Background

Albert Speer was born on 19 March 1905 in Mannheim, he was a son of a prosperous upper-middle-class family of master builders (his father was one of the busiest architects in the city).

Education

Speer was educated at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, completing his architectural studies in Munich and Berlin. It was at Berlin University that he first heard Hitler speak in 1930 and came under his hypnotic spell.

Career

In 1932 he received his first-commissions from the NSDAP and after 1933 he was responsible for the designs and decorations used in the large Party rallies, beginning with the 1 May celebration on the Tempelhofer field. He perfected the Nazi style of public parades, the monumental liturgy of the movement, using inventive lighting effects and rapidly erected flagpoles with great skill to enhance the Reich Party rallies at Nuremberg.

In 1937 he was appointed Inspector-General of the Reich, responsible for rebuilding Berlin and other German cities in the neo-classical, monumental style which he favoured. Speer’s task was to convert the visions of a grandiose German Reich into an imposing architectural reality.

In 1938, Speer, who already enjoyed the honorary title of Professor, was made a Prussian State Councillor and received the Nazi Golden Party Badge of Honour. A section leader of the German Labour Front, he also headed its Beauty of Labour' Department.

In 1941 he was elected to represent the electoral district of Berlin West in the Reichstag. The many posts he held during the war included General Inspector of Water and Energy and head of the Party’s main office for technology.

In February 1942 he succeeded Fritz Todt as Minister of Armaments and War Production, demonstrating remarkable gifts as a manager of industrial enterprises on a gigantic scale.

Speer was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment on 30 September 1946 and the Russians (who had voted to hang him) kept him to the full term. He was released from Spandau prison in 1966.

During his imprisonment, Speer wrote the first draft of his best-selling memoirs, Inside the Third Reich (published in 1970).

He died in a London hospital on 1 September 1981 during a visit to Great Britain.

Achievements

• Speer was the greatest employer of manpower in Nazi Germany and performed miracles in rapidly expanding war production capacity in spite of massive Allied bombing attacks. Output was increased from 9,540 front-line machines and 2,900 heavy tanks in 1941 to 35,350 machines and 17,300 tanks in 1944 under Speer’s relentless prodding and efficiency.
  
  In his role as Minister of Armaments, Speer not only kept the German military machine in the field - thereby prolonging the war by at least two years - he also showed no scruples in exploiting all the slave labour he could get his hands on. Nevertheless, in the final stages of the war, Speer became increasingly disillusioned with Hitler's policy of ‘victory or annihilation' and tried to protect German industry from the Führer’s orders to destroy all areas threatened by the advancing Allied armies.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Inside the Third Reich

    (The book gave a detailed, dispassionate account of his ye...)

    1970

• building

  • Reich Chancellery in Berlin

    1939

  • Party palace in Nuremberg

Politics

In January 1931 he became a member of the National Socialist Party.

Hitler appeared to the young Speer to offer the complete answer to communism and the political futility of the Weimar system. It was the personality of the Führer, rather than the Party itself (in which he was always something of an outsider), which attracted Speer, who was able through his close personal relationship with Hitler to realize all his youthful architectural ambitions, to design and build for a new order.

Views

He entered the party, denying, as he subsequently put it in his memoirs, ‘my own past, my upper-middle- class origins and my previous environment’.

Though he never sought contact with the conspirators of 20 July 1944, Speer did contemplate killing Hitler, then abandoned the project, attempting till the end to combat with rational argument the illusions of the fantasy world in the Führerbunker. Speer’s loyalty to Hitler did not lead him to abandon his critical intelligence or independent will, though he continued to shelter behind the fiction of being a strictly ‘non-political’ specialist. In contrast to other Nazi leaders, Speer, however, did acknowledge the guilt of the régime when brought before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946.

He recognized the inadmissibility of obeying orders as an excuse for serving a criminal State and admitted his personal responsibility for the slave labour in the factories under his authority and for his collaboration with the SS when it provided concentration camp prisoners for his production lines.

Membership

• From 1942 he was a member of the Central Planning Office.

  Central Planning Office , Germany

  1942

Personality

His organizing ability impressed Hitler who came to regard him as an ‘architect of genius' and gave him a stream of projects to design, including the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin and the Party palace in Nuremberg.

Speer's artistic imagination and technological expertise appealed to the frustrated architect in Hitler.

His book Third Reich strengthened the view of many historians that Speer was a man of integrity and honour in comparison with the criminal leaders who were his associates. His personal qualities notwithstanding, Speer was the prototype of the intellectual technocrat without whose efficient and loyal service the modern totalitarian State could never have consummated its lawless acts of violence.

Quotes from others about the person

• Speer was found guilty of war crimes against humanity, but it was recognized in mitigation that‘. . . in the closing stages of the war he was one of the few men who had the courage to tell Hitler that the war was lost and to take steps to prevent the senseless destruction of production facilities’.