Albert Speer

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Albert Speer, the German architect who later ran Nazi Germany's war economy, liked to tell a dramatic story about the day he was born. In his telling, it happened at midday, amid crashes of thunder and the ringing bells of the nearby Christ Church. None of it was true. He was born sometime between three and five o'clock in the afternoon, and the church had not yet been built.

  A man willing to invent the weather on his own birthday was willing to invent far more. Over the following decades, Speer assembled a careful portrait of himself as a gifted, apolitical technician who regretted never discovering the crimes around him. Readers bought it. So did judges, historians and millions of ordinary Germans. Why was the story so easy to believe? What did the man at the centre of Hitler's circle really build, and really know? And how did a portrait that held for so long finally come apart?

  2142922

• 2. Student to Insider

  ›

  Mannheim was the city where Speer was born, the second of three sons in an upper-middle-class family. Henry T. King, a deputy prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials who later wrote about him, said love and warmth were missing from the household of his youth. His brothers Ernst and Hermann bullied him throughout his childhood. He found escape in skiing and mountaineering, and he followed his father and grandfather into architecture.

  The German hyperinflation crisis of 1923 squeezed his parents' income and steered him to the University of Karlsruhe rather than a more celebrated school. In 1924, with the crisis over, he moved to the Technische Hochschule München. A year later he moved again, to Berlin-Charlottenburg, where he studied under Heinrich Tessenow, whom he greatly admired. After passing his exams in 1927, he became Tessenow's assistant at only 22. In Munich he had also begun a friendship with Rudolf Wolters that would last more than fifty years.

  Margarete Weber, the daughter of a craftsman who employed 50 workers, had been courting partner to Speer since mid-1922. His class-conscious mother thought the Webers socially inferior. The couple married in Berlin on the 28th of August 1928, yet seven years passed before Margarete was invited to stay at her in-laws' home. They had six children. Speer grew steadily more distant from the family after 1933, and he stayed distant even after his release from prison in 1966.

  On the 1st of March 1931, Speer became Nazi Party member number 474,481, having applied in January. That year, with stipends shrinking in the Depression, he gave up his post with Tessenow and returned to Mannheim hoping to work as an architect. It did not work out, and his father gave him a part-time job managing family properties. In July 1932, a visit to Berlin to help the Party before the Reichstag elections brought a lucky break. Party official Karl Hanke recommended him to Joseph Goebbels, who needed the Berlin headquarters renovated.

  The 1933 Nuremberg Rally gave Speer his first meeting with Hitler. Organizers asked him for designs, but neither they nor Rudolf Hess would approve the plans, so Hess sent him to Hitler's Munich apartment to get a decision. The work earned him his first national post, Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Party Rallies and Demonstrations. Meanwhile, Hitler had hired Paul Troost to renovate the Chancellery, and he chose Speer, whose work for Goebbels had impressed him, to manage Troost's building site.

  Hitler lived in the Chancellery building and came by daily to hear progress reports. After one briefing, he invited the architect to lunch, to Speer's great excitement. Soon Speer was expected for a morning walk or chat, for advice on architecture, and for dinner on most days. The routine made him part of the inner circle.

  Troost died on the 21st of January 1934, and Speer effectively took his place as the Party's chief architect. One of his first big commissions was the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg, which appears in Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will and held 340,000 people. Speer pushed for events to be held at night, both to show off his lighting effects and to hide the overweight Nazis. He also gave Werner March's Olympic Stadium for the 1936 Games a stone exterior that pleased Hitler, and he designed the German Pavilion for the 1937 exposition in Paris. For Nuremberg he drew up an even larger German Stadium, planned for 400,000 spectators.

  132314222

• 3. Capital of the World

  ›

  The 30th of January 1937 put an entire city in Speer's hands. Hitler named him General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital, with the rank of State Secretary. He answered directly to Hitler, and neither the mayor of Berlin nor the regional Gauleiter could overrule him.

  His assignment was to redesign Berlin. The plan centred on a three-mile boulevard running north to south, which Speer called the Prachtstrasse, the Street of Magnificence. At its northern end stood the Volkshalle, a domed assembly hall more than 700 feet high with floor space for 180,000 people. At the southern end, a triumphal arch almost 400 feet tall was big enough to fit the Arc de Triomphe inside its opening. Existing railway termini were to be torn down, and Wolters joined the design team to handle the boulevard. War in 1939 postponed the scheme and later ended it. After the Nazi surrender, Speer himself called the plans awful.

  The new Reich Chancellery on Voßstraße was the project that did get built. Demolition of the first buildings began in March 1936. In June of that year Speer charged a personal honorarium of 30,000 Reichsmark and estimated three to four years of work. On the 27th of January 1938, Hitler gave him full powers to finish by the 1st of January 1939, and at the topping-out ceremony on the 2nd of August 1938 Hitler claimed for propaganda purposes that he had ordered the building done within the year. Labor shortages forced construction workers into shifts of ten to twelve hours. The SS built two concentration camps in 1938 so that inmates could quarry stone for the building.

  A brick factory near the Oranienburg concentration camp was also built at Speer's urging. When someone remarked on the poor conditions there, Speer answered with a mocking comment about Jewish prisoners. The Chancellery was finished in early January 1939, and Hitler hailed it as the crowning glory of the greater German political empire.

  Kristallnacht erupted while the Chancellery was under construction, and Speer left it out of his first draft of Inside the Third Reich. Only his publisher's urgent advice led him to add a line about seeing the ruins of the Central Synagogue from his car. In fact, the pogrom sped up his existing efforts to take Berlin's Jews out of their homes. From 1939, his department used the Nuremberg Laws to evict Jewish tenants of non-Jewish landlords, making room for non-Jewish tenants displaced by redevelopment or bombing. In all, 75,000 Jews were displaced.

  Speer insisted that those evicted were completely free and that their families stayed in the apartments. He also wrote that, driving to his ministry, he saw crowds on the platform at Nikolassee station and knew they must be Berlin Jews being evacuated. He recalled an oppressive feeling. Historian Matthias Schmidt said Speer had personally inspected concentration camps and called his comments an outright farce. Martin Kitchen judged the repeated claim of ignorance hollow, since Speer knew the fate of the Jews and took part in their persecution.

  When war began, Speer set up quick-reaction squads to build roads and clear debris, and before long they were clearing bomb sites. He used forced Jewish labor on these projects alongside regular German workers. His offices went on to build for every branch of the military and for the SS, using slave labor. The work made him one of the wealthiest men among the Nazi elite.

  141122023

• 4. The Armaments Minister

  ›

  A plane crash at Rastenburg on the 8th of February 1942 killed Fritz Todt, Hitler's Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions. Speer had arrived the previous evening and accepted Todt's offer of a seat on the flight back to Berlin. Some hours before take-off he cancelled, because a late meeting with Hitler the night before had left him tired. Hitler named Speer to the vacant post. Kitchen says the choice was unsurprising, since Speer was loyal and had experience building prisoner of war camps and other military structures.

  Speer inherited all of Todt's other offices too. These included Inspector General of German Roadways, Inspector General for Water and Energy, head of the Party's Office of Technology, and head of the Organisation Todt, a vast government-controlled construction company. Hitler gave him no clear remit, so Speer had to fight rivals for power. On the 1st of March 1942, Hermann Göring signed a decree making him General Plenipotentiary for Armament Tasks. By April, Speer had persuaded Göring to create a three-member Central Planning Board, which gave him supreme authority over raw materials and production scheduling.

  In July 1943, Speer gained control of armaments for the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine as well as the army. The next month he took over most of the Ministry of Economics, which led Admiral Dönitz to call him "Europe's economic dictator". His title changed on the 2nd of September 1943 to Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production. His rivals had not grasped that his talk of rationalization was a plan to sideline them.

  Winter 1941-42 had brought the disastrous German defeat at the Battle of Moscow. Friedrich Fromm, Georg Thomas and Todt had concluded that the war could not be won, and they favoured seeking a political solution. Speer answered with showmanship. He claimed a sixfold increase in munitions production and a fourfold increase in artillery production, and he fed the newsreels. The talk of ending the war faded.

  The armaments miracle was a myth, built on statistical manipulation. Production did rise, but because of reorganization that predated Speer, relentless slave labor and a deliberate drop in quality in favour of quantity. Naval armaments were not under his supervision until October 1943, nor the Luftwaffe's until June 1944, yet both grew by similar amounts. Extra coal for the steel industry also helped the boom in ammunition. Production of every weapon type peaked in June and July 1944. Then fuel ran short, and after August 1944 oil from the Romanian fields was gone.

  Speer's own priorities fared worse. He agreed with Hitler to make tank production the top priority, but Hitler kept changing the specifications, and the program stalled. Relatively little of the armaments budget actually went to tanks. The failure contributed to a significant German Army setback at Prokhorovka in 1943. In shipbuilding, Speer and his hand-picked director Otto Merker decided to build the new Type XXI and Type XXIII submarines in prefabricated sections at different sites. Dozens were completed, but construction flaws left them crippled and few ever entered service.

  In December 1943, Speer damaged his knee badly on a visit to Organisation Todt workers in Lapland. He was treated by Professor Karl Gebhardt at Hohenlychen, a clinic where patients "mysteriously failed to survive". In mid-January 1944 a lung embolism struck him. Fearing for his power, he named no deputy and ran the ministry from his bedside. His illness coincided with the Allied Big Week bombing raids on aircraft factories, and rivals used the moment to undermine him. He lost Hitler's unconditional support. On the 14th of April 1944, he lost control of the Organisation Todt to his deputy, Franz Xaver Dorsch.

  25171441

• 5. Slave Labor

  ›

  Six million workers had been drafted into the armed forces, and Speer's factories were short of hands. Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel as a manpower dictator, and Speer, who had asked for 1,000,000 "voluntary" laborers, was delighted at the free hand Sauckel received. Whole villages in France, Holland and Belgium were rounded up and shipped to Speer's factories. In occupied areas of the Soviet Union, civilian men and women were seized en masse and sent to work in Germany. By April 1943, Sauckel had supplied 1,568,801 laborers, including forced laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners. The maltreatment of these people was the principal reason Speer was convicted at Nuremberg.

  As head of the Organisation Todt, Speer was directly involved in building and altering concentration camps. He agreed to expand Auschwitz and some other camps, allocating 13.7 million Reichsmarks. The money paid for an extra 300 huts at Auschwitz and raised its capacity to 132,000 people. It also covered materials for gas chambers, crematoria and morgues. The SS called the effort Professor Speer's Special Programme. In 2005 The Daily Telegraph reported documents showing that he approved the materials after two assistants inspected the camp on a day when almost a thousand Jews were massacred there. Filmmaker Heinrich Breloer said Speer was not just a cog in the machine but the "terror itself".

  Hitler authorized a Fighter Staff committee to protect and expand fighter aircraft production, and it was running by the 1st of March 1944 on Speer's orders, with support from Erhard Milch of the Reich Aviation Ministry. Fighter output more than doubled between 1943 and 1944. Much of the growth, however, was in models that were becoming obsolete and were easy prey for Allied aircraft. On the 1st of August 1944, Speer merged the committee into a new Armament Staff.

  The SS supplied 64,000 prisoners from camps including Mittelbau-Dora for 20 separate projects of the Fighter Staff. Prisoners worked for companies such as Junkers, Messerschmitt, Henschel and BMW. Speer introduced punishments for the workforce: anyone who feigned illness, slacked off, sabotaged production or tried to escape lost food or was sent to a concentration camp. In 1944 over half a million workers were arrested. By then, 140,000 people worked in his underground factories, which were death-traps with brutal discipline and regular executions. At Dora, the crematorium was overwhelmed by corpses, and Speer's own staff called the conditions hell.

  The rocket program, which began in 1932, had produced no weapons when Speer enthusiastically backed it. In March 1942 he ordered A4 rockets, the forerunner of the V-2, the world's first ballistic missile. Research took place at Peenemünde alongside the V-1 flying bomb. The V-2's first target was Paris, on the 8th of September 1944. The huge investment never paid off in military effectiveness. The rockets were assembled in the underground Mittelwerk factory with labor from Mittelbau-Dora, where 20,000 of the 60,000 people sent there died in appalling conditions.

  Historian Charles Dick argues that under Speer the Organisation Todt reorganized the slave-labor system and drove forced laborers into subterranean construction, which made its mortality even worse. Dick concludes that Speer, like his predecessor, bears substantial responsibility for the Holocaust and for the deaths in the slave-labor program.

  63113225

• 6. Defeat and Judgment

  ›

  In January 1945, Speer told Goebbels that armaments production could be sustained for at least a year. Later that month Soviet forces captured the important Silesian industrial region, and Speer concluded the war was lost. Even so, he argued that Germany should fight on to win better terms than the unconditional surrender the Allies demanded. He promised "decisive weapons" that would bring a dramatic change on the battlefield. In February he gained control of the railways and asked Heinrich Himmler for concentration camp prisoners to repair them.

  By mid-March, Speer accepted that the economy would collapse within eight weeks. On the 15th of March he gave Hitler a memorandum on the dire situation and sought approval to stop demolitions of infrastructure. Three days later he proposed concentrating the remaining forces along the Rhine and Vistula rivers, which ignored military reality. Hitler answered on the 19th of March with the Nero Decree, ordering destruction of all infrastructure as the army retreated. Appalled, Speer persuaded several military and political leaders to ignore it. When they met on the 28th and the 29th of March, Hitler rescinded the order and gave Speer authority over demolitions, though the army still blew up bridges.

  Speer made his last visit to the Führerbunker on the 22nd of April, touring the damaged Chancellery before leaving for Hamburg. His memoirs claimed he confessed to Hitler there that he was defying the scorched-earth policy. Historian Richard J. Evans called that assertion pure invention. In the same period, Speer also plotted with Luftwaffe technical chief Siegfried Knemeyer to commandeer a BV 222 aircraft and fly to Greenland.

  Hitler's political testament of the 29th of April dropped Speer from the successor government and named his subordinate Karl-Otto Saur in his place. Speer was disappointed not to be chosen. After Hitler's death he offered his services to Karl Dönitz, and on the 5th of May he was named Minister of Industry and Production in the Flensburg government. From the 10th of May he gave the Allies information on the air war and many other subjects. British troops arrested the cabinet on the 23rd of May, which brought Nazi Germany to a formal end.

  In September 1945, Speer learned he would be tried for war crimes and was moved to Nuremberg. The indictment had four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. U.S. chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson charged that Speer helped plan and run the program that forced prisoners of war and foreign workers into German industry. His attorney Hans Flächsner portrayed him as an artist thrust into politics, an approach that set him apart from the other defendants. Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for slave and forced labor, and acquitted on the other two counts. On the 1st of October 1946 he was sentenced to 20 years. Three of the eight judges, two Soviet and the American Francis Biddle, wanted a death sentence, and a compromise took two days to reach.

  12738514

• 7. Prisoner Number Five

  ›

  On the 18th of July 1947, Speer entered Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he was known as Prisoner Number Five. His parents died while he was inside. His father, who died in 1947, despised the Nazis and had stayed silent when he met Hitler. His mother, who died in 1952, had greatly enjoyed dining with Hitler. Letters to his wife were the only written communication officially allowed. Wolters and his longtime secretary Annemarie Kempf helped his family from outside, and from 1948 a sympathetic Dutch orderly, Toni Proost, smuggled out mail and writings.

  Wolters opened a bank account for Speer in 1949 and raised money from architects and industrialists who had benefited from Speer's wartime activities. The funds first supported Speer's family, especially the children's education. Increasingly they paid messengers like Proost and bribed people who might help secure his release. Once Speer learned of the fund, he sent detailed instructions on how to spend it.

  Prisoners were forbidden to write memoirs, but Speer got his pages to Wolters, and they eventually amounted to 20,000 pages. By November 1953 he had completed his memoirs, and they became the basis of Inside the Third Reich. In Spandau Diaries he cast himself as a tragic hero who had made a Faustian bargain and endured a harsh sentence.

  A large enclosed yard at Spandau gave inmates plots for gardening, and Speer built an elaborate garden with lawns, flower beds, shrubbery and fruit trees. To make his daily walks more interesting, he set off on an imaginary trip around the globe. He began in Berlin, went east across all of Eurasia, crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska, and then headed south down the west coast of North America. Measuring each day's distance and matching it to real geography, he walked more than 30,000 km and ended near Guadalajara, Mexico. He also studied architectural journals and brushed up his English and French. He claimed to have finished five thousand books, though 20 years amounted to only 7,305 days.

  Charles de Gaulle and U.S. diplomat George Wildman Ball were among those who pledged support for commuting his sentence. Willy Brandt backed his release and ended the de-Nazification proceedings that could have cost Speer his property. The Soviet Union, which had demanded a death sentence at trial, refused any reduction. Speer served the full term and walked out at midnight on the 1st of October 1966.

  Reporters and photographers packed both the street outside Spandau and the lobby of the Hotel Berlin, where Speer spent the night. He said little then and saved his comments for a major interview in Der Spiegel in November 1966. He hoped to return to architecture, but his sole project, a collaboration on a brewery, was unsuccessful. Instead he reworked his prison writings into Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, and later wrote a book on Himmler and the SS. Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler of the publishing house Ullstein helped shape the books.

  His children kept their distance. His daughter Hilde Schramm said: "One by one, my sister and brothers gave up. There was no communication." This was true even of his son Albert, who had also become an architect. His brother Ernst had died at the Battle of Stalingrad, despite repeated pleas from their parents for Speer to bring him home. Speer supported his other brother Hermann after the war.

  In October 1973, Speer made his first trip to Britain, flying to London to be interviewed on the BBC programme Midweek. That same year he appeared on the television series The World at War. He returned to London in 1981 for the BBC's Newsnight. There he suffered a stroke and died on the 1st of September. He had stayed married, but he was with a German woman who lived in London when he died. His daughter Margret Nissen wrote in her 2005 memoirs that after prison he spent all his time building the Speer Myth.

  82223227

• 8. Unmaking the Myth

  ›

  The personal diary known as the Chronicle was donated by Speer to the German Federal Archives after his release. Wolters had edited it, and it made no mention of the Jews. David Irving found discrepancies between it and independent documents. Speer asked Wolters to destroy the omitted material, but Wolters refused and kept an original copy. Their friendship soured, and a year before Speer died, Wolters gave Matthias Schmidt access to the unedited Chronicle. Schmidt went on to write the first book highly critical of Speer.

  Speer's memoirs were a phenomenal success. A major war criminal became a popular figure almost overnight, because the public was fascinated by an inside view of the Third Reich. His story also gave older Germans who had been Nazis an alibi. If Speer, so close to Hitler, had not known the full extent of the regime's crimes, they could say they had also just followed orders. Fest and Siedler were able to strengthen the myth against mounting evidence. Biographer Isabell Trommer calls them co-authors and co-creators of the myths, paid handsomely in royalties and other financial inducements.

  Speer's explanations of why he joined the Party kept shifting. In the English version of his memoirs he said his commitment amounted to paying monthly dues. For German readers he said the Party offered a new mission. In an interview with William Hamsher he said he joined to save Germany from Communism. Historian Magnus Brechtken argues that Speer's central motives throughout his life were to gain power, rule, and acquire wealth.

  A planned poison-gas assassination of Hitler is one of the stranger myths. It grew from Speer's memory of the panic when car fumes entered an air ventilation system, and he made up the rest. According to Brechtken, his most brazen lie came from a 1952 interview with a French journalist. The journalist described an invented scenario in which Speer refused Hitler's orders and Hitler left with tears in his eyes. Speer liked it so much that he put it in his memoirs. He also falsely claimed sympathy for the 20th of July plotters, though he opposed the plot. He said he realised the war was lost early and worked to save resources for civilians. In reality, he sought to prolong the fighting until further resistance was impossible.

  British intelligence officer and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper investigated Hitler's death and largely accepted the technocrat picture. He called Speer an administrative genius with peaceful instincts, but he also named him "the real criminal of Nazi Germany". Trevor-Roper wrote that Speer sat at the very centre of power for ten years and saw the madness around him, but "he did nothing".

  Speer's final statement at Nuremberg sounded like an apology, though it admitted no personal guilt and named only the German people as victims. A photograph shows him with slave laborers at Mauthausen concentration camp on the 31st of March 1943. Survivor Francisco Boix testified about the visit at Nuremberg, and historian Telford Taylor wrote that, had the photo been available, Speer would have been hanged. Speer also admitted attending the conference at Posen on the 6th of October 1943, but claimed to have left the hall before Himmler spoke of exterminating the Jews. Himmler addressed him directly in that speech. In 2007, The Guardian reported a letter Speer wrote on the 23rd of December 1971 to Hélène Jeanty, widow of a Belgian resistance fighter. In it, he admitted he was present when Himmler announced that all Jews would be killed. Brechtken said that, had his involvement been known at trial, Speer would have been sentenced to death.

  By 1999, historians had amply shown that Speer lied extensively. Public perception barely shifted until 2004, when Heinrich Breloer aired the television film Speer und Er. Adam Tooze, in The Wages of Destruction, called the idea of Speer as a blindly obedient technocrat "absurd". Trommer describes him as one of the most powerful and unscrupulous leaders of the entire regime. Kitchen says Speer deceived the Nuremberg tribunal and postwar Germany.

  Very little of his architecture remains. In Berlin, only the four entrance pavilions and underpasses at the Victory Column survive, along with one odd structure. The New Reich Chancellery was largely destroyed by air raids and the Battle of Berlin, and the Soviets dismantled its surviving exterior walls. In Nuremberg, the tribune of the Zeppelinfeld stadium still stands, though partly demolished. The odd survivor in Berlin is a 46-foot concrete cylinder built around 1941 to measure how much the ground sank under test loads, as groundwork for the planned triumphal arch. Today it is a protected landmark, open to visitors.

  272332526