Fritz Todt Quotes
In these highways our engineering will reflect the National Socialist movement.
Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 204.
FDR had envisioned a national highway system. He had taken a map of the United States and drew three horizontal lines across the country and another three vertical lines running North to South. These he envisioned as a national highway system. The Second World War intervened with all men and material devoted to the war effort, highway ideas were all on the back burner. After the war President Dwight Eisenhower, in one of the great presidential achievements of American history, initiated the Federal National Highway System. The main difference was a reversal of the classic party positions. Democrat Roosevelt had planned to have the users pay for much or part of the construction and maintenance, while Republican Eisenhower accepted the entire burden on the general taxpayers and tolls and usage fees were banned on Federal Highways.
Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier
Fritz Todt was a German construction engineer and senior Nazi, who rose from the position of "Inspector General for German Roadways", where he directed the construction of the German Autobahns (Reichsautobahnen), to become the Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition. From that position he directed the entire German wartime military economy. At the beginning of World War II he initiated what Hitler named Organisation Todt, a military-engineering company, which supplied industry with forced labor and administered construction of the Nazi concentration camps in the late phase of Nazi Germany. Todt died in an aircraft crash in 1942.
