About this Event
Join us for a special talk by Dr Charles Dick highlighting aspects of our newest exhibition .
In this talk, Dr Dick will present his latest book Unknown Enemy: The Hidden Nazi Force that built the Third Reich (Bloomsbury, 2025). Unknown Enemy examines the Organisation Todt (OT), the Nazi engineering and military organisation and its brutal and murderous operations across German-occupied Europe during World War Two. The book is a comprehensive study of this key overseer of the Third Reich’s vast slave labour programme, which exploited millions of workers from conquered countries. The OT was at the heart of Hitler’s regime: Hitler called it the greatest construction organisation of all time. British intelligence rated its achievements as ‘the most impressive building programme since Roman times.’
Until now, only fragments of the story of Organisation Todt, known as the OT, had been told. Unlike the SS, the OT remained largely much under the radar of war crimes prosecutors and the world at large. This was mainly because the SS and Germany’s surviving political and military leaders were the focus of attention in the dock at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal and at other trials, whereas the OT remained mainly in the shadows. Since then, the OT’s story had been confined to the margins of wide-ranging works or in studies restricted to particular camps or countries. Unknown Enemy rectifies this trend by telling the complete story of the OT across an entire continent and gives a strong voice to survivors of OT violence.
About the speaker
Dr Charles Dick is the author of Unknown Enemy: the Hidden Nazi Force That Built the Third Reich, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. He obtained his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, and his first book, Builders of the Third Reich: the Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour, was published in 2020. Before then, he was a journalist for Reuters in North Africa, Bonn, Paris, Vienna and London over a 35-year career.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Wiener Holocaust Library, 29 Russell Square, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
