Hitler and the Autobahns: Nazi Germany's Major Propaganda Project

The ceremonial opening of the works on the "first" highway in the "Third Reich" is one of the most impressive performances of the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, writes the German "Spiegel". It served as a matrix for how the construction of these roads should be used for glorification in the future Fuhrer and his National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP).

On January 30, 1933, the president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Eight months later, on September 23, in Frankfurt, 720 workers in work uniforms walked out of the Unemployment Office onto a street decorated with swastikas and a "work and peace" banner.

The General Inspector of Roads of Germany, Fritz Toth, greeted the workers with the words: "Comrades, you have just come from the Unemployment Office. It is the will of our Fuehrer that you never return there. We are not going to get stamps anymore - we are going to build roads."

Hundreds of shovels are stuck in front of Toto, which they begin to distribute to the workers. He stands at the head of the column heading for the Frankfurt Forest.

Adolf Hitler will also arrive there soon. The Ministry of Propaganda previously issued an order to stop work at 10.45:XNUMX a.m. in the entire country - so that no one would accidentally miss the radio broadcast in which the Führer addresses the nation and explains at length "about the time of the highways" that has come.

"Not even six years will pass, and our gigantic work will testify to our courage, our diligence, our tenacity and our determination. German workers, start working!" thundered Hitler and said that the highways belong to the "canon of German supremacy".

After finishing his speech, he takes the mace in his hands and symbolically sticks it into the ground: the works on the Frankfurt-Mannheim-Heidelberg highway are open. The photo of this event, which expresses the closeness of the Führer to the working people, was printed in millions of copies in the following years.

Hitler promises to build 1000 kilometers of highways per year. German journalists of the time called them a "gigantic", "powerful", "incredible", "giant" achievement.

The myth of the Führer's "genius idea"

The construction of the Reich highways (Reichsautobahn) were massively used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, promising the people that they would be able to move faster and easier, that they would connect the whole country, that they would reach every place.

A myth arose about how Hitler came up with the idea that highways should be built and began to put his dream into action.

"While he was in prison (1924), when his movement was crushed, when his enemies thought they had destroyed him, when he was writing the book of the Germans (Mein Kampf), he spread the map of our fatherland on his knees and imagined on it the highways of the Reich: this is how it will flow. Since hardly anyone else believed in him, he himself had so much faith in himself and his task that he prepared everything". These theatrical words about the "genius idea" of Hitler were written by a poet and winner of the cultural award of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung) Heribert Menzel.

Reichsautobahn mit zwei KdF-Wagen

The first freeway in Germany was opened on August 6, 1932 by the then mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, but the thought that their creator was not Adolf Hitler was a taboo.

Anyone who said otherwise would receive a threatening letter from Toth stating: "The Reich Autobahns we are now building are to be attributed exclusively to Adolf Hitler." It should not be understood as a "rebuke", he wrote, but as a "warning with the intention to adjust your position to the position that I consider to be the only correct one".

It is not the truth that matters, but the appearance

The Nazis took advantage of the massive unemployment in the Weimar Republic to come to power. As a solution that Hitler came up with, they presented the construction of highways. They claimed that 600.000 jobs were created in this way.

However, Hitler was not the first to think of highways, nor were the planned 6900 kilometers of these roads built. By 1945, 3900 kilometers were built, their construction created about 120.000 jobs.

Unemployment in Germany was suppressed to a far greater extent by the initiation of military industry, but the production of arms was not as amenable to propaganda as the construction of highways.

For the head of Hitler's propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, the truth was otherwise unimportant. "These are the Führer's roads," he said, he built them for the Germans and Germans following his vision, they are a symbol of Nazi Germany, a reflection of its strength and greatness.

To ensure that everyone understood it exactly like that, Goebbels's propaganda machine, which at that time had at its disposal newspapers, radio and short advertising films that were broadcast before feature films in cinemas. The media were "Gleichshalt", they all had the same message, they all glorified Hitler and his struggle. Anyone caught thinking otherwise would end up in a concentration camp, often as a forced laborer on highway construction.