Albert Speer - Early years, First Architect of the Reich, Minister of Armaments, After the war
Albert Speer (help·info) (born Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer; Admired by the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Speer remained in personal contact with him until a week before his suicide and two weeks before the German surrender that ended World War II in Europe.
Speer was Hitler's chief architect before becoming his Minister for Armaments during the war.
Early years
Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany, the second of three sons. Although Speer was an architect, he originally wanted to become a mathematician when he was young. In 1924 when the inflation had stabilized, Speer transferred his studies to the more esteemed Technical University of Munich. Speer had a high regard for Tessenow and when he passed his exams in 1927 he became Tessenow's assistant. Although Tessenow himself never agreed with Nazism, a number of his students did, and it was they who persuaded Speer to attend a Nazi Party rally in a Berlin beer-hall in December 1930.
Speer claims to have been apolitical as a young man; Speer claimed to have been quite affected, not only with Hitler's proposed solutions to the threat of communism and his renunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, but also with the man himself. Speer was disturbed by the way he had whipped the crowd into a frenzy, playing on their hopes. Although Goebbels' performance offended Speer, he could not shake the impressions Hitler made on him.
In the summer of 1922 he got to know Margarete Weber from Heidelberg (1905-1987; They married in Berlin on August 28, 1928 despite the fact that Speer's mother was against this relationship.
Speer's first major commission as a Party member came in 1932 when Karl Hanke (whose villa Speer previously worked on) recommended him to Goebbels to help renovate the new District Headquarters in Berlin, and, later, to renovate Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry. Speer's most notable work on this assignment was the addition of the famous balcony from which Hitler often presented himself to crowds that assembled below. Speer subsequently became a prominent member of Hitler's inner circle and a very close friend to him, winning a special place with Hitler that was unique amongst the Nazi leadership. Hitler, according to Speer, was very contemptuous towards anybody he viewed as part of the bureaucracy, and prized fellow artists like Speer whom he felt a certain kinship with, especially as Hitler himself had previously entertained architectural ambitions.
First Architect of the Reich
When Troost died in 1934, Speer was chosen to replace him as the Party's chief architect. In his autobiography, Speer claimed that, upon seeing the original design, he made a derogatory remark to the effect that the parade ground would resemble a "rifle club" meet.
The grounds were based on ancient Doric architecture of the Pergamon Altar in Anatolia, but magnified to an enormous scale, capable of holding two hundred and forty thousand people. At the 1934 Party rally on the parade grounds, Speer surrounded the site with one hundred and thirty anti-aircraft searchlights.
Nuremberg was also to be the site of many more official Nazi buildings, most of which were never built; While planning these buildings, Speer invented the theory of "ruin value". According to this theory, enthusiastically supported by Hitler, all new buildings would be constructed in such a way that they would leave aesthetically pleasing ruins thousands of years in the future.
In 1937 Speer designed the German Pavilion for the 1937 international exposition in Paris. Speer's work was located directly across from the Soviet Pavilion and was designed to represent a massive defense against the onslaught of communism.
Speer was also directed to make plans to rebuild Berlin, which was to become the capital of a "Greater Germany"—Welthauptstadt Germania. Speer also designed the new Reich Chancellery, which included a vast hall designed to be twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles.
Almost none of the other buildings planned for Berlin were ever built. At the north end, Speer planned to build the Volkshalle—an enormous domed building, based on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
Part of the land for the boulevard was to be found by building two major railroad stations, one just north and one just south of the boulevard. However, according to Speer in The Spandau Diaries, 80,000 buildings would have to be destroyed to complete his plans.
While the north-south axis was not completed, an east-west axis, focused upon the Brandenburg Gate was completed and remains in Berlin today. While none of the buildings designed by Speer during the Nazi era still stand in Berlin, some lampposts still do.
It has been alleged that Speer was responsible for the forced evictions of Jews from their houses to make room for his grand plans, and for re-housing only Aryans affected by this work. He was also listed as being present at the 1943 Posen Conference, a charge Speer later contested by saying that he had in fact left early.
Speer did have an architectural rival: Hermann Giesler, whom Hitler also favoured.
Minister of Armaments
Hitler was always a strong supporter of Speer, in part because of Hitler's own frustrated artistic and architectural visions. For Speer, serving as architect for the head of the German state and being given virtual carte blanche as to expenses, presented a tremendous opportunity. For Hitler, Speer seemed to be capable of translating Hitler's grandiose visions into tangible designs which expressed what Hitler felt were National Socialist principles.
After Minister of Armaments and War Production Fritz Todt was killed in an airplane crash in 1942, Hitler appointed Speer as his successor in all of his posts. Hitler's affinity for Speer and the architect's efficiency and avoidance of party squabbling are believed to have been considerations in Speer's promotion. In his autobiography, Speer recounts that the power-hungry but lazy Hermann Göring raced to Hitler's headquarters upon word of Todt's death, hoping to claim the office. Hitler instead presented Göring with the fait accompli of Speer's appointment.
Faced with this new responsibility, Speer tried to put the German economy on a war footing comparable to that of the Allied nations, but found himself incessantly hindered by party politics and lack of cooperation from the Nazi hierarchy. To fill this gap, Speer made heavy use of foreign labour, a considerable portion of it forced labour.
Speer was considered one of the more "rational" members of the Nazi hierarchy, in contrast with Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler. Speer's name was found on the list of members of a post-Hitler government envisioned by the July 20 plot to kill Hitler. However, the list had a question mark and the annotation "if possible" by his name, which Speer credits with helping save his life from the extensive purges that followed the scheme's failure. By his own account, Speer considered assassinating Hitler in 1945 by releasing poison gas into the air intake vent on the Führerbunker, but the plan, such as it was, was frustrated for a number of reasons.
Hitler continued to consider Speer trustworthy, though this trust waned near the war's end as Speer, at considerable risk, campaigned clandestinely to prevent the implementation of Hitler's scorched earth policy on both German soil and occupied territories. Speer worked in association with General Gotthard Heinrici, whose troops fighting in the east retreated to the American-held lines and surrendered there instead of following Hitler's orders to make what would have been a suicidal effort to hold off the Soviets from Berlin.
Speer even confessed to Hitler shortly before the dictator's suicide that he had disobeyed, and indeed actively hindered Hitler's "scorched earth" decree. According to Speer's autobiography, Speer visited the Führerbunker towards the end and stated gently but bluntly to Hitler that the war was lost and expressed his opposition to the systematic destruction of Germany while reaffirming his affection and faith in Hitler. In disfavor, Speer was excluded from the new cabinet Hitler outlined in his final political testament, where Speer was to be replaced by his subordinate, Karl-Otto Saur.
After the war
Nuremberg trials
Immediately after the war, there seemed to be little indication that Speer would be charged with war crimes. Speer traveled unprotected and openly participated in the so-called Flensburg government for weeks, in the presence of Allied officers. Some journalists and spectators even expected that Speer would be appointed by the occupying powers to help restore Germany's economy.
At the Nuremberg Trials, Speer was one of the few officials to express remorse. At the trials, the prosecution introduced as evidence a photograph of Speer visiting the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he is clearly shown surrounded by prisoners. The prosecution claimed this proved Speer was well aware of the Holocaust. However, Speer held that he was only given a "V.I.P."
According to interviews after his imprisonment, as well as his memoirs, Speer adopted a "see no evil" attitude towards the Nazi atrocities. Newly released documents suggest that Speer knew a lot more about the atrocities than he was telling, but hard evidence for that remains very thin.
Speer's acknowledgement of guilt was nuanced.
One problem with assessments of Speer's complicity in the Holocaust comes from his status in post-war Germany—he became a symbol for people who were involved with the Nazi regime yet did not have (or claimed not to have had) any part in the regime's atrocities.
Imprisonment
His time in prison, painstakingly documented in his secret prison diary, which was later released as Spandau: The Secret Diaries, was described as consisting mainly of a mind-numbing and pedantically enforced daily routine; Speer and most of the prisoners had established secret lines of communication to the outside world via sympathetic prison staff. Speer made full use of this by, amongst other things, writing innumerable letters to his family (which were restricted to one outgoing page per month under official regulation) and even having money spent on his behalf from a special bank account for a variety of benign purposes.
Speer, as recounted in his diary, made a deliberate effort to make as productive use of his time as possible. In the first decade, this took the form of putting on paper the first draft of his tell-all memoirs, an act Speer considered to be his "duty" to history and his people, he being the sole surviving member of Hitler's inner circle and in possession of knowledge and a degree of objectivity that no other had.
All the while Speer devoted much of his energy and time towards reading books from the prison library, which was organized by fellow prisoner and ex-Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. Speer was, more so than the others, a voracious reader and he completed well over 500 books in the first three years alone.
Later, Speer took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work. When regulations began to slacken in this regard, Speer was allowed to build an ambitious garden, complete with a meandering path, rock garden, and a wide variety of flowers. The garden was even, humorously, centered around a "north-south axis", which was to be the core design element of Speer and Hitler's new Berlin. Speer then took up a "walking tour of the world" by ordering geography and travel books from the local library and walking laps in the prison garden visualizing his journey.
Release
Speer's release from prison in 1966 was a world-wide media event. Speer died of a cerebral hemorrhage in London, England, on September 1, 1981—exactly 42 years after Germany invaded Poland.
Speer's daughter Hilde Schramm became a noted left-wing parliamentarian. Speer's oldest son, Albert, became a successful architect in his own right. Arnold Speer, Speer's second youngest son, born in 1940, became a community doctor. Speer, Albert (1976). Speer, Albert (1981). Speer, Albert, et al (1995). Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth. Albert Speer: The End of a Myth.
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