of a constant tug-of-war between state and construction industry throughout the war (Buggeln, 2010). However, Nazi authorities often lacked the time and personnel to calculate adequate mark-ups.

Thus, far from being exponents of a ‘command economy’ that dictated contract conditions to construction companies, Einsatzgruppe Wiking and the Reich Price Commissioner sought the support of the industry, especially since they had little experience with the demanding conditions in Northern Europe. In spring 1942, the Construction Industry Group in Berlin and its Oslo liaison office were constantly involved in negotiations on the contract clauses.²¹ Most importantly, the Industry Group forwarded a request by the Reich Price Commissioner to Gerhard Opitz, asking him to develop an easy-to-use method for calculating the mark-ups for operating expenses and profit under a cost-plus contract in Norway.²² Opitz, a construction pricing expert of Siemens-Bauunion, was no stranger to the men at the Price Commissioner’s office: in 1938, he had finished a book manuscript on pricing in construction, which became the basis of the state’s Construction Price Ordinance of 1939 (Reuss, 1966, pp. 78–81). Over the course of spring 1942, Opitz collaborated closely, and apparently frictionlessly, with the authorities and drafted easy-to-read tables of the rates for operating expenses and profit that the firms were allowed to add to their invoice total. Comparing the rates in Opitz’s drafts to the final contract documents of August 1942, we see that the state clearly had followed the industry expert’s suggestions meticulously.²³

Subsequently, several major contractors formed a committee in order to monitor the introduction of the contract and discuss potential problems. Based on an agreement between the Construction Industry Group and the head of Einsatzgruppe Wiking, Willi Henne, director Karl Pfitzner was appointed the Einsatzgruppe’s contracts consultant (Vertragsreferent) to support the Einsatzgruppe with his expertise in the future. Pfitzner was the head of Sager & Woerner’s Oslo office, and as such a particular ‘Norwegenkenner’.²⁴ Given OT’s ever-growing tasks and limited number of personnel, Henne also wanted the industry’s liaison office in Oslo to become more involved. Its leader was, on the one hand, to act as a counsel to Henne and forward requests and complaints by the firms. On the other hand, he was to be authorised to independently implement measures concerning the construction industry.²⁵

In the following months, however, the flaws of the cost-plus contract became apparent. As the firms’ profits increased proportionally with rising costs, the contract de facto rewarded companies that worked slowly and employed more workers than necessary. Einsatzgruppe Wiking therefore decided to introduce a kind of fixed-price contract, called efficiency-output contract, for the building season 1943. Having agreed on a price beforehand, firms would be incentivised to work fast and cost-efficiently to undercut the price and increase their earnings. In the literature, fixed-price contracts have been discussed as one of the National Socialist state’s prime means of tightening the reins on industry (Barkai, 1990, p. 237; Overy, 1994, pp. 348–349, 357–358). However, this contract, too, had to be drafted. In particular, the firms needed service and price specifications containing details on the construction projects in order to calculate a fixed price.

Drafting the service and price specifications required experience and knowledge about local conditions. Once again, Einsatzgruppe Wiking was forced to admit that it did not possess the necessary expertise and therefore commissioned private industry to draft specifications for various types of construction works and structures. On 31 October 1942, the liaison office in Oslo contacted 26 construction firms that had gained first-hand experience in Norway and asked them to submit specifications. The drafts would then be discussed and harmonised at the monthly meeting between firms and the liaison office two days later in Oslo.²⁶

Over the following weeks, the Einsatzgruppe and the companies negotiated on the new contract that was to be introduced after 1 April 1943. In the negotiations, in which Sager & Woerner’s Karl Pfitzner seems to have played a particularly influential role, the firms managed to defend their interests quite successfully. Most importantly, the state did not dictate prices for certain work steps globally, which would have increased the pressure on firms significantly. Instead, every contract was still subject to price negotiations between the individual firms and the Einsatzgruppe. Moreover, the industry succeeded in modifying several points of the contract’s initial draft.²⁷ The liaison office in Oslo also seems to have been very satisfied with the outcome of the negotiations.²⁸ Finally, we should stress that there is no evidence that any German firm in Norway was ever forced to sign the new efficiency-output contract. Whenever conditions were too unpredictable, firms were also allowed to work under the old cost-plus contracts in the following years.²⁹

The situation in Norway resembles that in occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands, where negotiations on the introduction of an efficiency-output contract had already started in the summer of 1942. Here, too, the Construction Industry Group and the sector’s big players, such as Philipp Holzmann, Polensky & Zöllner, Grün & Bilfinger and Wayss & Freytag were closely involved in the formulation of the contracts.³⁰ Moreover, in Paris, Einsatzgruppe West’s department for contracting and deployment of firms was in fact led by an employee of the construction company Polensky & Zöllner – a fact that certainly did no harm to the industry. In the opinion of the industry’s liaison office in Paris, he was ‘not only an outstanding expert in contracting and pricing, but also … an absolute supporter of the necessity of a strong organisation of the German construction industry’. Moreover, the liaison office was able to add with satisfaction: ‘The fact that most of the experts that he again and again consulted with our consent on questions of contracting and pricing are taken from the construction industry, speaks for the importance of the Construction Industry Group and the appreciation that its liaison office has acquired here in 18 months of diligent work’.³¹ The head of Einsatzgruppe West’s technical department was likewise a man of the industry.³²

2.3. Price auditing

Price auditing played a particularly important role in the relation between state and businesses, not least in construction. Few principles were as central to the National Socialist war propaganda as its demand that no one should profit from the war. Parts of the literature have drawn the picture of a tight monitoring system with rigorous ex post price reductions (Rauh-Kühne, 2002) and described the state’s grip on private industry as ‘airtight’ (Hayes, 2009). However, how convincing is this interpretation with regard to German business activities in occupied Europe, given their massive volume and the administration’s limited capacities?

The situation was already strained within the Reich, where the Wehrmacht was forced to admit that its 1,600 auditors were not enough to check the books and monitor the prices of military construction projects in 1940 (Streb, 2009, p. 358). The German Court of Audit reported that public demand for construction works had risen so massively that the public administration had been unable to scrutinise the calculations as thoroughly as necessary.³³ Also Wehrmacht’s construction offices in the occupied territories were known for overpaying their contractors, not least because they lacked the personnel to monitor them (Thomas, 1966, p. 207, 210, 276). Moreover, the Wehrmacht constantly disregarded wage and price regulations. This led to remarkable episodes of other German authorities asking for permission to ignore price regulations to be able to compete with the Wehrmacht for local workers and firms.³⁴

OT itself was well aware of the trade-off it was facing between the quick realisation of its projects and high costs. When confronted with the dilemma, however, the Organisation most of the time chose to prioritise speed over cost-efficiency. But the exploding costs resulting from OT’s cost-plus contracts certainly created some headaches for the officials at the Reich Ministry of Finance, the German Court of Audit and the Reich Price Commissioner. The most important price factor was labour. Lists documenting the hours worked on a site formed the basis on which the firms added their mark-ups for overheads and profit. However, the areas covered by the Einsatzgruppen were simply too big. As the secretary of the Construction Industry Group’s liaison office in Oslo already put it both laconically and accurately in early 1942: ‘who is to control the correctness of the records in the wilderness?’³⁵

The introduction of efficiency-output contracts posed a new challenge to the German administrations in the occupied territories. Now, auditors had to check the contract prices calculated by the firms. Otherwise, firms would profit from information asymmetries by including all imaginable risks and price-increasing factors in their calculations and demand excess prices. It is telling that even OT’s foremost contracting expert, Walter Daub, harboured serious concerns about these new contracts. In the summer of 1942, when the introduction of efficiency-output contracts was first discussed between Einsatzgruppe West and its contractors in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Daub doubted that OT possessed an even remotely sufficient number of qualified officers to conduct negotiations with its contractors on a level playing field.³⁶

In Norway, internal documents of Einsatzgruppe Wiking reveal that its negotiators worked under enormous time pressure. When the new efficiency-output contracts were introduced in 1943, Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s contracts expert Josef Fröhler personally travelled along the coast for three months, often sleeping on board the boat he was using, in order to visit construction sites and negotiate with firms in a huge area between Stavanger and Narvik.³⁷ In early October, Fröhler travelled to the northernmost construction sites in Germany’s sphere of power, the area around the Norwegian town of Alta. The local OT representative noted that ‘an apparently overworked’ Fröhler waved through more or less all the offers that the firms presented to him in a marathon meeting. The sometimes ‘absurdly high prices’ produced considerable excess profits for the firms.³⁸

Similar control problems also extended to the field of taxation. As their OT mission was regarded temporary, German construction firms usually paid their taxes in Germany. However, it was almost impossible for the few German tax auditors to visit the remote construction sites all over Europe. Sometimes, local tax auditors tried to check construction sites – this was the case in Norway, where the firms had to pay a 10% turnover tax to the Norwegian state. However, the Wehrmacht denied the auditors access to the sites as well as insight into the firms’ books for reasons of military secrecy (Gogl, 2020, p. 207). Tackling the problem of excess profits by means of retroactive taxation was thus not feasible.

The lack of pricing experts and auditors forced the occupiers to rely on the industry. While ‘the entrepreneurs [had] to be aware of their self-responsibility more than ever when drawing up their invoices’, the state hoped to achieve ‘a maximum degree of simplification of the accounting process’.³⁹ In the occupied West, OT decided to swear in engineers of the construction firms as controllers by handshake in September 1943. Whether they lived up to the trust placed in them by the state was to be secured through spot checks.⁴⁰ This seems to have been a comprehensive policy under OT both in other parts of Europe⁴¹ and within the Reich.⁴² Philipp Holzmann likewise reported after the war that its qualified engineers had been sworn in as controllers.⁴³

Another measure was to appoint members of construction firms as local Delegates for Pricing (Vertrauensmänner für die Preisbildung), as happened in occupied Norway in 1943 and later also in Denmark. The delegates usually came from one of the bigger construction firms working in a certain area.⁴⁴ Their task was to work in the field of contracting and pricing, assisting the Einsatzgruppe when transferring firms, workers and machinery between construction sites or when firms and machinery were returned to Germany towards the end of the occupation.⁴⁵ It seems that in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, committees of at least two entrepreneurs, subject to each OBL, assumed similar tasks (Seidler, 1987/1998, p. 215). Most importantly, they were to support the firms in drawing up offers. Einsatzgruppe Wiking, however, lacked both the expertise and the personnel to assess whether these offers were fair. It therefore asked the industry whether the Delegates for Pricing could also advise the officers that checked the offers. This would indeed have been akin to leaving the foxes in charge of the henhouse and a new high point of industrial self-responsibility in public procurement: the firms were basically supposed to monitor themselves. It was the firms, however, that refused to take over this task, as it would have been too time-consuming for them to visit and stay in touch with all contractors in the spread-out country.⁴⁶ At least in the outermost north, however, Einsatzgruppe Wiking commissioned firms to independently check their own contract prices and report potential excess profits in 1944. In doing so, the Einsatzgruppe finally abandoned any closer supervision of its contractors in the area. Reporting excess prices and profits, however, does not seem to have been a top priority for the firms, since Oslo had to remind the firms to send in the reports several times.⁴⁷

2.4. Monitoring local (sub-)contractors

A fourth aspect of industrial self-responsibility concerned the monitoring of local contractors, who worked on German construction sites in great numbers. Estimates speak of ‘probably … many more’ than 800 French firms under Einsatzgruppe West and the Wehrmacht (Lemmes, 2009, p. 393) and at least 400 Norwegian firms under Einsatzgruppe Wiking alone (Ingulstad, 2018, pp. 264–265). The figures refer to certain reporting dates. Because of this, and because it is unclear to what extent subcontractors were counted, the actual number of firms was certainly higher. Contacting, monitoring and negotiating with these local contractors was a crucial part of mobilising the ‘occupied economies’. Local construction firms were able to conclude contracts directly with German authorities, but very often they worked as subcontractors for German firms. In this way, both Wehrmacht and OT were able to lighten the burden on their own administrations, particularly when the German firms controlled their subcontractors’ book-keeping. Construction prices often became the subject of negotiations between two companies, instead of occupying the capacities of the OT apparatus.

This role opened up considerable room for manoeuvre for the German companies, which they seem to have used primarily in two ways. On the one hand, there are examples of firms using the power given to them in the OT system against their subcontractors, for instance during contract negotiations or when threatening to withdraw construction workers, machinery and materials (Sæveraas, 2016, pp. 225–226, 231).

On the other hand, however, German firms and their subcontractors could be united by overlapping interests. For example, the German firms were allowed to add a certain mark-up on the subcontractor’s invoice total to compensate for their administrative effort. This arrangement of course bore the danger of fraud as the German firms’ profit rose when local subcontractors demanded illegally high prices. Internal documentation of 1944 of Berlin-based Allgemeine Baugesellschaft Lorenz show that this indeed happened. Lorenz was constructing a pier in southern Norway, first for the air force’s local construction office, later under Einsatzgruppe Wiking. In its books, Lorenz managed to conceal that its subcontractor was paying its Norwegian workforce illegally high wages and bonuses. Lorenz’s site manager was pleased to report to the firm’s headquarters in Berlin that this very special form of German-Norwegian cooperation ‘ … redounds very much to our advantage … ’.⁴⁸

Beyond the direct contractor-subcontractor relation, German firms were also commissioned with supervising several local firms in a specific area. In Italy, Einsatzgruppe Italien introduced a so-called Führungsvertrag by which it delegated the direction and supervision of a group of Italian firms to a German contractor. When several OBLs fell behind with the contracting and accounting of their Italian firms in 1944, an official of the Einsatzgruppe reproached the OBL’s employees, stating that they had not relied enough on their major German contractors.⁴⁹ Sometimes, OT even commissioned some of its major contractors with the administration of entire OBLs. Here, at the latest, the notion of OT as an organisation that had ‘absorbed’ (Pohl, 1999, p. 228) private industry must be questioned. In Italy, the contractors Polensky & Zöllner and Sager & Woerner led entire OBLs, meaning that they took on the tasks previously held by OT’s civil servants, such as organising provisions, deploying labour, awarding contracts and controlling invoices.⁵⁰ These tasks also included the supervision of several local construction firms. Below the OBL level, the local BL, ABL and the individual construction sites were normally led by executives of the construction firms, anyway (Handbook of the Organisation Todt, 1992, pp. 30–32).

Again, the entire system of firms functioning as supervisors of local firms is reminiscent of the German companies that were appointed as supervisors for French, Belgian and Dutch firms in the context of the Auftragsverlagerungen under the guiding idea of Speer’s ‘industrial self-responsibility’. The fact that it was private industry’s engineers who monitored production lightened the burden on the German administration (Dickert, 2014, pp. 123–125). Research has shown, however, that this opened up room for manoeuvre for the German firms to pursue goals that did not necessarily coincide with those of the regime (Homburg, 2005, p. 542).

2.5. Recruiting and supervising forced labour

Finally, I want to highlight two ways in which private industry directly contributed to OT’s regime of forced labour. It would have been impossible for the Third Reich to wage war for more than five years without the extensive use of forced labour. However, exploiting millions of Europeans – whether in Germany or in the occupied countries – took enormous administrative effort.

OT contractors could recruit local labour either on their own or by contracting local firms with their workforce. Some German firms, however, such as Breidt & Daub from Darmstadt, Berlin-based J. Feret, as well as Richard Plihal, J. Kellner and Gnom, had offices in the General Government where they recruited Polish workers for OT’s Einsatzgruppen all over Europe. Only some of the firms, such as Breidt & Daub, actually carried out construction works. Others functioned only as recruiting offices. They capitalised on the desperate situation of many Polish workers and frequently lured workers with false promises. For every worker sent to an Einsatzgruppe and its contractors, these firms received 100 Reichsmark (Denkiewicz-Szczepaniak, 1997).

The company Breidt & Daub gained a particularly important position in Norway in the second half of 1944. On 28 August 1944, OT instructed the firm to establish an office in the rooms of Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s headquarters in Oslo. This so-called Polenüberweisungsbüro was to keep track of the hours worked by Polish civilian workers on construction sites in Norway and organise the transfer of their wages to Poland. Thus, wage accounting for these OT workers was laid entirely in the hands of a private firm. Breidt & Daub’s employees in the office were paid by Einsatzgruppe Wiking.⁵¹

This arrangement was in place until January 1945, but does not seem to have worked smoothly. Workers and other OT contractors complained that the workers’ families in Poland had received payments only after a delay or not at all. In spring 1945, criminal proceedings were initiated against employees of Breidt & Daub, primarily because of currency offences. However, authorities also suspected that the company had embezzled money of Einsatzgruppe Wiking that should have been transferred to Poland.⁵²

On the construction sites, OT commissioned all of its German contractors with the supervision of forced labourers and with evaluation of their productivity. In what has been described as OT’s function as a ‘hinge’ (Scharnierfunktion) between military, industrial and racial-ideological aims, the Organisation integrated private businesses into the National Socialist system of oppressing and exploiting millions of forced labourers (Herbert, 1985/1999, p. 419). OT promised to solve one of the big dilemmas of the National Socialist war economy: the dilemma between the need for workers and the security concerns about the mass deployment of foreigners in German-controlled areas. Much of the system’s brutality resulted from the combination of an ideology that dehumanised especially Eastern European and Jewish forced labourers and a contract system that financially rewarded their ruthless exploitation.

The integration of private businesses was accompanied by an incessant ideological barrage that tried to commit the German construction workers to the aims of Nazi warfare. ‘In the state of war’, Fritz Todt remarked as early as in 1939, ‘every individual, worker, businessman, or OBL engineer, even if he does not wear a uniform, is no longer a civilian, but a soldier in his attitude’.⁵³ The firms’ foremen were to guide and supervise the daily routines before and after work. Workers had to gather, were counted and marched to the construction site together. The weekly payment of wages was also staged as a muster, at which the firm’s site manager was also supposed to announce new directives and read the latest Wehrmacht reports.

During the war, OT’s front area personnel section became an important institution with regard to the militarisation of work relations and the National Socialist ‘education’ of workers. Named the OT-Frontführung, it was led by so-called Frontführer. The task of these Frontführer, who were based in every OBL, was to educate the workforce on the conduct appropriate for wartime, establish routines and facilities on the construction sites with regard to safety, camouflage and alarms, conduct controls of the living quarters and keep an eye on the workers’ clothing and equipment (Seidler, 1987/1998, p. 148). Over the course of the war, the Frontführer below the OBL level were increasingly recruited from the site managers or regular German workforce of the private construction firms.⁵⁴ These men were supposed to distinguish themselves by a ‘soldierly spirit and commitment, social understanding and passion for people, National Socialist thinking and innate leadership qualities’.⁵⁵ Thus OT directly entrusted its contractors with the tasks of National Socialist indoctrination and security.

Subsequently, OT equipped more and more employees of construction firms with weapons. The armed supervision of forced labourers by German construction workers became a key element of OT’s mode of operation. This must be regarded as a crucial aspect of why the Organisation continued to grow in both power and size during the war. By integrating private business into its administration, OT made good on its promise to carry out vital projects with an army of forced labourers and at the same time free up state officials and soldiers.

Guidelines by Einsatzgruppe West in France illustrate what the Organisation expected of its German construction workers. If a forced labourer tried to escape, attacked a German or defied orders in any way, guards were to shoot if other measures failed. In the case of a coordinated attempt to escape, guns should be used immediately and ruthlessly. Every lenient guard was to be punished himself. The guidelines explicitly applied to all armed Germans on construction sites, including the companies’ foremen and workers.⁵⁶ Their superior position as Germans, at the top of the Nazi racial hierarchy, was enhanced by their supervisory function within OT. In June 1944, Einsatzgruppe West once more hammered home the role of German construction workers: ‘No German must be unarmed in his quarters and on the construction site […] Every OT man is more than ever responsible for holding the foreign workers together […] The rounding up of foreign workers is also necessary for reasons of security. Every runaway OT man can defect to the terrorists and reappear as an enemy’.⁵⁷ The literature has documented numerous examples of war crimes committed by engineers and workers of German OT contractors (Bunting, 1995; Kershaw, 2011, pp. 266–269; Kwiet, 2000). However, a systematic analysis of OT members’ involvement in war crimes, particularly during the German retreat, still remains one of the biggest desiderata in research on OT and its German contractors.

In the field of forced labour, too, German construction firms took over genuinely administrative tasks when commissioned to register and assess the productivity levels of various groups of forced labourers, especially of prisoners of war (POWs). OT needed an overview as this directly influenced contract prices. Once again, however, the state lacked the personnel to conduct independent surveys on labour productivity and was forced to rely on the information provided by private businesses. Unsurprisingly, the firms once again managed to profit from information asymmetries: they understated ‘their’ forced labourers’ productivity during contract negotiations, hence pushed through higher prices, and then increased their profit margin by urging the workers on (Gogl, 2020, pp. 295–308).

In the last year of the war, the firms became the drivers of the regime’s desperate efforts to get the utmost out of the forced labourers. In June 1944, the Wehrmacht agreed that parts of the warm meals for POWs in occupied Norway should be distributed depending on the POWs’ work performance. It was the Wehrmacht that gave out the rations in the camps, but it was the German foremen on the construction sites who were now registering the work performance during the day in a so-called performance book.⁵⁸ The literature on forced labour has repeatedly demonstrated the potentially devastating effects of performance-based food rations for POWs in all parts of the German war economy (Herbert, 1985/1999, pp. 319–320; Naasner, 1994, pp. 147–150). The decision on whether an already weakened POW would be punished for his lower performance lay with the employees of private German businesses. Their superior position thus held the potential to make them masters over life and death.

3. Conclusion

In this article, I have demonstrated how the Nazis in the field of construction resolved the discrepancy between their ambitions and their limited administrative capacities in occupied Europe by relying on industrial self-responsibility.

The question is, of course, what the financial consequences were and – quite literally – what was the price that the administration had to pay for this arrangement? Research on the construction industry in the Third Reich has shown that firms were able to profit massively from information asymmetries during the building boom of the 1930s and 1940s and that the state was unable to monitor the sector as thoroughly as would have been necessary to prevent rising prices and excess profits (Gogl, 2018, 2020; Streb, 2003).

However, this must not be understood as an institutional failure of OT or the German occupation administration in the field of construction procurement. It was the very nature of their modus operandi and a major reason why the OT gained more and more power vis-à-vis the construction offices of the Wehrmacht. Under a regime that wanted to see results as fast as possible – in the form of bunkers, airfields and gun emplacements – industrial self-responsibility was one of the means to achieve those results. Most remarkably, the example of OT and its contractors shows that the regime’s answer to an increasingly fierce total war was not less, but more industrial self-responsibility.

The article’s findings contribute to the recent debates on entrepreneurial freedom of action under the Nazi dictatorship. My findings suggest that OT’s integration of private business did not necessarily mean that the latter lost its autonomy and scope of action. Rather, it gave firms the opportunity to exert influence and defend their interests ‘from within’. Moreover, it seems necessary to factor in the regime’s control deficits in order to assess to what degree strict state regulations and potentially draconian penalties actually limited the firms’ room for manoeuvre in their day-to-day work. The wider implications of this put the focus not only on the presence of regulations, but on the state’s actual capacity to enforce them. In this way, we might gain a more nuanced picture of the nature of Nazi rule in occupied Europe.

The findings presented in this article point to two topics worth addressing in future research. First, there is the question of whether the outlined role of construction firms in occupied Europe stood out only in quantitative terms or whether construction played a role that differed from other industry branches in qualitative terms, too. Put differently: did firms from other sectors of the German industry also become an integral part of the German administration in occupied Europe? Secondly, I propose that the literature on local businesses’ industrial collaboration should consider the specific role of German firms more thoroughly than it has done so far – either as mediators between local business and the occupation regime or as the latter’s auxiliaries in enforcing German policy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the research project ‘In a World of Total War: Norway 1939–1945’, Prof. Jonas Scherner, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this article. I also want to thank the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for financially supporting the publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet: [grant number 256369].

Notes

1 Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BAK), N 1318/5, Speer Chronicle, 1944, fol. 58.

2 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (BArch), R 43/3511, Overview over the civil servants deployed in the German administration outside the Reich, spring 1943.

3 Riksarkivet Oslo (RAO), RAFA-2188/1/F3a-L0015; BArch, R 13-VIII/85, fol. 51–2.

4 RAO, RAFA-2188/2/Hh-L0002, file 90-III.

5 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5a-L0035, Letter Terboven, 20 September 1942.

6 This means before the incorporation of the Finnish OT units and the construction apparatus of the navy and the air force.

7 RAO, RAFA-2188/2/Hh-L0001, file 90-II, Einsatzgruppe West employment statistics, 25 January 1944.

8 See the various staffing plans from 1943 and 1944 in: RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5a-L0003.

9 BArch, R 50-I/189, fol. 79–81, Personnel of Einsatzgruppe Italien – Einsatz Seefalke on 4 January 1944, 6 January 1944.

10 BArch, R 50-I/408, Duty diary of Kurt Wiendieck, head of Einsatzgruppe West, OBL Holland, fol. 19.

11 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5a-L0003, Letter Köbele to Einsatzgruppe Wiking’s staff department, 25 February 1943.

12 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5a-L0004, file Personal A-K 1942–45, Letter Fröhler, Einsatzgruppe Wiking, to Ludwig Alter, OT-Einsatzgruppe VII, 4 October 1944.

13 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5a-L0046, Protocol by the Chefintendant beim Wehrmachtbefehlshaber Norwegen of a meeting between representatives of the Chefintendant, RK, OT and the Wehrmacht branches on 7 September 1942, 10 September 1942.

14 BAK, N 1318/5, Speer Chronicle, 1944, fol. 59–60.

15 RAO, RAFA-2188/2/He-L0004, file Dr. Klein Mappe II, Letter by Klein, Technical Department of the Reich Commissariat, to the Construction Industry Group, Berlin, 22 October 1941.

16 Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden (HHStAW), Abt. 485, 480, fol. 33–9, Minutes by the Supply Staff Wiking on a meeting on 17 March 1942 concerning the Wiking mission, Berlin, 18 March 1942.

17 RAO, S-3138/0001/Dg-L0419 – L0422, Trial against A/S Høyer-Ellefsen, Report by A. Woerner, O. Hachmann and K. Pfitzner (Sager & Woerner) on the company’s cooperation with Høyer-Ellefsen, 25 February 1947.

18 RAO, Oslo Politikammer, B-sak 3061, box 2, file 3, C. Otte, ‘Die Hauptabteilung Volkswirtschaft der Behörde des Reichskommissars für die besetzten norwegischen Gebiete’, unpublished report (Oslo 1945), 8–9.

19 BArch, R 13-VIII/86, Report on the situation in the West by Naschold, Paris liaison office of the Construction Industry Group, 22 July 1944, fol. 46.

20 The office of the Reich Price Commissioner (Reichskommissar für die Preisbildung) not only was supposed to monitor industry’s adherence to the state’s price regulations, but was supposed to participate in the formation of prices, too.

21 On the negotiations, see: BArch, R 13-VIII/264.

22 BArch, R 13-VIII/264, Letter Construction Industry Group to G. Opitz, 16 January 1942.

23 The drafts can be found in BArch, R 13-VIII/264. A contract with the attached tables can be found in RAO, RAFA-2188/2/Haa-L0034.

24 BArch, R 13-VIII/265, Note by Thierbach, Oslo liaison office of the Construction Industry Group, 8 September 1942, and letter Thierbach to Riedel, Construction Industry Group, 9 September 1942.

25 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E1l-L0044, Copy of a note on a meeting between representatives of Einsatzgruppe Wiking, the Construction Industry Group, the Reich Association of the Building Handwork Guilds and of the Ed. Züblin AG on 20 October 1942 in Berlin, 13 November 1942.

26 BArch, R 13-VIII/265, Draft of the letter from Thierbach to construction firms regarding the service and price specifications for the efficiency-output contract in Norway, 31 October 1942; ibid.: Note by Thierbach regarding the draft of price and service specifications for the new efficiency-output contracts in Norway, 3 November 1942.

27 Cf. the different drafts of the efficiency-output contract and the industry’s modifications between early January 1943 and the version of 6 February 1943 in: RAO, RAFA-2188/1/F3a-L0011, file Leistungsvertrag.

28 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/F3a-L0011, file Leistungsvertrag, Report by Klumpp on the transition to the efficiency-output contract in Norway, 29 October 1943.

29 In Italy, too, it was made clear that there was no legal basis for OBLs to force firms into signing a certain type of contract: BArch, R 13-VIII/85, fol. 45.

30 Corporate Archive of the Bilfinger AS, Mannheim (hereafter Bilfinger Archive), A 367.

31 BArch, R 13-VIII/86, fol. 65, Report on the situation in the West by the head of the liaison office in Paris, Naschold, 5 July 1944.

32 Ibid.

33 BArch, R 2301/3007, Memorandum of the President of the German Court of Audit on the Reich budget account for the budget year 1939, 19 April 1943, fol. 260.

34 RAO, RAFA-2174/Ef-L0001, file 7, Letter Thote, OBL West of the Reich Commissariat, to the Department of Technology in Oslo, 7 February 1942.

35 BArch, R 13-VIII/264, Second report by Thierbach, Oslo liaison office of the Construction Industry Group, 18 January 1942, 5.

36 Bilfinger Archive, A 367, Minutes of a meeting between representatives of the construction industry, OT and Reich Price Commissioner on 24 June 1942 in Berlin, 25 June 1942.

37 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/F3a-L0011, Report by Klumpp, Oslo liaison office of the German building trades, 29 October 1943.

38 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/G2b-L0023, Two notes by Oberbau-Inspektor Kulike on price negotiations in Alta, 11 October 1943 and 28 December 1943.

39 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5a-L0007, Circular by Einsatzgruppe West to all OBLs and firms, 19 February 1943.

40 BArch, R 50-I/293, fol. 13, 43–4.

41 OT-arkiv, Department of Historical Studies, Norwegian University for Science and Technology (hereafter OT-arkiv), W. Henne, ‘Die Organisation Todt in Norwegen: Aufgabe, Organisation, Art der Baudurchführung mit aufgetretenen Schwierigkeiten, Leistungen’, unpublished manuscript (Oslo 1945), pt. II, 4.

42 At IG Farben’s Buna-Werke in Schkopau, engineers were sworn in to control invoices on behalf of OT: Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Abt. Merseburg, I 528, Nr. 512.

43 Archiv des Instituts für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt/Main, W1-2/298, Draft of Philipp Holzmann’s anniversary Festschrift by Hans Meyer-Heinrich, 135.

44 See for example the list of delegates as of May 1943 in RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5a-L0009, Circular no. 18 by the Oslo liaison office of the German building trades, 17 May 1943.

45 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/F3a-L0009, file Vertrauensmänner, Letter Klumpp to Dipl. Ing. Schneider, Wayss & Freytag, on the occasion of Schneider’s appointment as Delegate for Pricing in the vicinity of OBL Bergen, 22 December 1944.

46 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/F3a-L0011, file Leistungsvertrag, Report by Klumpp on the transition to the efficiency-output contract in Norway, 29 October 1943.

47 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5f-L0005.

48 Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep. 250-05-13, Nr. 149, Letter by Allesch, Allgemeine Baugesellschaft Lorenz, Lunde construction site, to the firm’s headquarters in Berlin, 29 October 1944.

49 BArch, R 50-I/140, fol. 38.

50 BArch, R 13-VIII/85, Letter by Haufe, Construction Industry Group, to Director Schaipp, Sager & Woerner, 18 March 1944.

51 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5f-L0005, file Durchschriften ot/v/254, Einsatzgruppe Wiking to all Einsätze and OBL, 28 August 1944.

52 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E5f-L0005, file Durchschriften ot/v/254 [forts.], Einsatzgruppe Wiking to Amt Bau-OT, 25 March 1945.

53 BArch, NS 26/1188, fol. 221–2, General Inspector for German Roads to all OBLs and officers of OT, 4 September 1939.

54 OT-arkiv, W.Henne ‘Die Organisation Todt in Norwegen’, pt. III, 32.

55 BArch, R 50-I/226, Guidelines for the Frontführer in the OT construction units (construction firms) of Einsatzgruppe West, 24 December 1943.

56 BArch, R 50-I/224, Special instructions for guards by Einsatzgruppe West, 15 March 1944.

57 BArch, R 50-I/304, Political information no. 4 of the front area personnel section of Einsatzgruppe West, 25 June 1944.

58 RAO, RAFA-2188/1/E1m-L0047.