Oganisation Todt.

Machemer, Heinrich

Schwarz, Richard

1941

Der Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straẞwessen Organisation Todt

Bogdan Gisevius

Berlin

Separate Map

55

74

6,000,000

Europe

World War II

Military

Der Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straẞwessen Organisation Todt / Zentrale Kraftstoff- Einsatz / Büro Dr. Machemer Berlin / Tankstellennetz Stand 1. November 1941 / Maẞtab 1:6000000. [The General Inspector for German Roadways, Organization Todt / Central Fuel Deployment / Office of Dr. Machemer, Berlin / Petrol Station Network as of November 1, 1941 / Scale 1: 6000000].

10826.000

Oganisation Todt.

Machemer, Heinrich

Schwarz, Richard

1941

Der Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straẞwessen Organisation Todt / Zentrale Kraftstoff- Einsatz / Büro Dr. Machemer Berlin / Tankstellennetz Stand 1. November 1941 / Maẞtab 1:6000000. [The General Inspector for German Roadways, Organization Todt / Central Fuel Deployment / Office of Dr. Machemer, Berlin / Petrol Station Network as of November 1, 1941 / Scale 1: 6000000].

"A seemingly unrecorded ‘classified’ map showcasing the major transport routes for Nazi armoured vehicles and tanks, plus the locations of Wehrmacht gas stations, oil storage depots and garages across the entire European battle theatre, made during the height of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, Germany’s attempt to mount a ‘blitzkrieg’ invasion of Soviet Europe; the map made for Organisation Todt, the Third Reich’s colossal infrastructure and armaments enterprise, predicated upon a plan devised by the logistics expert Dr. Heinrich Machemer, drafted by the cartographer Richard Schwarz and published in Berlin by the firm of Bogdan Gisevius. This fascinating, seemingly unrecorded ‘classified’ map depicts the main transportation routes of the Nazi German forces throughout the European war theatre, plus the vast network of gas stations, fuel depots and garages that sustained their thousands of armoured vehicles and tanks, as they existed at the beginning of November 1941, during the height of Operation Barbarossa, the Third Reich’s attempt at the lightning conquest of the European USSR. The map was made for the Organisation Todt (OT), the massive joint governmental-corporate enterprise that was responsible for all aspects of the Third Reich’s military-industrial complex. The transport and fuel distribution network showcased on the map follows the elaborate designs of Dr. Heinrich Machemer, a senior OT official and logistics expert, while the map was drafted by the cartographer Richard Schwarz and published by the Berlin firm of Bogdan Gisevius. Petroleum, and easy, seamless access to it, for tanks and armoured vehicles were key factors behind the Wehrmacht’s early success in World War II. The OT ensured that seminal transport routes were always well maintained, while refuelling and repair facilities were located at the right places to ensure that military traffic could maximize its progress. The transport-fuel distribution network proved its value during the Nazi ‘Blitzkrieg’ invasion of France and the Low Countries in May-June 1940, when German tanks and vehicles literally rolled over hundreds of kilometres enemy territory in only a matter of days, as well as the early period of the Operation Barbarossa. The map’s geographic scope extends from the tip of Brittany, in the west, all the way east across Europe, to the Urals (the gateway to Asia), and from the northern tip of Norway down to the middle Balkans, in the south. The ‘Zeichenenerklärung’ [Explanation of Symbols], below the title, upper right, provides the symbols employed to identify the key features of the transport-fuel distribution system: ‘T = ‘Tankstelle’ [Gas Stations]; ‘L = ‘Tanklager’ [Petroleum Storage Depots]; ‘W = ‘Werkstatt-Reparaturstützpunkt’ [Workshops-Garages]; while the vast web of red lines connecting the cities and fuel/repair facilities represents ‘Hauptdurchgangsstraẞnen u. Autobahnen’ [Main Thoroughfares and Expressways]. The core of the transport-fuel deployment system was in Germany itself, with its incredibly well-developed autobahn network, featuring the world’s first modern expressways, along with numerous oil refineries, stations and depots. The Nazi’s network is then shown to extend to the west, with an especially intense concentration of oil and tank/vehicle repair facilities in northern France and Belgium, which were both a legacy of the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg conquest of those lands, as well as Germany’s ongoing imperative to defend the English Channel coasts from possible British invasion. The map extends the transport-fuel distribution network’s coverage south as far as Belgrade, as Yugoslavia had fallen to the Nazis in April 1941. Notably, the map extends the network eastward, through occupied Poland and deep into the USSR. On June 22, 1941, only little over four months before the present map was made, the Wehrmacht mounted a massive blitzkrieg invasion of Russia and Ukraine. While the Nazis failed to take Leningrad (with would be besieged for 872 days before the Germans were driven off), their tanks and armoured vehicles rumbled over the Eastern European Plains. By the beginning of November 1941, at the point depicted upon the present map, the Germans were only 87 km from Moscow and had taken the western half of Ukraine. While their progress was, when viewed in isolation, impressive, the vast distances involved and the onset of the Russian winter began to severely test the Organisation Todt’s supply chains, which came to experience their first broken links. Indeed, as future events proved, the Nazis overextended themselves in Russia, and fortunately for the world, this would ultimately lead the fall of the Third Reich. The present map was commissioned by Organisation Todt to showcase the transport-fuel distribution system, as developed by Dr. Machemer, when it was near its maximal extent, at the beginning of November 1941. The map would have been intended as a strategic aid for senior Wehrmacht officers and OT logistics planners, especially with regards to the ongoing invasion of the USSR. In particular the map would have been of interest to those directing the Panzer divisions, the core of the Nazi’s land operations, as tanks required frequent refuelling and expert maintenance. The map was considered to be highly sensitive and bears the note ‘Nur für den Dienstgebrauch!’ [For official use only!] and would have been issued in only a very small print run for the exclusive use of select, authorized personnel. Naturally, the Wehrmacht would not want the Allies to obtain an example. It was normal for Third Reich entities, such as the OT, to commission private firms to provide them with raw material, services, manufactured goods and maps; this was in the spirit of their corporatist agenda. Machemer’s original manuscript plan would have been professionally projected onto a map of Europe by Richard Schwarz, a Berlin mapmaker, active roughly between 1908 and 1960, who otherwise specialized in maps of the German capital and its environs. The map was published by the old Berlin firm of the Bogdan Gisevius Lithographische Anstalt und Steindruckerei, founded in 1875. It is worth noting that while the map shows the situation on the ground as of November 1, 1941, the map was printed in December 1941, as revealed by the appearance of the printer’s slug ‘XII 41’ in the lower left margin. The Map: Seemingly Unrecorded The present map is seemingly unrecorded; we cannot trace a reference to the map anywhere, let alone the location of another example. The map would have been made in only very small print run for select official use, while examples would have perished in the field leading to a low survival rate. Oil, Blitzkrieg and Operation Barbarossa Oil, and the manner in which it was distributed and employed, as well as access to oil fields, was absolutely central to the Nazis’ wartime agenda. The Third Reich’s stunning success during the first two years of the World War II was largely due to their successful prosecution of Blitzkrieg (‘Lightning War’), by which massive forces of tanks and armoured vehicles moved with great speed and precision to ruthlessly take out enemy target, after enemy target before the opposition had time to respond, with the goal of overwhelming entire countries, or at least large coherent theatres. This merciless form of war relied upon a nearly perfect marshalling and distribution of resources, with a particular emphasis on oil distribution, as well as the ability to rapidly repair vehicles in the field. All activities of the army had to be perfectly choreographed, and any mistakes in organization or delays in one place could cause ripple effects that could upset an entire campaign. Due to its extreme discipline and immense resources, the Wehrmacht was perfectly suited to Blitzkrieg, at least until Germany over-extended itself on the frozen plains of Russia. On the eve of World War II, the Third Reich had developed the world’s greatest military-industrial complex. While the rest of the world slumbered in the Great Depression, Germany’s massive civilian industrial conglomerates retooled their expertise for military applications in a ‘corporatist’ union with the new Nazi state. One of the most conspicuous achievements of this arrangement was the Autobahn network, the world’s first modern expressways that crisscrossed Germany. Fritz Todt (1891 - 1942), a civil engineer, and from 1933 the Generalinspektor für das deutsche Straßenwesen (General Inspector of German Roadways), took the lead in forging the Third Reich military-industrial complex. With Hitler’s support, in 1938, Todt rolled all of Germany’s private and public industrial resources under the administrative umbrella of the Organisation Todt (OT), which became the world’s largest manufacturing, construction and logistics enterprise. Initially, the OT could rely upon 1.75 million conscripted German labourers (who served in lieu of military service), but during wartime the OT enslaved over a million people in occupied territories and in concentration camps, often in barbarously cruel conditions. The OT employed cutting edge technology and ruthless discipline and efficiency to its operations. On the eve of the war, it was able to produce astounding amounts of aircraft, tanks, armoured vehicles, weapons and ammunition, and was able to marshal these resources with incredible foresight and skill. In 1940, Todt was made the Reichminister für Bewaffnung und Munition (Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions), so formalizing his role in charge of all elements of military production. The fuel deployment network that is the focus of the present map was devised by Dr. Heinrich Machemer, a senior official at the Orgnanisation Todt. Long before the war, Machemer was a prominent engineer and frequent contributor to the leading trade magazine Der deutsche Baumeister (The German Builder). His book, co-authored with Otto Reismann, Kampf um Treibstoff. Motorisierung, eine Schicksalsfrage Deutschlands; Treibstoffversorgung, die Schicksalsfrage der Motorisierung (Fight for Fuel: Motorization, a Question of Fate for Germany; Fuel Supply, the Crucial Question of Motorization) (Frankfurt am Main, 1936), advanced that a rapid and seamless system for delivering sufficient petroleum to tanks and armoured vehicles at the battle front would be a determinative factor in the next generation of warfare. Machemer’s ideas were so well conceived that in the early days of World War II, the OT placed him in charge of developing the Wehrmacht’s fuel distribution system. The OT geared the production and distribution of their martial resources towards supporting Blitztkrieg operations. That the Nazis were able to complete their invasion of France and the Low Countries in only 46 days (from May 10 to June 25, 1940) was in large part due to OT’s amazing efficiency (as well as their brutal exploitation of slave labour) in supporting a mechanized, rapidly moving army. However, this success seemed to have made both Hitler and the OT planners supremely overconfident when mounting a far more ambitious endeavour - the invasion of the Soviet Union. Germany had two principal motivations for invading the USSR; one was murderous and ideological, the other was quite practical. First, Hitler’s Generalplan Ost envisaged the Third Reich taking over all of the Soviet Union as far east as the Ural Mountains, upon which the local peoples would either be killed, exiled or ‘Germanized’. These lands would then be annexed to Germany to create a massive tract of ‘lebensraum’ (living space) for the ‘master race’, extending from Alsace to the gates of Asia. Second, while Germany already had access to Romania’s oil fields, the its fuel supply was always tight, at least compared to Britain, which could (albeit with difficulty) ship in oil from its overseas empire which possessed unlimited reserves. While the Wehrmacht had enough oil reserves to sustain its operations until the winter of 1941-42, it needed a massive new source of petroleum if it was to continue its activities, at least at its established ambitious scope and pace. Thus, the Third Reich’s plan was to seize the Baku oil fields in Soviet Azerbaijan, the achievement of which would easily solve their petroleum problem. Germany ripped up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), the Soviet-German alliance of convenience that had governed their relations for the first two years of the war, and on June 22, 1941 mounted Operation Barbarossa, the full-scale invasion of the European USSR. The Wehrmacht juggernaut was the largest military campaign in world history, involving 4 million Axis troops, over 3,500 tanks (organized into 19 Panzer divisions), 600,000 vehicles and 4,000 aircraft. It was planned as a Bliztkrieg operation that would rely on utterly and rapidly overwhelming the Soviets, with the objective of conquering the entire country west of the ‘A-A line’, a meridian that ran from Archangel down to Astrakhan (so assuming the conquest of Leningrad, Moscow, all of Ukraine and the Baku oil fields) by the winter of 1941-42. This was an incredibly ambitious goal, but both Hitler and the Organisation Todt planners believed that, on the back of their experience in France, this was quite achievable. That being said, many top German generals privately cautioned against the invasion, anticipating what was to transpire. In the summer and early autumn of 1941, while the Soviets put up a fight (and Leningrad amazingly managed to avoid capture), Operation Barbarossa went relatively well. The OT’s logistical planning, as showcased on the present map held strong, as the tanks and armoured vehicles made good progress. Yet, by September 1941, some cracks started to develop in the Nazi designs. The vast distances involved, combined with determined Soviet resistance wore down the German advance. The Russian and Ukrainian plains turned rainy and muddy, slowing the progress of the tanks and other vehicles, as the Wehrmacht came to fall well behind their planned progress. While an early lightning strike upon Moscow could perhaps taken out the Soviet capital, the Germans found themselves bogged down only a short distance to the west, giving the Red Army time to recharge. During the Battle of Moscow (October 2, 1941 to January 7, 1942), the Germans failed to break the Soviet lines, and suffered terribly due the severe winter weather. German soldiers lacked proper clothing and shelter, while the engines of many tanks and vehicles froze, rendering them useless. Both the Germans and the Soviets endured astounding casualties and losses of equipment. However, while the Red Army simply kept fighting regardless of its suffering, the OT, for the very first time, proved unable to deliver sufficient equipment, supplies and fuel to the front, and the Nazis confronted defeat. Operation Barbarossa, while having conquered hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of Soviet territory, did not achieve enough. The Wehrmacht failed to reach anywhere near the A-A Line, as Leningrad, Moscow and the Baku oilfields remained in Soviet hands; the Germans were now trapped far from home in an inhospitable land, facing a reinvigorated enemy. Fritz Todt, at a meeting at the Führer’s ‘Wolf's Lair’ retreat (near Rastenburg, East Prussia, today Kętrzyn, Poland) on February 8, 1942, apparently felt emboldened to tell Hitler that the war in the Soviet Union was a lost cause; this opinion was not well-received. Todt was killed in mysterious plane crash later that day, and questions have ever since swirled as to whether or not his death was an accident. In the wake of Todt’s demise, the OT, while continuing to operate as a specialist engineering entity, was rolled into the Ministry of Armaments and War Production, led by Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer. Despite his best efforts, Speer’s task was too great, and the Germans continued to experience supply problems on the Eastern Front. The elaborate, perfectly oiled distribution system as envisaged by Machemer was a thing of the past, as the Wehrmacht’s logistics were by this time haphazard, leading to further military reversals. Matters came to head at the Battle of Stalingrad (August 23, 1942 – February 2, 1943), whereupon a large portion of the German Eastern army was encircled and destroyed, in one of the most bloody and horrific military events in world history. From that point onwards, the Germans were on the defensive, with the Red Army constantly pushing them westwards. The Allied invasion of Italy, commencing in August 1943, saw the Third Reich fighting on two fronts, and its fate was sealed upon the Allied landings in France in June 1944. The last year of the war was merely the Third Reich’s attempt to delay the inevitable, as the history’s most evil empire fell in May 1945." (Alexander Johnson, 2020)

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Oganisation Todt. ; Machemer, Heinrich ; Schwarz, Richard