Reichsautobahn
The Reichsautobahn system was the beginning of the German autobahns under Nazi Germany. There had been previous plans for controlled-access highways in Germany under the Weimar Republic, and two had been constructed, but work had yet to start on long-distance highways. After previously opposing plans for a highway network, the Nazis embraced them after coming to power and presented the project as Hitler's own idea. They were termed "The Fuehrer's roads" and presented as a major contribution to the reduction of unemployment. Other reasons for the project included enabling Germans to explore and appreciate their country, and there was a strong aesthetic element to the execution of the project under the Third Reich; military applications, although to a lesser extent than has often been thought; a permanent monument to the Third Reich, often compared to the pyramids; and general promotion of motoring as a modernization that in itself had military applications.
Hitler turned the first sod on 23 September 1933, at Frankfurt, and work officially began simultaneously at multiple sites throughout the Reich the following spring. The first finished stretch, between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, opened on 19 May 1935, and the first were completed on 23 September 1936. After the annexation of Austria, the planned network was expanded to include the Ostmark, and a second soil-breaking ceremony for the first Reichsautobahn on formerly Austrian territory took place near Salzburg on 7 April 1938. When work ceased in 1941 because of World War II, had been completed.
History
Background
Two controlled-access highways had been built prior to the Nazi era. The long AVUS was built in Berlin starting in 1913. The corporation to build it was organized in 1909, and construction continued during World War I using prisoners of war, but it was not completed and officially opened until 1921. This was originally intended as a race track and was used for testing vehicles and road surfaces, but it had many of the characteristics of the later Reichsautobahn and served as a model for Piero Puricelli's 1924 autostrada between Milan and the northern Italian lakes, the first true motorway in the world. In 1929–32, a highway some long that also resembled the Reichsautobahn except for the lack of a median strip was built between Cologne and Bonn using unemployed labor; on the basis of this, the then Lord Mayor of Cologne and chairman of the provincial committee for autostraßen, Konrad Adenauer, could be credited as having built an autobahn before Hitler. The "Opladen bypass" between Cologne and Düsseldorf was also built in 1931–33. Adenauer also began construction of a ring road encircling Cologne, which was more in accord with demand at the time. According to a 1936–37 traffic survey, the highest road traffic was still around the major cities.Corporations were also formed and plans drawn up for motorized highways between Mannheim and Heidelberg, between Munich and Berlin via Leipzig, between Munich and Lake Starnberg, between Leipzig and Halle, and between Cologne and Aachen, in addition to plans for networks totaling or in length. In 1930 the Ministry of Transportation became involved in trying to establish guidelines for the building of a highway network. Most notably, the organization known as HaFraBa or HAFRABA, was founded in 1926 at the instigation of, who had been inspired by the Italian highways, and projected a north–south highway to be expanded into a network. Detailed engineering specifications were prepared, bound in 70 volumes, and this planning would form the basis of the Reichsautobahn network.
However, HAFRABA was never able to surmount the logistical problems of building a highway through many different jurisdictions, or the funding problems of such a large undertaking. Moreover, legislators condemned it as a luxury project that would benefit only the few wealthy enough to own cars; the Nazi Party was against public spending on highways for this reason, as were the Communists and the Reichsbahn, the German national railroad, which feared highways would take some of its freight business. Even the association of German car manufacturers did not support highway projects; they were concerned that long-distance driving would overtax their vehicles.
Planning and construction
After the Nazis came to power at the end of January 1933, their position changed rapidly. Fritz Todt produced a report arguing for the building of highways, Straßenbau und Straßenverwaltung, known as the "Brown Report", and in a speech at the Berlin Motor Show on 11 February, Hitler presented it as a necessity and as the future measure of a people, as railroads had been in the past. A law establishing the Reichsautobahn project under that name was passed on 27 June 1933, and the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen was founded on 25 August as a subsidiary of the Reichsbahn, thereby removing its objections. Todt was named Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straßenwesen on 30 June. HAFRABA and other organizations were folded into the planning arm, known as GEZUVOR. The Chairman of the Board of HAFRABA, Dr. Ludwig Landmann, the Mayor of Frankfurt, was Jewish, which provided the Nazis with a reason to take it over. The autobahn was presented to the German public as Hitler's idea: he was represented as having sketched out the future network of highways while in Landsberg Prison in 1924. They were to be "the Führer's roads", a myth promoted by Todt himself, who coined the phrase and warned close associates not to "in any way the impression arise that I built the autobahns. They are to be reckoned as simply and solely the Führer's roads." Hof, an enthusiastic party member, resigned on 22 December 1934; the editor of the HAFRABA magazine, Kurt Kaftan, had caused a political problem by presenting Hof as the originator of the idea, or jointly responsible for it with Hitler. The overlapping responsibilities of the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen and of Todt's office exemplified the growth of central authorities in the Third Reich and inevitably led to conflicts, but only on 1 January 1941 was the Gesellschaft Reichsautobahnen removed from the Reichsbahn and placed directly under Todt.On 5 August 1933, a radio play by Peter Hagen and Hans Jürgen Nierenz, Wir bauen eine Straße, was broadcast throughout the Reich. On 23 September 1933, the first 720 unemployed marched to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, where they were ceremonially invested with shovels as Reichsautobahn workers, then from there accompanied by SA men, marched behind Todt and Jakob Sprenger, the Reichsstatthalter of Hesse, to the bank of the Main. There after further speeches, Hitler was to inaugurate work on the autobahn system with the first ceremonial shoveling of dirt to form the base of an embankment. However, as Todt described the scene in an illustrated album published in 1935, "again and again his shovel plunged into the mound . This was no symbolic shoveling; this was real construction work!" Two of the workers "sprang ... to help him", and they worked "until the mound had been dealt with in an orderly fashion and ... the first drops of sweat were dripping from his brow onto the earth." The image of Hitler shoveling was used many times in propaganda, including superimposed on the workers' march in Heinrich Hoffmann's poster urging Germans to ratify the Nazi government in the November 1933 Reichstag election. The location was marked with a park and a commemorative stone.
Preparatory work at several sites was done over the following winter, but full-scale construction officially began on 21 March 1934, as the showpiece of the opening of the Arbeitsschlacht, which also included construction of dams and residences and agricultural work. Autobahn work sites had been established at 22 locations, governed by 9 regional work divisions, distributed throughout the Reich for maximum public visibility, and work was ceremonially initiated at 15 of the sites. At Unterhaching, Hitler made a short speech ending with the command, "Fanget an!" This was broadcast nationwide on the radio, after which his representatives opened work with the first shoveling of dirt at the other 14 locations: Hermann Göring at Finowfurth near Berlin, for example. A monument in the highway median at Unterhaching later commemorated the event: it took the form of a cylinder inscribed with Hitler's command and the date and surmounted by shovels in the manner of weapons on a military monument. 15,000 workers were now engaged; however, at several of the work sites, the men were immediately sent home because mechanized excavations and other preparation had to be done first. According to a Sopade report in April–May 1934, only 6,000 workers on a stretch between Frankfurt and Heidelberg and 700 on a stretch between Munich and the border were actually active. GEZUVOR presented its 788 volumes of plans to Todt on 1 June 1934.
Despite initial promises that the first segment would open in September 1934, to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the ground-breaking and with the 7th International Road Congress, this did not happen until 19 May 1935, when the stretch between Frankfurt and Darmstadt was opened. Hitler rewarded Todt with a three-axle Mercedes-Benz touring car. Two further segments opened that year, a total of. The celebration of the first took place on 27 September 1936 at Breslau, five segments being opened to traffic that day. were completed by the end of 1937, and by the end of 1938, when the planned network was also extended from to after the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. A second inaugural ceremony for the first autobahn construction on formerly Austrian soil took place on 7 April 1938, with Hitler shoveling dirt into a decorated dumpster near Salzburg, and on 1 December 1938, Rudolf Hess broke ground at Eger for a projected "transit autobahn" from Breslau to Vienna via Brünn. However, the emphasis on east–west connections and on attracting foreign tourists and promoting automobile touring meant that the completed sections did not constitute a useful network for freight transportation until 1937. In 1938, construction priorities shifted with the preparation for war. Todt was given responsibility for building the Westwall, and in 1939 only were added to the Reichsautobahn. In addition, Hitler ordered important sections of the autobahns to be widened, from to and ultimately to, which further diverted resources from building new sections.
Working conditions were hard and the pay very low, because it was based on the lowest local wage and unlike unemployment payments did not include an allowance for living expenses. There was also no payment until winter 1938 for bad weather days when work could not take place. Workers were initially housed in barracks, barns, industrial buildings, and tents, and complained about the work, the conditions, and the pay. On 18 October 1934, the workers on the Hamburg-Bremen segment of the autobahn at Gyhum went on strike; the 141 who could not be talked into resuming work were transported to Berlin for interrogation by the Gestapo. To avoid a recurrence of such problems, a policy was put in place of investigating men for political reliability before they were hired for work on the autobahn, access to the workers' camps was restricted, a surveillance network was instituted in which the Gestapo participated increasingly, and the few SA members among the workers were organized into Baustürme that provided both example and intimidation at work sites. There were nonetheless several further strikes in 1935, and increasing numbers of fires were ascribed to sabotage by disgruntled workers. Todt attempted to make worker housing into "worthy lodgings", and had camps specially built, beginning with a model camp at Werbellin on the Berlin-Stettin autobahn that was opened in December 1934. Kraft durch Freude entertainment, books, and propaganda movies were also provided from that point on. One worker wrote in 1975 of the camp where he had lived in 1937 that he would still describe the living conditions as "absolutely model". However, conditions remained very poor. Work sites were often remote, as far as two hours' march from the camp, and had no access to food or water. The pressure on the workers was considerable, especially after Hitler publicly alluded in 1937 to the objective of completing a year. After mid-1936, workdays lasting 11 to 12 hours were the norm. There was a high incidence of back injuries to men who were unaccustomed to physical work after long unemployment and in many cases undernourished. Numerous accidents occurred, some fatal, due to the rapid pace of work, exhaustion, and unfamiliarity with heavy machinery; after the first five years, one worker died per completed.
As the economy improved and the rearmament effort accelerated, it became impossible to find enough workers; they were for a while brought in from the big cities where unemployment remained highest, primarily Hamburg and Berlin, but in 1937 full employment was achieved, and armaments factories offered far superior pay and working conditions. The policy of minimizing the use of machinery was reversed and pay was increased, those unemployed who refused assignment to the autobahn were punished by suspension of benefits for up to 12 weeks, and after the annexation of Austria and of the Sudetenland, workers from there were almost immediately put to work on the autobahn, but increasingly the project used forced labor of various kinds. Several times, up to 1,400 youths fulfilling their obligation to work through the Reichsarbeitsdienst were used as autobahn workers, mostly doing simple hard labor, in November 1937, women and school-age children were put to work at a site in Silesia, and soon after, 17 and 18-year-olds in Hanover. Eventually, the inmates of re-education camps—the "work-shy", Social Democrats and Communists—constituted the majority of Reichsautobahn workers, and during the war increasing numbers of prisoners of war were used. The war also removed the main obstacle to using prison inmates and Jews from the concentration camps, that foreign visitors would see the necessary armed guards and form a bad impression; previously they had been used only at remote locations such as quarries. In October 1939 an SS re-education camp was built at Hinzert that housed recalcitrant workers on the autobahn as well as the Westwall; in all, 50 forced labor camps were established for Reichsautobahn workers, and transferred to regular SS use when construction stopped. In fall 1940, an internal report counted approximately 62,600 workers engaged on the autobahn, of whom approximately 21,900 were contract workers, 300 women, 28,600 prisoners including prisoners of war, 1,100 Poles, 5,700 Czechs, and 4,700 other foreigners.
The Reichsautobahn network as it was ultimately conceived was to extend into most of the planned Lebensraum in the conquered territories; along with a trio of eastward and southward extensions of the extreme broad-gauge Breitspurbahn rail system, the highways were intended to provide the main connections for the "settlement strings" of German immigrant Wehrbauer communities to be located in conquered Soviet territory. The addition of Austria to the Reich in 1938 resulted in an extension of the previously Vienna-centered road system and major planning and construction efforts in the Alpine regions. The West Autobahn between Vienna and Salzburg was started within weeks with much publicity, but only a few kilometers around Salzburg were finished by 1942.