Durchgangsstrasse IV (translated as Thoroughfare IV or Transit Road IV; abbreviated DG IV) was a road constructed by Nazi Germany in occupied Ukraine during World War II. It was a strategic military road to supply the southern sector of the Eastern Front. The large scale constructions works started in early 1942 to support the German advance towards Stalingrad. It ran for over from Lviv east to Stalino (now Donetsk). Organisation Todt was responsible for the construction which was sub-contracted to several private construction firms. It was constructed by forced laborers – Soviet prisoners of war, local civilians, and Jews – who were procured by the SS and guarded by the Schutzmannschaft battalions. One of the largest forced labor projects undertaken by Nazi Germany that involved Jewish labor, it marked a transition between using Jews as forced laborers to the practice of "extermination through labour".
Construction
In December 1941, Heinrich Himmler inspected the southern sector of the Eastern Front and experienced poor road conditions first hand. He even had to cancel a meeting with Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the III Army Corps as road conditions made it too difficult to reach the unit. Himmler quickly agreed that road improvement was a top priority. The planning for the road started in fall 1941. It was not a new road but a widening (to ) and modernization of a late 18th-century Russian road built by Catherine the Great. The planned road stretched approximately from Lviv in District of Galicia of the General Government via Ternopil, Letychiv, Vinnytsia, Haisyn, Uman, Kirovograd (now Kropyvnytskyi), Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Stalino (now Donetsk), and Taganrog to Rostov-on-Don in Russia. The road had two branches – DG IVb from Lviv via Brody, Dubno to Rivne and DG IVc from Kirovograd via Oleksandriia, Kremenchuk to Poltava. At Vinnytsia, the road would intersect with the proposed Durchgangsstrasse V that would connect to Werwolf, Führer Headquarters, and go south up to Zhytomyr. There were further plans to extend the road into Caucasus as the Wehrmacht advanced further into Russia. The initial plans called for the road further south, but the plans were modified to avoid Transnistria Governorate controlled by the Romanian allies. When the project was discussed with Adolf Hitler, he insisted that the road be primitive and the surface should last only two to three years. Other projects undertaken under the auspices of DG IV included the repair of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station and building a bridge over the Kerch Strait and a bridge over the Southern Bug at Mykolaiv.
In District of Galicia, SS and Police Leader Fritz Katzmann ordered Jews to work on the road in October 1941 (some photos of DG IV were included in the Katzmann Report of June 1943). Historians have proposed that when Reinhard Heydrich made a reference to Jews working on road construction during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, it was an allusion to the DG IV project. The large-scale constructions works started in 1942 in preparation for the German advance towards Stalingrad. Organisation Todt was charged with constructing the road and provided technical supervisors while Legion Speer transported supplies. Various German constructions companies were contracted to build different sections of the road. The SS was tasked with providing forced laborers and their guards. Himmler put Higher SS and Police Leader Hans-Adolf Prützmann in charge of the SS units involved in the construction. Prützmann organized a special task force (Einsatzstab) commanded by Oberstleutnant Walter Gieseke. He commanded four Oberbauabschnittsleitungen (Senior Construction Sector Directorates) based in Vinnytsia, Kirovograd, Kryvyi Rih, and Stalino. In total, about 5,000 Germans worked on the road. A network of small camps for forced laborers was set up about every . About 50 camps for Jews have been documented. These camps were guarded by various auxiliary police battalions of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Cossack Schutzmannschaft.The main tasks of forced laborers was to produce, collect, and transport materials (e.g. sand, gravel), construct the road, and build protections (e.g. walls against snowdrifts or ditches for drainage).