After the depressed mood of the preceding years, the Annual Reports from 1933 onwards
at first started to reflect optimistic future expectations. It was obviously Hitler's
government that gave rise to them. The favorable opinion that many people had of
Hitler can be seen in the fact that many members of the Supervisory Board joined the
Nazi Party after it had won the parliamentary elections in March 1933. However, in
1933 not one member of the Management Board was a Nazi party member; it was
the "directors", the hierarchical level immediately below the Board, who nearly all had
a party card. Nazi party membership was never a prerequisite for a seat on the
Supervisory or the Management Board. The management of HOCHTIEF was therefore
not under any overall obligation to follow the party line, and even the Jewish members
of the Supervisory Board remained in office until the "Nuremberg Laws" robbed all
Jewish citizens of their civil rights in 1935. In another case, however, affecting a
politically persecuted member, the Supervisory and Management Boards took the view
that he was a "liability", and he had to go.
Eugen Vögler, the CEO, did not join the Nazi Party until 1937, which was relatively late.
He also made himself available to the Party as "Führer" (leader) of the "Construction
Industry Business Group" and held an honorary position in the Hitler Youth. On the
other hand he protected an employee who was being persecuted as a Christian of Jewish
origin.
As early as March 1934 the expectations that HOCHTIEF and other construction companies
had placed in a new stimulation of the construction business appeared to be fulfilled,
because that was when work started on the Autobahn or super-highway network.
HOCHTIEF was also involved in another major project, the national center for Nazi
Party rallies in Nuremberg. In 1936 HOCHTIEF finally moved out of its offices at Pferdemarkt
in Essen and into a new head office building in Rellinghauser Strasse, where it still has its
headquarters. In 1937 work started on a leisure center at the beach resort of Prora, on
the Baltic island of Rügen, under the title of the Nazi party slogan "Strength through Joy".
In addition to this and other buildings for the State and the Party, HOCHTIEF also built many industrial buildings. For instance a truck factory was built for the Opel company in Brandenburg in record time in 1935. From 1936 onwards the "Second 4-Year Plan" increasingly determined the speed of construction work. Then it was said that within four years the German Army would have reached combat readiness, and German industry would have to be on a war footing within four years as well. In the years that followed, orders of this kind increased at an unmistakable rate.
From 1938 onwards HOCHTIEF worked on the "Westwall" line of defenses under the
direction of the Nazi labor organization, the head of which, Fritz Todt (1891-1942), had been
instructed in 1938 by Hitler's Air Force chief, Hermann Göring, to carry out all the
construction work of relevance to war. The Todt Organization thus took charge of virtually
all construction projects. Everything was regarded as "relevant to war", not only the
obviously military buildings and the Westwall defenses, but also industrial buildings and
traffic routes. Civilian building activity steadily declined.
Once Germany had defeated France in 1940, work started on the "Atlantic Wall", and
HOCHTIEF was involved in this as well, and in "Operation Viking", which started in
Norway in October 1941. HOCHTIEF also operated outside Germany, in countries that
Germany had occupied and others as well: Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary,
Austria and even Iran. These projects mainly involved traffic routes and sometimes
industrial buildings, but HOCHTIEF also worked on "buildings for the Führer" such as
his mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps, called the Berghof, his "Wolf's lair" command
headquarters in Rastenburg (then in East Prussia, now Poland), and the notorious
Führerbunker in Berlin.
Another difficulty is that many of the construction projects were carried out by
consortia, so it is not possible to make any reliable statement about the forced
laborers whom HOCHTIEF deployed there. The information that is available can be
seen in the Corporation Chronicle, which appeared in October 2000.
Towards the end of the war construction work came to an almost complete halt.
The employees on the construction sites in Eastern Europe fled for their lives
as the Soviet troops advanced, and in March 1945 the HOCHTIEF head office
was badly damaged in a dead hit from a bomb.