Talk:Organisation Todt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Germany Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Germany, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles related to Germany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
Additional information: This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-Class status: Referencing and citation: not checked Coverage and accuracy: not checked Structure: not checked Grammar: not checked Supporting materials: not checked To fill out this checklist, please add the following to the template call: <!-- 1. It is suitably referenced, and all major points are appropriately cited. --> |B-Class-1=yes/no <!-- 2. It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain major omissions or inaccuracies. --> |B-Class-2=yes/no <!-- 3. It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or more sections of content. --> |B-Class-3=yes/no <!-- 4. It is free from major grammatical errors. --> |B-Class-4=yes/no <!-- 5. It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an infobox, images, or diagrams. --> |B-Class-5=yes/no

	This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and regional and topical task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
Additional information and associated task forces: This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-Class status: Referencing and citation: criterion met Coverage and accuracy: criterion met Structure: criterion met Grammar: criterion met Supporting materials: criterion met Associated task forces (general topics): Military technology and engineering task force Associated task forces (nations and regions): German military history task force Associated task forces (periods and conflicts): World War II task force

re my 20070929 undo of the last edit:

The Nazi regime was totalitarian (cf. e.g. Gleichschaltung, Gestapo, KZ as a few of the many mechanisms for establishing absolute social control). It was ruthless (cf. eg. the invasion of Czechoslovakia even though the Suddetenland had been conceded or the invasion of Russia even though Poland had been successfully divided. Compulsory laborers were in the state's complete service: there was no option to do anything else and many were worked to death. If you still genuinely believe this is somehow merely an opinion, please demonstrate that and reinstate the change, otherwise leaave the text alone.

Ludwig X 14:54, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

---

I've done small stylistic, grammatical, spelling etc. edits before anonmously, but finally came across a topic that I was both very interested in and a corresponding article that obviously needed replacement, so I've created an account and am doing this work as a readily identifiable wiki member.

There were a lot of reasons to replace the previous article. Most obviously, following its major source (Gildea, 2002), it presented the Organisation Todt and its activities primarily from the perspective of its activities in France, for the most part under Albert Speer, in the second half of WWII, omitting a lot of information on the development and history of the OT, which spanned almost the entire history of the Third Reich.

Some of what was lost by doing so can be illustrated by the single question of whether, and how, to use the terms "slaves" and "slavery" in this context. The preceding version of the article was amazingly careless and inaccurate in this respect. I've generally avoided use of the terms for three reasons: 1) “Slavery” is not a literally accurate translation of either “Pflichdienst” or “Zwangsarbeit”; 2) in English usage -- and despite what the (currently locked) Wikipedia article on the subject has to say about the specific meaning of the term “chattel slavery” -- "slavery" has a strong semantic component of “ownership” and "being owned" and an association with a market and a trade in slaves. All of these were irrelevant in the Third Reich context (except perhaps in the most abstract economic sense), particularly in the early stages; 3) Finally, and most importantly, the term “slavery” obscures the way in which an originally limited concept of compulsory service was gradually expanded to encompass not only foreign workers and POWs, but everyone in the dominion of the Third Reich, including Germans. What was effectively a gradually escalated behavioral conditioning terminated in an end result that, presented simply in its final form as a fait accompli, is both in itself significantly more difficult to grasp and tends to block any understanding of what, at least for me, is the biggest mystery of the Third Reich, namely how it happened at all.

Ludwig X 15:24, 21 December 2006 (UTC) 2005.12.21