Franz Xaver Dorsch

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Franz Xaver Dorsch (to the left of Albert Speer and Karl Dönitz with hands in their pockets)

Franz Xaver Dorsch (born December 24, 1899 in Illertissen , † November 8, 1986 in Munich ) was a German civil engineer . Before 1945 he worked temporarily as a construction clerk in the civil service and then worked as a freelance and entrepreneur .

Life

Franz Xaver Dorsch joined the NSDAP and the SA as early as 1922 and took part in the march to the Feldherrnhalle in November 1923. From 1933 he was Fritz Todt's closest collaborator and was entrusted with building the Reichsautobahn. In 1936 he was appointed government master builder ( assessor in the public building administration) and two years later, under the leadership of Fritz Todt, the Todt Organization (OT for short) began building the West Wall . At this point in time the organization was tightened militarily and Todt appointed the graduate engineer Dorsch as “special representative for warlike leadership”. In February 1940 Dorsch was promoted to Ministerial Director.

From 1941 he was head of the headquarters of the Todt Organization in Berlin and after Fritz Todt's fatal crash on February 8, 1942, he became the deputy of the new head of the OT, Albert Speer . In the course of the attack by the German Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Dorsch reported on July 22, 1941 about the catastrophic conditions in a camp near Minsk .

On April 29, 1944, on Speer's instructions, Dorsch became chief and organizer of the OT and thus largely responsible for the deployment of forced laborers throughout the Reich and ultimately also for the deployment of 1,700 Jewish women in the Walldorf subcamp . At the same time he was a member of the hunting staff .

After the end of the war on May 8, 1945, Dorsch worked with the US armed forces and wrote a study on the OT as early as 1945 for the Historical Division of the US Army in Europe. In 1947 he delivered this bundle, which had grown to over 1000 pages (a copy is in the BA-MA , Freiburg i.Br.).

In 1951 Dorsch founded today's Dorsch Consult Ingenieurgesellschaft mbh . During the reconstruction phase of the Federal Republic of Germany, the company was a leader in large-scale infrastructure projects, particularly in the restoration and construction of highways and large-scale facilities for what would later become NATO . In 1958 orders were already being processed for the World Bank.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus D. Patzwall : The Knight's Cross Bearers of the War Merit Cross 1942–1945. Patzwall Militaria Archive, Hamburg 1984, p. 38.
  2. ↑ The communist is not a comrade . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1978, p. 84 ( online ).
  3. ^ The former Walldorf subcamp Organization Todt (OT) and Continuity , accessed on August 21, 2009.
  4. ↑ Signature ZA1 1762-1770.
personal data
SURNAME Dorsch, Franz Xaver
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German civil engineer, construction officer and entrepreneur, head of the Todt organization
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Illertissen
DATE OF DEATH November 8, 1986
Place of death Munich