Incisive and original, this remarkable account explores what British intelligence regarded as the “most impressive building programme since Roman times.” The master builders of the Third Reich constructed the motorways, fortifications, and mines of the racial state with the axioms of the racial state. Charles Dick explains how engineers and architects drove hundreds of thousands of slaves as they executed their blueprints. With great authority, he tells us the story of both groups, the drivers and the slaves, who inhabited this vast, terrifying construction site in twentieth-century Germany.

Peter Fritzsche, Professor of History, University of Illinois, USA

Builders of the Third Reich offers the first sustained scholarly analysis of the Organisation Todt. Assiduously researched and carefully argued, the book studies Nazi forced labour projects from the Balkans to the Arctic Circle. Dick's sensitive analysis of life and death at Organisation Todt worksites makes an important and original contribution to scholarship on forced labour in occupied Europe.

Christopher Dillon, Senior Lecturer in Modern German History, King's College London, UK