Durchgangsstrasse IV
It was constructed by forced laborers – Soviet prisoners of war, local civilians, and Jews – who were procured by the SS and guarded by the Schutzmannschaft battalions.
[1] In December 1941, Heinrich Himmler inspected the southern sector of the Eastern Front and experienced poor road conditions first hand.
He even had to cancel a meeting with Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the III Army Corps as road conditions made it too difficult to reach the unit.
[4] The planned road stretched approximately 2,175 kilometres (1,351 mi)[5] from Lviv in District of Galicia of the General Government via Ternopil, Letychiv, Vinnytsia, Haisyn, Uman, Kirovograd (now Kropyvnytskyi), Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Stalino (now Donetsk), and Taganrog to Rostov-on-Don in Russia.
[2][6] Historians have proposed that when Reinhard Heydrich made a reference to Jews working on road construction during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, it was an allusion to the DG IV project.
[1][5] Organisation Todt was charged with constructing the road and provided technical supervisors while Legion Speer transported supplies.
He commanded four Oberbauabschnittsleitungen (Senior Construction Sector Directorates)[4] based in Vinnytsia, Kirovograd, Kryvyi Rih, and Stalino.
The main tasks of forced laborers was to produce, collect, and transport materials (e.g. sand, gravel), construct the road, and build protections (e.g. walls against snowdrifts or ditches for drainage).
[3] The road was also an anchor for various support facilities – field hospitals, veterinary clinics, motor pools, repair shops, supply depots, etc.
As Red Army began its advance in late summer and fall 1943, sections of the road came under fire and were captured by the Soviets.
[5] The Germans also used Jews to construct DG IV, but there were few located in the vicinity of the road who had survived the mass executions in 1941.
[5] According to post-war investigations by the district attorney in Lübeck, approximately 50,000 POWs, 50,000 civilian workers, and 10,000 Jews worked on DG IV in 1942.
[3] In a June 1943 report, Fritz Katzmann stated that about 20,000 Jews "passed through" the camps built for DG IV and that 160 kilometres (99 mi) of road was completed in District of Galicia.
[2] Willi Ahrem, commander of labor camp that was used to expand Durchgangsstrasse IV,[9] helped Jews escape execution, for which he received the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1965.
Harry Bennett, associate professor at Plymouth University, identified the man as Gieseke which could prove his role in the atrocities along DG IV.
