Albert Speer

Chief architect and minister of armaments in Nazi Germany

• Born: March 19, 1905
• Birthplace: Mannheim, Germany
• Died: September 1, 1981
• Place of death: London, England

Major offenses: War crimes, specifically employing forced laborers

Active: 1939-1945

Locale: Germany and lands occupied by the Nazis

Sentence: Twenty years in prison

Early Life

Albert Speer (shpeehr) grew up in a middle-class family in Mannheim and Heidelberg. Both his father and his grandfather were architects, and he pursued that same career by studying at technical schools in Karlsruhe and Munich and in 1927 completed his architectural studies in Berlin. In 1930 Speer attended a rally of the Nazi Party in a Berlin beer hall (later known as the Beer Hall Putsch) where he heard party leader Adolf Hitler speak. A month later Speer joined the Nazi Party and was given a series of commissions for the party. His talent, efficiency, and enthusiasm so impressed the führer that shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Speer was named his personal architect.

Political Career

Hitler was especially interested in art and architecture, and Speer became a personal friend and a prominent member of Hitler’s inner circle. One of his first commissions was the design of a Nuremberg stadium as the site for Nazi Party congresses. Speer stage-managed the 1934 party rally on the Nuremberg parade grounds, complete with martial music, swastika flags and banners, and the surrounding of the site with 130 searchlights, creating a “cathedral of light.” As documented in Leni Riefenstahl’s motion picure Triumph of the Will (1935), the Nuremberg rally was one of the Nazis’ most successful propaganda feats. Nazi leaders were so pleased with Speer’s work that he was given more important commissions.

Together, Hitler and Speer made plans for remodeling Berlin into a new capital of “Greater Germany,” Germania, a testament to the greatness of the Third Reich. Their audacious construction plans featured enormous boulevards, reflecting ponds, huge public buildings, and a gigantic triumphal arch. Speer’s theory of “ruin value” was to govern the construction of new buildings that would leave aesthetically pleasing ruins centuries into the future—symbols of the greatness of German civilization analogous to the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome. Speer was appointed inspector general of construction for the Reich capital, empowering him to destroy buildings, evict people, and demand materials and labor for the project. To make room for his grand plans and for rehousing Germans affected by this work, Speer allegedly was responsible for the forced eviction and deportation of Jews from the capital. The planned construction of Germania came to an abrupt halt, however, during World War II.

Hitler also asked Speer to build the new Reich’s chancellery, the official seat of government for Germany. Speer demonstrated his remarkable organizational skills by planning and supervising the project, mobilizing labor to work in shifts, and finishing within a year. The führer admired the chancellery, which included an underground bunker (where Hitler later committed suicide). The building was demolished during the Soviet occupation after World War II.

In 1942, Hitler chose Speer to be minister of armaments and munitions. Speer had never served in the military and knew nothing about armaments, but he had demonstrated that he could create and run highly efficient organizations. Speer attempted to put the German economy on a war footing comparable to that of the Allies, but he was hindered by party politics and the Nazi bureaucracy. Another obstacle was a shortage of workers in German factories, complicated by the Nazis’ exclusion of women from factory work. To fill this gap, Speer relied on forced foreign labor and slave labor from concentration camps. Under the threat of severe punishment, such workers were productive. Slowly Speer centralized control of almost all industry and succeeded in dramatically increasing war production, which reached its peak in 1944, matching the armament production of Britain—and this during the height of the Allied strategic bombing campaign. Speer was so successful in mobilizing and streamlining German industry that at one time in late 1943, he was reputed to be Hitler’s heir apparent.

After the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, Hitler issued “scorched earth” orders to destroy Germany’s infrastructure to prevent its use by the invading Allies. Speer opposed the führer’s policy, and by arguing and pleading with Hitler helped prevent the orders from being carried out until the last days of the war. After Hitler committed suicide in April, 1945, Germany was governed briefly by the so-called Flensburg government headed by Admiral Karl Dönitz. Speer joined Dönitz in northern Germany and remained a part of the government after Germany’s unconditional surrender. After the war, U.S. intelligence officers interrogated the cooperative Speer about how Germany kept increasing its armaments output in the face of accelerated Allied bombings—information that could be useful in the continuing fighting against Japan.

Legal Action and Outcome

On May 23, 1945, Speer was arrested by British troops, and along with twenty-three other Nazi leaders, was tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal. Speer was charged with employing forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners. Although he contended that he was unaware of the killing of millions of Jews and that he was an apolitical, unwitting collaborator in the horror, the prosecution claimed that Speer was well aware of the Holocaust. Of the Nazis convicted at Nuremberg, Speer was one of the few who admitted responsibility for his crimes and expressed repentance. Rather than receiving the death penalty, as did most of the defendants, Speer was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in Spandau Prison, West Berlin. While imprisoned, he kept in contact with his family and secretly started writing his memoirs on toilet paper, tobacco wrappings, and any other material he could smuggle out. In 1966 he was released from Spandau.

Impact

In 1970, Albert Speer published his memoirs, the first of several semiautobiographical works he wrote. In his books, he claimed that he had no direct involvement in or knowledge of the Holocaust, although he presented himself as someone who should have known what was occurring. In postwar Germany, Speer grew wealthy and became a symbol for people who were involved with the Nazi regime yet claimed not to have had any part in Nazi atrocities. Speer died of a cerebral hemorrhage in London in 1981. After his death, archival evidence was released indicating that Speer probably knew much more about the atrocities than he admitted.

Bibliography

Ramen, Fred. Albert Speer: Hitler’s Architect. New York: Rosen, 2001. A succinct study of Speer’s life in a series of “Holocaust biographies” for a young adult audience.

Schmidt, Matthias. Albert Speer: The End of a Myth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. An exposé of Speer’s denial of knowledge of the Holocaust, with proof that he was keen to profit from the forcible evacuation of Jewish-owned apartments in Berlin and afterward tried to falsify the records.

Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth. New York: Knopf, 1995. Based on interviews with Speer, this thorough study humanizes Speer while charging him with indifference to Nazi atrocities.

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Memoirs that focus on 1933-1945, when Speer figured prominently in Hitler’s government and the German war effort.

Van Der Vat, Dan. The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. An incriminating portrait of Speer as an opportunist, a “good” dedicated party servant who was the principal exploiter of forced labor.