Fritz Todt Quotes
Only one country and one system is unable to recognize our accomplishments: Russia. They make the lying claim that our road construction program is only on paper.
Zeller, Thomas. Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970. Berghahn Books, 2007, p. 65.
The Kuomintang nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek tried to stay in power in China, but their corruption and incompetency at government lost them the support of most of the Chinese. The Chinese communists took over the government. The Nationalists then invaded the offshore island of Taiwan but claimed to be the rightful government of all of China. For many years they controlled the Chinese seat in the UN and they refused to recognize the fact that they had failed to gain the loyalty of the Chinese people.
Chamberlain’s military assessment of Russia’s military ability was yet another example of his faulty judgment. He was not alone however in that many British military experts and American as well, thought that Stalin and Russia could not hold out against Hitler and any military aid given to Russia would just fall into German hands. It was FDR assistant Harry Hopkins who went to Russia, toured the front, met with Stalin and other Russian leaders and observed the Russian people and then recommended to FDR that we send arms to Russia. It was a critical judgment. In the end, the Germans suffered more casualties on their Russian front than any other part of the war and it was the Russians who took Berlin though they suffered large casualties themselves.
Yale University had announced the discovery of a Norse map called the Vinland Map. It was an old Viking map that showed the East Coast of America and Canada as well as Greenland and Iceland. It purported to prove that the Vikings had been to America before Columbus. This was shocking and unbelievable to large numbers of Italian Americans many of whom lived in New York City. Most Italian Americans rejected the possibility that the map could be genuine, but there had to be a reason that it was forged. In the midst of the Cold War, there was an obvious villain and it did not take long before large numbers of people believed and repeated the headline. The quotation shows how rabid the anti-Communism of the Cold War was. The authenticity of the Vinland Map is still debated. Ironically, Columbus—the “discoverer” of America, never got to North America at all. He landed in and captured some islands in the Caribbean. The Daily News was then the largest circulation newspaper in the United States.
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.
