Reichsautobahn

After the annexation of Austria, the planned network was expanded to include the Ostmark, and a second soil-breaking ceremony for the first Reichsautobahn on formerly Austrian territory took place near Salzburg on 7 April 1938.

This was originally intended as a race track and was used for testing vehicles and road surfaces, but it had many of the characteristics of the later Reichsautobahn and served as a model for Piero Puricelli's 1924 autostrada between Milan and the northern Italian lakes, the first true motorway in the world.

[21] On 5 August 1933, a radio play by Peter Hagen and Hans Jürgen Nierenz, Wir bauen eine Straße ("We are Building a Road"), was broadcast throughout the Reich.

"[23] The image of Hitler shoveling was used many times in propaganda, including superimposed on the workers' march in Heinrich Hoffmann's poster urging Germans to ratify the Nazi government in the November 1933 Reichstag election.

[35] However, the emphasis on east–west connections and on attracting foreign tourists and promoting automobile touring meant that the completed sections did not constitute a useful network for freight transportation until 1937.

[37] Working conditions were hard and the pay very low, because it was based on the lowest local wage and unlike unemployment payments did not include an allowance for living expenses.

[48] Numerous accidents occurred, some fatal, due to the rapid pace of work, exhaustion, and unfamiliarity with heavy machinery; after the first five years, one worker died per 6 km (3.7 mi) completed.

[49] As the economy improved and the rearmament effort accelerated, it became impossible to find enough workers; they were for a while brought in from the big cities where unemployment remained highest, primarily Hamburg and Berlin, but in 1937 full employment was achieved, and armaments factories offered far superior pay and working conditions.

[58] In July 1941, Dieter Wisliceny, the Judenberater for Slovakia, invited Slovak government officials to tour several Reichsautobahn camps in Upper East Silesia.

[6]) Other than official traffic, which picked up toward the end of the war, the autobahns were used for some deliveries of tank parts and finished U-boats and motor-boats, and as runways for fighter planes, including in one case for final assembly and test flights of Messerschmitt Me 262s after the factories in Augsburg and Regensburg were bombed.

Georg Halter, professor of road construction and railroads at the Technical University of Munich and a Nazi Party member, wrote several pieces beginning in fall 1933 in which he contested Todt's report, with respect to strategic applications pointing out that road vehicles had less than a third of the weight capacity of railroad freight wagons, in addition to which the steel wheel-rims and treads of armored vehicles would severely damage the roadway.

He also regarded the light-colored concrete that was to be used for the roadways as a guide for enemy aircraft (beginning in 1937, the surface was tinted black for this reason, which distressed Hitler)[97] and the planned large viaducts as tempting targets, "like honey to wasps".

Seifert called for architects, rural planners, plant sociology experts and ecologists to contribute to the effort, and maps were made of the native vegetation with the intention of preserving it and providing a "genuine" experience of the landscape.

[112] A debate spearheaded by Seifert, who argued that straight stretches were "unnatural"[113] and moreover would lead to accidents through highway hypnosis,[114] led to increasing dominance of the view that the autobahns should provide, as Emil Maier-Dorn put it in 1938, "not the shortest but, rather, the most sublime connection between two points".

[116] Although Todt had hired Seifert and his landscapers in order to ensure the "German character" of the autobahn, he initially favored the railroad engineers' views on layout; the decisive factor was cost, namely the reduction in the number of embankments and bridges needed.

[117] The showpiece aesthetic stretch of the Reichsautobahn was the Irschenberg on the autobahn from Munich to the Austrian border, where instead of passing through the valley, the highway was routed in a curving path up the hill to the summit, from which there was a full view of the Alps to the south.

[118] (The Irschenberg autobahn segment was one of those that limited the usefulness of the highways for freight transport, and with the increase in traffic after the war it became a notorious bottleneck and accident site.

Todt, who was credited with choosing the route, described it as an orchestrated experience culminating in the surprise view of the Chiemsee, where "[a]nyone who has a proper feel for this landscape ... turns off the motor and silently glides down the three-kilometer-long slope to the southern shore of the lake, where a bathing beach, parking places, or the [inn] invite you to stay and rest"; and according to Seifert, of the 13 possibilities for the continuation from the Chiemsee down to the Salzburg plain, the engineers had selected the only one that "[made] the impossible possible" by "continu[ing the sequence of landscape beauty] ... on another level".

[124] To some extent the autobahn landscapers were influenced in this emphasis on the natural environment by the American parkways; Todt had a 1934 USDA bulletin on Roadside Improvement reprinted for his planners' use, and Nazi designers visited Westchester County to study them, about the same time that the Westchester County Parks Commission (WCPC) was partly overseeing the construction of what is today the Taconic State Parkway's southern stretches.

But the Reichsautobahn aimed for a more natural, less parklike view from the road, and although in both countries using natively occurring plants in highway landscaping was important, the Americans selectively emphasized those with an attractive appearance.

[134] Beginning in 1936–37, they were relocated to the side of the road where there was more space, and developed from purely utilitarian service stations into rest stops with overnight accommodation intended to be attractive to the driver.

For example, Emil Maier-Dorn wrote: "The Reichsautobahn must become, like the Great Wall of China, like the Acropolis of the Athenians, [and] like the pyramids of Egypt, a tower[ing presence] on the landscape of history, [it] must stand like a duke in the parade of human achievements.

"[141][142] One aspect of this was the sheer size of the project, which was constantly presented to the public not only by ceremonies starting work on and opening segments, but by radio broadcasts (including at least two dramas as well as informational broadcasts and coverage of ceremonies), posters, postcards, stamp issues, calendars, board games, etc., and a major exhibition, Die Straße (The Road), which opened in Munich in 1934 and in which the autobahns were presented in artworks as the culmination of the history of human roadbuilding.

[145] In addition, Todt commissioned official artists, particularly Ernst Vollbehr [de], and photographers, particularly Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, to depict the construction of the autobahns in heroic terms.

[146] Full-length movies called Fahrzeuge und Straßen im Wandel der Zeiten (Vehicles and Roads Throughout Time; scripted in 1934) and Die große Straße (The Great Road; to have been directed by Robert A. Stemmle) were never made; however, work on the autobahns is the setting of Stemmle's 1939 Mann für Mann (Man for Man), Harald Paulsen's Stimme aus dem Äther from earlier in the same year includes chase scenes on the autobahn, and some 50 short films were made about the project, including both technical films such as Vom Wald zur Straßendecke (From the Forest to the Road Surface, 1937) and shorts for popular consumption such as Bahn Frei!

Photomontages attempted to impress upon the public the sheer volume of earth moved and materials used to build them,[149] but the primary means of demonstrating the monumentality of the achievement were bridges and sculpture.

Paul Bonatz, who was hired in 1934 to oversee bridge design on the Reichsautobahn, wrote a few months before that they should be as unnoticeable as possible, minimal in mass and in obstruction of view.

One exception that proved the rule was the bare steel bridges spanning the Dessauer Rennstrecke high-speed section, which expressed its high-tech purpose and also alluded to the Junkers aircraft company that was headquartered in Dessau.

Although protected as a monument, apart from signs against damage to property, even today there is no memorial plaque commemorating the Reichsautobahn route, which ended as a ruin and was completely suppressed for many years.

"[166] In his critical book on Nazi Germany, The House That Hitler Built, historian Stephen Henry Roberts described them as "needlessly grandiose but most impressive.