"This book is a welcome addition to the slim historiography of an insufficiently researched organization. It is the first scholarly book-length account of Organisation Todt in English . While Builders of the Third Reich is not written expressly for historians of technology and scholars of infrastructure, its conclusions offer many opportunities for comparative and general analyses. The book examines infrastructure serving the Nazi dictatorship, but its findings are useful for research on infrastructures, violence, and modern management in general." - Technology & Culture "Drawing on work about Nazi building and infrastructure and the role of these projects in the expansion of the Reich together with work on perpetrators, Dick makes a valuable contribution to the evolving discourse on Hannah Arendt's thesis of the 'banality of evil' and of 'ordinary men' who were 'just following orders.'" - Canadian Slavonic Papers "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.