I was thinking in the Interwar period, where actual workers were building them, not prisoners.
Hitler is a train enthusiast
- Thread starter tigercat
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marathag
Banned
Its still all Organization Todt, since Fritz Todt was head inspector of German Railways, and used Conscripted labor to build the Autobahn, but wouldn't be named such til after he died.
Started with Gastarbeitnehmer, 'Guest Workers' when he didn't have enough younger German Male Citizens, with those not in the Military required to 'donate' six months of Service to the State from 1935 onwards to build the Autobahn and 1938 military projects the the Reich Labor Service.
Many didn't have a choice early on, as the 'Unzuverlässige Elemente' unreliable elements, like prisoners, homeless, Communists, political dissidents and such filled the ranks
Personaly I believe losing WWII as quick as possible and getting rid of the nazis would be the best for the Germans.
Sorry I know. Bad joke. Still does not make it any less true.
Best time for that would be when the German army moved into the Rhineland on 7th March 1936.
I would disagree (and so does Mierzjewski) . The head of DRB did shift, but Dorpmuller had the reins post 1941. Ganzenmuller had it before. Todt never had any authority over the DRB. Perhaps he had this in terms of allocations of construction resources.
In terms of operational matters, Todt had nothing to do with the DRB.
Railroad enthhusiast Hitler builds, or rather tries to build*, the Brietspurbahn network, which serves to waste enormous quantities of resources needed for the war effort on an ultimately useless monument to megalomania. Germany therefore loses the war even more rapidly than in OTL.
* I have a peculiar suspicion that in the end all it would have ammounted to would be about twenty kilometers of track, one enginehouse, one or two locomotives, (probably the switcher as shown below) and a score of cars.
* I have a peculiar suspicion that in the end all it would have ammounted to would be about twenty kilometers of track, one enginehouse, one or two locomotives, (probably the switcher as shown below) and a score of cars.
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marathag
Banned
Hitler gave Todt authority at the Reich Transport Ministry level, even over the Minister himself, for allocation of resources.
That's what I said...resources? Yes. Operationally? No.
The Reichsbahn's planning for the re-purposing of the existing engineering was wholly inadequate; this only became apparent once they were already "balls deep" into the campaign.
You have to look at this from the perspective of a German railroad engineer of the period.
They were absolutely gobsmacked by the shoddy engineering of the extant Soviet infrastructure.
The bridges that were captured intact were so poorly built (in many cases) that heavily loaded trains had to decelerate to as little as 10 Km/h to safely cross them without inducing resonant stresses on them.
It all looks good on paper...once you get on the site and assess what you're dealing with? Entirely different matter.
Where Todt's authority bit hard was once the German Railroad engineers had appraised the situation and began placing demands for additional labor and materials to address the problems they were finding themselves faced with in situ.
In this regard? Dr. Todt certainly is a factor in the overall picture.
If your inference was in respect to this aspect? I concur.
Thoughts?
Respectfully, Ron
What impacts would this have on the wider perception of the Nazis?
The Nazis deliberately associated themselves with dynamic new technologies like the automobile, the plane or the cinema and radio.
If Hitler is a train enthusiast, it detracts from this vigorous modern image.
The Nazis deliberately associated themselves with dynamic new technologies like the automobile, the plane or the cinema and radio.
If Hitler is a train enthusiast, it detracts from this vigorous modern image.
The vision I've always had is of a propaganda film centered on shipping a new P.1000 by Breitspurbahn to some fortified settlement deep in Russia.
On that note of whether railways could be given the right modernist spin, American streamliners aside, consider that there was pre-war work done on Shinkansen in Japan. Bullet trains thirty years early in Autobahn medians anyone?
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Deleted member 96212
A lot of people correlate "train enthusiast" with "cringey autist", this whole thing would make the usual crowd push the "Hitler was autistic" theory a lot harder.
I want to make it clear that none of this is how I personally feel. It's just how some would push things.
Automobiles in Germany were not very dynamic without fuel or rubber.
It was only in the 1950s that Autobahns start to be used anywhere near their capacity.
VW plant did come in useful for making Kubelwagens during the war.
