Nazis’ claim to autobahns false

Press, 1 June 1985, Page 7

Nazis’ claim to autobahns false

By

MICHAEL BACKHAUS

of Reutershrough NZPA Frankfurt Fifty years ago, Adolf Hitler opened a stretch of highway between Frankfurt and the nearby city of Darmstadt and started one of the most enduring myths about Germany - that the .famed autobahns were the brainchild of the Nazis. “There is a glow of delight over the Fuehrer’s face today, for he has come here to inaugurate his own creation,” a German Reich radio commentator reported in a not entirely accurate dispatch from the scene on May 19, 1935. In reality, Germany’s first highway dates from 1921 when the famous Avus racing circuit in Berlin was reopened as a test stretch ofautobahn. The first purC built highway was jht into service a year before Hitler came to power in 1933. Recent opinion polls show

that more than 50 per cent of West Germans today believe the autobahns crisscrossing their country were the personal idea of Hitler and not a legacy of the Weimar Republic he destroyed. Within two years of taking _ power the Nazis were projecting themselves as the builders of a network of super highways that would not only link Germany’s cities but also provide work for the unemployed. The myth was carefully promoted. Fritz Todt, appointed by the Nazis as “General Inspector of German Highways,” said, “These autobahns (are being built) only as the roads of Adolf Hitler.” Todt had worked a engineer on the . project to link Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Basle by autobahn during the Weimar period and had handed over some highway construction plans to the Nazis. The 1932 pre-nazi highway linked the neighboring cities of Cologne and Bonn. It was opened by Konrad Adenauer, the Mayor of cologne who became West Germany’s first Chancellor after World War H.

Nazi propaganda presented the planned 12,000 km network as a means of tackling unemployment by providing construction jobs, using the slogan, “Autobahn

und Arbeit” (Autobahn and work). But historians say that only 130,000 jobs were created to build the autobahns, and among the workers were many opponents of the regime who had been dismissed from their former jobs. In 1943, war brought construction to a standstill With just under a third of the planned network completed. West German autobahn construction began again in earnest in the 1960’5, after the post-war economic recovery. The network is now the most extensive outside the United States. Some 5800 km have been built in the last 25 years, and the Bonn Transport Ministry has plans to construct another 2000 km to complete the network. But the time of autobahn euphoria in West Germany is at an end as the country measures the cost of damage caused by exhaust fumes and highway construction to the environment. The last myth surrounding the autobahns — that of the freedom of the open road — is threatened. Their status as the last, highway in Western Europe where a driver can drive without regard for speed limits may soon disappear if a campaign to limit the maximum speed to lOOkm/h succeeds.