Fritz Todt

Fritz Todt (1891 to 1942) was a German construction engineer who trained in Munich and Karlsruhe and earned a doctorate in engineering in 1932 with a thesis on defects in tarmac and asphalt road surfaces. A member of the Nazi Party from 1922, he was appointed Inspector General for German Roadways in July 1933 and oversaw construction of the Reichsautobahn network, the German motorway system that was a major road engineering programme of the 1930s and was also intended to speed military transport. He later founded Organisation Todt, a construction body that built the Westwall and, later, the Atlantic Wall using large numbers of forced laborers, and in 1940 became Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions. He died in an aircraft crash near Rastenburg in February 1942 and was succeeded by Albert Speer. His place in transport history rests on the autobahns, and his wider record cannot be separated from the forced labor and Nazi state projects that his organization carried out.