PERSONALITY IN THE 20TH CENTURY: ALBERT SPEER …byj-20thchistory-unit1.wikispaces.com/file/view/Albert+Speer... · Personality Proﬁle: Albert Speer 354 | Key Features of Modern

Personality Profile: Albert Speer

354 | Key Features of Modern History

Tall, handsome, quietly spoken and intellectual, Speer was the only leading Nazi

at the Nuremberg Trials to acknowledge the evils of the Nazi regime, and one

of the few to show remorse. As a result, he escaped the death penalty, receiving

a sentence of twenty years imprisonment. After his release he was a courteous

and helpful source of information for numerous documentaries and books.

Although he claimed to have had a close relationship with Hitler, saying: ‘If Hitler

ever had a friend, it would have been me’, to the end of his days he claimed

complete ignorance of the excesses of the regime, including the horrors of the

concentration camps. Was Albert Speer really the ‘good, if misguided’ Nazi as he

liked to portray himself, or did he succeed in fooling everyone?

Timeline1905 Speer is born in Mannheim; his father is a wealthy architect.

1927 After studying in Munich and Berlin, he qualifies as an architect.

1928 He marries Margarete Weber and they have six children.

1931 He joins the Nazi Party.

1933 He redesigns the Gauhaus in Berlin for Goebbels.Designs a simple but effective backdrop for the Nazi rally on the Templehof airfield on 1 May.Commissioned by Hitler to renovate and refurbish the dilapidated chancellery in Berlin.

1934 He runs the ‘Beauty of Labour’ section of the ‘Strength through Joy’ campaign, and becomes the ‘First Architect of the Reich’.Commissioned to redesign the Nuremberg Rally grounds; work was begun but never completed.

1937 His design for the German pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition wins the gold medal.He is appointed to rebuild Berlin as ‘Germania’, directly answerable to Hitler.

1938 He is appointed to build a new Reich chancellery within twelve months; he succeeds.

1942 He is appointed minister of armaments and munitions.

1943 September: his position is expanded to ‘Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production’.

1945 He is sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials, principally for his use of forced and slave labour; the Soviets want him hanged.

1966 He is released from Spandau prison, Berlin.

1969 Inside the Third Reich, Speer’s memoirs are published.

1975 Spandau: The Secret Diaries is published.

1981 Speer dies.

PERSONALITY IN THE 20TH CENTURY: ALBERT SPEER 1905–1981

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BackgroundAlbert Speer was born in Mannheim on 19 March 1905.

He came from a normal upper-middle-class family and

enjoyed the typical upbringing of a provincial child in

those circumstances. Speer’s father, like his grandfather,

was an architect who had made a name for himself in the

Mannheim area. His mother had come from a wealthy

merchant family in Mainz, by the river Rhine, and was

never reconciled to the move to industrial Mannheim

upon marriage. She compensated for the less glamorous

surroundings by being socially ambitious and running

an ‘aristocratic’ household complete with servants and

fine furniture. In 1918, the family moved to a new home

surrounded by woodland and overlooking the town

of Heidelberg.

Speer was not close to his parents, ‘who were virtually

strangers to him’ (Fest 2002, p. 14). Nor did he get on well

with his brothers, Hermann (b. 1902) and Ernst (b. 1906), who

were robust and outgoing, while he was physically delicate

and had unstable health. ‘The inhibitions that all observers

later remarked on were already conspicuous in those early

years. Speer’s mother, who had sought refuge from various

disappointments in a restless social life filled with receptions

and house parties, remained aloof’ (Fest 2002, p. 14). When

he passed his school-leaving exam, Albert wanted to study

mathematics, but his father persuaded him to follow the

family tradition into architecture.

In 1922 he fell in love with Margarete Weber, the daughter of a joiner. Both sets of parents objected

and tried to keep the young people apart—he being sent to Karlsruhe to begin studies, she to a

boarding school in Freiburg. They kept in touch by letter and in 1925 Speer moved from Munich to

Berlin to continue his studies. There he came under the influence of Heinrich Tessenow, who appointed

Speer as his assistant in 1928. This well-paid post enabled him to marry in that year. Albert and

Margarete spent their time in cultural activities, mountain walks and canoeing.

In his parents’ home, open discussion of politics had been banned. Albert remained apolitical,

apparently untouched by developments during the Weimar years. His father was a liberal, despising

Hitler as a ‘criminal upstart’. Yet Speer’s mother, after being impressed by an SA march through the

streets of Heidelberg in 1931, secretly joined the Nazi Party.

Fest sums up this early phase of Speer’s life by describing him as ‘an immature but gifted young

man, caught up in the prejudices and moods of his day. Nothing in him suggests any disorder caused

by parental neglect, or any complexes or deformations. He had even remained untouched by the

political and artistic extremes of the wild twenties, which captured almost everybody, at least for a time’

(Fest 2002, p. 24).

Speer first heard Hitler speak when he addressed a meeting of arts students in Berlin in December

1930, and Speer declared himself ‘captivated by the magic of Hitler’s voice’. On 1 March 1931 he joined

the Nazi Party.

Figure 11.44 Young Speer with Margarete Weber



Rise to prominenceSpeer the architectSpeer’s first architectural commission for the Nazis came

from Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, to renovate the

Gauhaus in that city. That was quickly followed by the task

of organising the backdrop for the May Day rally at the

Templehof airfield in Berlin in 1933. The black, white and

red flags of the old Reich, each ten storeys high, were hung

vertically. In between them a similarly large Nazi standard

was placed, the whole lit up at night.

The Führer was pleased with the effect and Speer was

asked to organise the Nuremberg rally of 1933, followed

by a commission to build entirely new rally grounds at

Nuremberg for the 1934 party rally. Hitler began to forge a

close relationship with the young architect.

In 1934, Speer was given responsibility for the ‘Beauty

of Labour’ section of the new ‘Strength through Joy’

campaign. This involved improving workers’ conditions by

providing canteen facilities, turning paved areas into parks,

and improving lighting and ventilation. These changes,

while part of Nazi policy, never interested Hitler, whose

main interest lay in architecture. In January 1934, Paul

Troost, Hitler’s favourite architect, died, and Speer replaced

him. Speer’s plans for the 1934 party rally at Nuremberg

brought him further credit, with his idea of a ‘Cathedral of

Light’ effect created by placing 150 searchlights around the

perimeter of the rally ground, with their beams pointing

perpendicularly into the night sky.

In 1936, the Olympic Games were to be held in Berlin.

A crisis arose when Hitler, furious at the ‘glass box’ stadium

designs of the architect Werner March, threatened to cancel

the games. Speer was hastily brought in, removed much

of the glass and concrete that had angered Hitler, and

carried out the essential reconstructions to the satisfaction

of the Führer.

The next year, Speer achieved another triumph at the

Paris World Exhibition, when his design for the German

pavilion, incorporating an eagle holding a wreathed swastika

in its claws, seemingly looking down in triumph on the

Soviet exhibition opposite, won the approval both of Hitler

and the exhibition judges, who rewarded Speer’s effort with

the gold medal.

In January 1938 Hitler asked Speer to build a new

Reich chancellery, with the specification that it had to be

completed within twelve months. Speer’s ability as an

Figure 11.46 Speer’s ‘cathedral of light’ formed by hundreds of searchlights pointing vertically to give the impression of huge columns surrounding the rally grounds.

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organiser now became clear. Using the best tradesmen

and having several building firms working simultaneously

on different parts of the building, the deadline was met.

In January 1939 the new building was opened and Hitler,

greatly pleased with the result, declared Speer a ‘genius’.

The chancellery was intended to demonstrate the might

of the Reich. Visitors could gain access to Hitler’s office only

by walking along an imposing marble gallery almost 150

metres in length. The building was decorated with heroic,

muscle-bound sculptures representing ‘party’ and ‘army’.

GermaniaIn 1937 Speer was handed the most ambitious architectural

project of his career: to rebuild Berlin, to be renamed

Germania, as the capital of the new Reich. The whole project

was the brainchild of Hitler who, in subsequent years, spent

many hours going over the designs of the new city with

Speer. A start was made by clearing away 52 000 flats in

the centre of Berlin to make way for one of the imposing

avenues of the new capital.

Figure 11.47 The centre of Germania. The arch in the centre would contain the names of all 1.8 million Germans who had died in the First World War.



Speer as minister of armaments and munitionsAt the start of the war, Fritz Todt had been appointed as minister of armaments and munitions.

He had already built up a massive organisation for the construction of public works and defences.

On 8 February 1942, Todt was killed in a plane crash and Speer was named as his successor.

Speer threw himself enthusiastically into his new role. He found that after two and a half years

of war the German workforce was riddled with inefficiencies. Some factories still operated single

shifts, and too many resources were being diverted to non-essential consumer production. In April

1942, Speer established a central planning board, which he called ‘the most important war economy

measure of all’, and which controlled the allocation of raw materials and planning decisions for new

plants. Speer pushed through a program of rationalisation, which trebled armaments output in three

years with a relatively small increase of resources, despite the loss of millions of workers to the armed

forces. This loss would have been greater without the introduction of a system of reserved occupations,

which gave exemptions from military service to the most important skilled men. In July 1943 he

established the Ruhr staff: a taskforce whose job it was to organise the restitution of damaged plant

and workers’ accommodation in this heavily bombed industrial area.

Obstacles to efficiencyOn 12 July 1943, Speer sent a memorandum to Hitler urging the use of more women for the war effort:

However, the Nazis’ conservative ideology still opposed maximising the use of women for war work,

and Speer had to turn to forced labour from the camps and conquered countries for his workforce.

Another source of opposition was the Gauleiters. These Nazi regional leaders were antagonistic

towards Speer’s attempts to impose a central control of resources, particularly when it took resources

away from their own Gaus. As late as 1943 Speer was still pressing for the closure of non-essential

plants, in the face of opposition from the local Gauleiter.

AchievementsThe transformation in armaments output between 1941–42 and 1944–45 was remarkable. The higher

production was achieved in the face of intensified Allied bombing of industrial plants.

1941 1942 1943 1944

Combat aircraft (Germany) 11 030 14 700 25 220 37 950

Combat aircraft (Britain) 20 100 23 600 26 200 26 500

Source: D. van der Vat, The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer, 1997, p. 178.

By August 1944 Speer was responsible for the whole of German war economy, with fourteen

million workers under his direction. It was Speer who, by a remarkable feat of organisation, patched

up bombed communications and factories, and somehow maintained the bare minimum of transport

and production, without which the war on the German side would have come to a standstill. His efforts

enabled Germany to stay in the war for another year or possibly two.

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His relationship with HitlerSpeer had worked very closely with Hitler on architectural

matters. He was one of the few ministers allowed direct

access to the Führer. Speer was later to say, partly perhaps

as an excuse for his actions, that Hitler’s charisma cast a

spell over his subordinates: ‘I noticed during my activities

as architect, that to be in his presence for any length of

time made me tired, exhausted and void. Capacity for

independent work was paralysed’ (Bullock 1993). Illness kept

him away from the Führer’s headquarters from February to

June 1944, but on his return he became alarmed at the price

which Germany was being made to pay to prolong the war.

Hitler’s destruction ordersThe collapse of the German Ardennes offensive in December

1944 and the Russian offensive in January 1945 convinced

Speer that the war was lost. Hitler, however, was determined

to destroy Germany rather than admit defeat. On 15 March

1945, in response to Hitler’s ideas of a ‘scorched earth policy’

for Germany, Speer drew up a memorandum in which he

argued that Germany’s final collapse was certain within

weeks, and that the overriding obligation of Germany’s Figure 11.48 Speer in conversation with Hitler

DOCUMENT STUDY: AN ASSESSMENT OF ALBERT SPEER

Source 11.26

Galbraith [J. K. Galbraith, an interrogator at Nuremberg], is … scathing about Speer’s claims to have frustrated Hitler’s scorched-earth decree almost single handed and to have plotted to gas him … These stories, Galbraith thought, had gained much in the telling and contained major elements of fantasy. So, he felt, did Speer’s claims about the German war economy, whose exponential growth had been from a very small base and did not surpass a smaller Britain’s until 1944. All this, and Speer’s carefully nuanced candour, were part and parcel of his ‘well devised strategy of self-vindication and survival’.

D. van der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer, 1997, p. 241.

Source 11.27

By the time he took over responsibility for the war economy, Germany was fighting for its life and Speer [was] in his element, as a crisis manager and … problem solver. But even he could not make up for Hitler’s earlier, Blitzkrieg-based ‘short-termism’ and could only achieve too little, too late, even when building up production so spectacularly (if from a small base). He was also as responsible as Hitler himself for some immensely wasteful diversions of scarce resources, such as the V2 project, as well as for the suffering of millions forced to work for him—and the tens of thousands of Jews he had directly caused to be thrown on the streets of Berlin in the first stage of a journey that usually ended in murder.

D. van der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer, 1997, p. 366.

DOCUMENT S TUDY QUEST IONS

1 What comment does Galbraith make in Source 11.26 about Speer’s economic claims?

2 What claims by Speer does Galbraith dismiss as fantasy?

3 What qualities of Speer are mentioned in Source 11.27?

4 What criticisms of Speer are made in Source 11.27?



rulers was to ensure that the German people should be left with some possibility of reconstructing

their lives in the future. Hitler did not agree and issued orders for the scorched-earth policy. Noakes

comments that ‘Speer’s determination to thwart the destruction of German industry was motivated

partly by a genuine concern for the future of the German people and partly, no doubt, by an attempt

to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of Germany’s conquerors’ (Noakes, 1998, p. 659).

Speer devoted himself in the final months of the war to preserving as much as possible of

Germany’s industrial base. He flew into the blockaded Ruhr and persuaded the Wehrmacht not to

destroy the bridges, railways and other installations or encourage the enemy to destroy them by

using them as defensive positions. He organised stockpiles of food and other essentials in Berlin and

elsewhere, persuading many individual commanders to refrain from an orgy of destruction, not only in

Germany but also in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Speer devoted all his efforts to saving

everything he could. But for him, thousands of bridges, waterways, telegraphic and power facilities

would have been blown up.

Speer’s refusal to carry out Hitler’s scorched-earth policy completed the break with the Führer. In

Hitler’s last testament, written just before his suicide, Speer was replaced as minister for armaments.

The Nuremberg trialsAt the Nuremberg trials, Speer claimed to have been detached from the politics of the Reich. He was,

he said, first and foremost an architect and an organiser, but he was disinterested in party politics and

ignorant of the excesses of the Nazi regime, particularly in relation to the fate of the Jews. Nonetheless,

as a minister in Hitler’s government he admitted a shared responsibility for what had been done and

expressed his contrition. He even claimed to have formulated a plan to assassinate Hitler. Convicted

of ‘Crimes against Humanity’ and ‘War Crimes’, primarily for his role in the use of forced labour, Speer’s

expressions of regret and acceptance of responsibility allowed him to escape the death penalty,

receiving instead a sentence of twenty years imprisonment.

Speer in SpandauFor a time, Speer and his fellow prisoners—Raeder, Doenitz, Funk, Neurath, von Schirach and Hess—

were held at Nuremberg until their transfer to Spandau prison, Berlin, on 18 July 1947.

Speer’s account of these years appeared in 1975 in Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Despite a prohibition

on the keeping of diaries, Speer managed to smuggle out more than 20 000 pages of notes, some by

way of letters, others on cardboard and even sheets of toilet paper. In this enterprise he was assisted

over the years by friendly prison workers. The opportunity first arose on 14 October 1947 when a young

Dutch prison employee Toni Proost (referred to as Anton Vlaer in the diaries) offered to smuggle letters

for Speer. Proost had been a wartime labour conscript in Berlin. When he became ill he had been taken

to a hospital for construction workers, which Speer had established, and been well treated. Now he

wished to repay Speer.

The smuggled writings found their way to Rudolf Wolters, an old friend and architectural colleague

of Speer, who had them typed into a manuscript ready for Speer’s eventual release. Wolters was

determined to help his friend in other ways. He later smuggled a small camera into Spandau for

Speer’s use, but his major contribution came with the setting up of a ‘school fee account’, designed

to support Speer’s family during his imprisonment. Many contemporaries of Speer had risen to

important positions in government and industry in post-war Germany and were willing to contribute

to the fund.

Speer had to devise ways to keep his diary writings secret, as discovery would mean confiscation of

the notes, and punishment for him. One method he used in his cell was to keep the top button of his

trousers undone so that he could shove his writing paper into his underpants if disturbed. This was also

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where he kept his reserve stock of paper (supplied by Proost)

and letters awaiting answer. Using bandages he sometimes

needed for a swollen leg, he closed the bottom of his

underpants to prevent anything falling out.

Conditions in Spandau were severe. The prisoners,

referred to only by their number (Speer was number five),

were not permitted to speak to each other, a restriction that

was not eased until 1954. The four Allied powers—Britain,

the USA, France and the Soviet Union—took turns to guard

the prisoners, and though it was true that the Russian

periods were generally regarded as times of poorer food,

friendly and unfriendly guards could be found from among

all the nations. Exercise was taken in the prison yard, and

eventually the prisoners were allowed to cultivate a garden.

In 1954 Speer adopted the idea of walking the distance from

Berlin to Heidelberg (626 kilometres), having marked out a

course in the exercise yard. By 1955 he had completed the

journey and, encouraged by Hess, planned a ‘walk around

the world’, a feat which led him, by his own calculations, to

cover 31 936 kilometres by the time of his release in 1966.

Family visits were restricted and closely supervised by

officials. The first visit from his wife at Spandau was in June

1949. Speer’s work in the Nazi regime meant that he had

lost contact with his family, a situation exacerbated by his

imprisonment. This first visit lasted for one hour and with

touching forbidden, not a word passed between them. Only

in 1961, for the first time in sixteen years, did the guards

step out of the room, leaving Speer alone with his wife. Not

knowing how to react, Speer automatically stuck to the rules

and did not take her hand or embrace her.

In his prison memoirs Speer commented on his

relationship with Hitler. In 1947 he reflected that ‘my

relationship to him far more resembled that of an architect

towards an admired patron than of a follower towards

a political leader’ (Speer 1976, p. 81), while in 1949 he

commented on opinions in a book about Hitler which a

guard had shown him: ‘They remind me of a remark my

associate Karl Maria Hettlage made after Hitler had paid an

evening visit to my studio, that I was Hitler’s unrequited love.’

(Speer, 1976, p. 139)

As for his culpability for Nazi war crimes, Speer recalled

touring the country with Hitler but claimed not to have

noticed the various anti-Semitic slogans on signs and

streamers strung across the road in welcome. ‘Even in the

light of the strictest self-examination, I must say that I was

not an anti-Semite,’ he added (Speer 1976, p. 23), claiming

that Hitler toned down his anti-Semitic rhetoric in Speer’s

presence and that ‘in my official speeches I refrained from

participating in the campaign against the Jews’. In 1960 he

wrote: ‘Like almost all of us, I thought Hitler’s anti-Semitism

a somewhat vulgar incidental, a hangover from his days in

Vienna … Moreover, the anti-Semitic slogans also seemed

to me a tactical device for whipping up the instincts of the

masses. I never thought them really important, certainly not

compared with the plans for conquest, or even with our vast

projects for rebuilding the cities.’ (Speer 1976, p. 353)

Speer’s relations with his fellow prisoners were never

easy. He alleged that they sided against him because

of his attitude at Nuremberg and, although they would

speak to him, he regarded himself as an ‘outcast among

prisoners’. In addition, Doenitz continually blamed Speer

for recommending him to Hitler as successor, a fact which

Doenitz blamed for the length of his sentence. Gradually

the prisoners left Spandau. In November 1954 Neurath

was released early because of ill health. Raeder and Funk

followed in September 1955 and May 1957 for the same

reason. Meanwhile, Doenitz had been released in October

1956, having completed his sentence. At midnight on

30 September 1966, Speer and Schirach were released,

leaving Rudolf Hess as the only prisoner in Spandau until

his death, officially by suicide, in 1987. The prison was then

demolished.

Figure 11.49 Speer in Spandau prison



After SpandauPrior to his release, Speer had entertained hopes of reviving his architectural skills in a new business,

but the death of two former colleagues who had offered him work ended that possibility. He found

relations with his family difficult and even fell out with his old friend Wolters. With the publication of his

books Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries he became a much sought after interviewee

for press articles and film documentaries on Hitler’s Germany.

At the end of August 1981, he was in London for an interview with the BBC. Suffering a stroke in his

hotel, he died on the evening of 1 September.

Significance and evaluationThe central question in any historical evaluation of Albert Speer is: Was Albert Speer the ‘Good Nazi’,

essentially an honourable man who became involved in the workings of the Nazi government without

any knowledge of, or involvement in, its excesses? Or was he a committed follower of Hitler who, although

not directly linked to the worst aspects of the regime, knew of these excesses and, if on a lesser scale than

others, played a part in perpetrating them, only to use his undoubted intelligence and seemingly modest

personality to convince the Nuremberg judges that he was not deserving of the death penalty?

Given that twelve of the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg received the death sentence, and a

further three life imprisonment, Speer’s sentence was mild by comparison. Why? It was a question of

responsibility, knowledge and contrition.

Speer, alone among the defendants, admitted responsibility for the crimes of the Reich, but only

in a limited and general way. In his Nuremberg testimony Speer claimed ‘A state functionary has two

types of responsibility. One is the responsibility for his own sector and for that, of course, he is fully

responsible … The common responsibility, however, can only be applied to fundamental matters, it

cannot be applied to details connected with other ministries or departments.’ This conduct, by which

Speer accepted a general responsibility for the actions of the government of which he was a member,

while at the same time denying any knowledge or involvement in Nazi brutalities, earned a grudging

admiration at Nuremberg.

Any attempt to evaluate the life of Albert Speer must go back through the stages of his involvement

with Nazism, beginning with his early links to the party.

Joining the partyWhen the rising politician Hitler spoke to a crowd of students, including Speer, on 4 December 1930,

he spoke calmly and reasonably, tailoring his address to the young, enthusiastic, but also educated

listeners. Speer was captivated by this speaker and in March 1931 he joined the Nazi Party. He later gave

three reasons for joining: he was motivated by the fear of communism; he was fascinated by Hitler, the

man, though not his political program, of which Speer claimed to know little; he rejected the notion of

German war guilt pronounced at Versailles.

In his book Inside the Third Reich, Speer describes his decision to join the party as ‘frivolous’:

On this point, it is difficult to judge Speer. He joined the Nazis, but so did many others at the time

of the Depression. Dan van der Vat suggests that it is only the committed who join a party long before

it is elected to office, as opposed to the ‘bandwagon’ effect the Nazis experienced after January 1933.

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In his view Speer’s becoming member 474 481 (from an

eventual total of approximately seven million) was an act of

commitment, not frivolity. However, as Kershaw points out,

the electoral success of September 1930 was the political

breakthrough that meant that many of the ‘respectable’

middle class felt ready to join the party.

Speer as architectSpeer frequently claimed that he was first and foremost

an architect and was therefore immune from and ignorant

of the developing evils of the Nazi regime going on

around him. It is with the beginnings of his work on

Germania that a question mark appears over Speer’s

record of his own history. Speer was formally appointed as

inspector-general of construction for the Reich capital (GBI)

in January 1937.

Germania, the new capital for the anticipated ‘thousand-

year Reich’ was to be built on the site of Berlin. It was to be

filled with grandiose buildings, statues and fountains in the

classical style. Though the war intervened to ensure that

Germania was never completed (only some ornate streetlights

survived as a testimony to Speer’s grand designs), the work

was begun and one of the first tasks was the creation of a

wide avenue in central Berlin.

To make space for this construction, thousands of old

apartment blocks were demolished. Some of the occupants

of these flats were good Aryan Germans but several

thousand were Jews. To rehouse the Aryans, Speer’s men

combed the capital in search of flats occupied by Jews.

When found, the occupants were turned out, often with only

an hour’s notice. Documents have been found that clearly

show that Speer threatened any landlords with punishment

if they rented out a vacant flat to Jews. In August 1941, on

Speer’s orders, action was taken to clear a further 5000 ‘Jew

flats’ for the rehousing of demolition tenants. This work was

not an example of Speer carrying out Hitler’s orders—the

evictions were done at Speer’s command.

How did Speer respond to the issue of the Jew flats

at Nuremberg? He didn’t—because he wasn’t asked. All

he would concede at Nuremberg was that he knew in an

overall sense that Jews were evacuated from Germany, while

denying any personal involvement in that process. The ‘Jew

flats’ affair shows that he did, at the very least, send many of

them on the first steps of the journey which was to lead to

the ghettos, concentration camps and death. The evidence

about the ‘Jew flats’ evictions did not emerge until after the

Nuremberg trials. In later years, Speer denied all knowledge

of the issue.

Speer and anti-SemitismAnti-Semitism was one of the watchwords of the Nazi

regime and led to some of its worst excesses. Was Speer

as anti-Semitic as the rest, or was he untouched by that

particular prejudice?

In his books, Speer repeatedly claims that he was not

anti-Semitic, pointing out that he had Jewish friends from

his school and university days. Yet in one of his letters to

Hilde, his daughter, who corresponded with him throughout

his imprisonment, he later wrote about Jews: ‘I really had

no aversion to them, or rather, no more than that slight

discomfort all of us sometimes felt when in contact with them.’

(authors’ italics)

As we have seen above, in the Spandau diaries Speer

again declared an absence of personal anti-Semitism and a

failure to grasp its importance to Hitler.

Speer and HitlerIn his early years as Nazi architect, Speer formed a close

relationship with Hitler. Gita Sereny calls the relationship

‘almost erotic’, Hitler referred to Speer as a ‘genius’ and Speer

reports himself as being ‘Hitler’s unrequited love’.

Figure 11.50 All that remains of Speer’s Germania: a few street lights in central Berlin



They spent hours poring over designs together, sharing the same pencil, as one report has it, to

correct and amend their joint formulations. In the later years of the Reich, Speer is usually credited with

being the second most powerful man after Hitler. Only Speer, Bormann and Goering were allowed to

have a house inside the three-kilometre inner security fence at the Berghof.

It is known that Hitler liked to keep his subordinates guessing, and issued no written orders about the

Holocaust, but is it likely that a man so close to Hitler would be as unaware of the anti-Semitic agenda

as he claimed to be? Historians such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen have suggested that the German

population as a whole knew a lot more about the anti-Semitic policies and deeds of the Nazis than has

previously been credited. How then, in Speer’s case, can one so important have remained so ignorant?

The use of forced labourThe single most specific issue that helped to bring Speer a prison sentence was the use of forced

labour in his efforts to boost war production. And yet, even here, critics might argue that he got off

lightly. At Nuremberg Speer admitted that he knew the workforce for his labour camps was brought

into Germany against their will and that he approved of that, though when faced with the evidence of

how they had been transported—jammed into cattle trucks—he alleged that he knew nothing about

transport conditions. Later in his testimony, when Mr Justice Jackson asked him about the working

conditions of the forced labour, he said that this was not in his sphere of responsibility and he couldn’t

be expected to remember any details of them.

In the Harz Mountains of southern Germany lay the Dora camp. In twenty kilometres of tunnels dug

deep into the mountains to avoid Allied bombers, 40 000 workers slaved to build the V2 rockets. One in

three died in the hellish conditions. The workers worked for eighteen hours a day, slept underground,

had no heating, ventilation or running water, and used half-barrels for toilets. They saw the sky once a

week at roll call. Speer inspected conditions at the Dora camp at the end of 1943. According to Fest,

Speer noted the stale, damp air reeking with excrement and was himself made dizzy by the lack of

oxygen. Some of his companions on the inspection were so overwhelmed by what they saw that they

had to go on leave to recover from the stress. Presumably it was small details like this that he ‘could not

be expected to remember’ two years later. As Lord Shawcross, the British prosecutor, would complain

long after the Nuremberg sentence had been handed down, Fritz Saukel, Speer’s subordinate, was

hanged for his role in the slave labour system for carrying out Speer’s orders—why wasn’t Speer?

The concentration campsIn assessing Speer’s complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime it is important to understand what he

knew of the concentration camps, and when.

In Inside the Third Reich he speaks of a meeting with his friend Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of lower

Silesia, which took place in the summer of 1944.

And what was Speer’s reaction to this piece of news?

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It is for this deliberate blindness that Speer condemns himself at Nuremberg and assumes a share of

the responsibility for the worst actions of the Nazi government. It is as if he is saying ‘You cannot blame

me for being involved, because I did not know. I blame myself for not seeking to know.’

What did Speer know about the concentration camps? Only one visit by Speer to a concentration

camp is recorded—to Mauthausen in Austria in March 1943. In a letter to Himmler written shortly

afterwards (April 1943), he complained about the ‘luxurious’ constructions he found there (he was

referring to the prisoners’ barracks) and urged that the SS switch to more primitive construction

methods involving ‘minimal material and labour’. Mauthausen, bad as it was, was not one of the

extermination camps that were at the centre of the ‘Final Solution’. So did he really have no idea of the

Polish camps until he talked with Hanke?

His claim to have known nothing about the Final Solution is questionable. At a meeting in Posen,

Poland, on 6 October 1943, Speer and Himmler addressed assembled Gauleiters. In the morning,

Speer warned them not to obstruct his attempts to reduce the output of consumer goods. After

lunch Himmler divulged the ‘secret’ of the Final Solution. Speer later claimed that he had left the

meeting before Himmler spoke and remained unaware of the details of Himmler’s speech. Details of

this meeting emerged into public knowledge long after the Nuremberg trials had concluded. Even

if Speer’s excuse is accepted at face value, are we expected to believe that none of Speer’s friends or

colleagues who had heard Himmler saw fit to mention the speech in Speer’s presence in the weeks

and months that followed, until he had his talk with Hanke some nine months later?

In 1977 Speer engaged in correspondence with a South African Jewish organisation. In a long letter

he wrote: ‘To this day I still consider my main guilt to be my tacit acceptance of the persecution and

the murder of millions of Jews’ (Fest 2002, p. 333). Surely ‘tacit acceptance’ implies knowledge of, if not

necessarily involvement in, the ‘Final Solution’?

In an interview in 1979, Speer, referring to Himmler’s speech, said ‘indeed he said that it was a secret

which we had to take with us to the grave; we dared not say anything about it to anyone’. Dan van der

Vat suggests that the use of ‘we’ in this context is significant, a verbal slip which implies that Speer had

been present (van der Vat 1997, p. 169).

The Wolters chronicleInformation relating to Speer and his activities was only partial at the time of the Nuremberg trials. One

of the most intriguing aspects to subsequently emerge in exploring the enigma that was Albert Speer

is the story of the Wolters chronicle.

Dr Rudolf Wolters was, like Speer, an architect. They had met in the 1920s, and when Speer was

appointed as inspector-general of construction for the Reich capital he recruited Wolters as one of his

department heads.

In 1940, Wolters suggested to Speer that he should compile a chronicle (or history) of the work of

the GBI. Speer agreed and gave orders to his department heads to cooperate in its formulation. It is in

the Chronicle that Wolters wrote the details of the clearance of the Jew flats.

Had the Chronicle been known about at the time of Nuremberg, containing as it did the details of

the anti-Jewish actions ordered by Speer, there seems little doubt that Speer would have been hanged.

Wolters kept what he presumed was the only copy of the Chronicle with him. In 1964 he decided

to revise it, principally to remove certain parts that would incriminate Speer and one or two of his

colleagues. The Chronicle was retyped and a copy of the edited version sent to Speer. Wolters kept the

original. In 1966 the British historian David Irving made reference to the Chronicle in one of his books.

His source, Wolters thought, was probably notes made by a colleague in the GBI, a Dr Groener.



In 1969, Speer presented his copy of the edited Chronicle

to the German Federal Archive and was panic-stricken to

receive a request for the original for purposes of comparison.

Speer wrote to Wolters and strongly hinted that he

should destroy the incriminating pages in the original

but, by this time, the friendship between the two had

cooled. Wolters had grown increasingly unhappy at Speer’s

condemnation of the Nazi years and his criticisms of

Hitler. When Inside the Third Reich was published, Wolters

observed: ‘A more thrilling crime novel could not have been

invented.’ (Fest 2002, p. 328). As van Der Vat comments:

‘Wolters could not bring himself to blow the whistle while

both he and Speer were alive, but he made sure that his

own … cleansing of the Chronicle and Speer’s plan to

destroy the suppressed evidence of his crimes against the

Jews … would inescapably become known’ (van der Vat,

p. 348). Following the death of Wolters in January 1983 the

complete Chronicle was deposited in the German Federal

Archive at Koblenz.

The closing phase of the warIn his memoirs, even while admitting his limited

responsibility, Speer managed to insert references to

‘whatever good I may have done or tried to do in the last

period of the war’ (Speer 1995, p. 507). What was this ‘good’,

and does it tip the balance back towards the figure of the

reluctant ‘Gentleman Nazi’ whose eyes were opened to the

horrors of the regime he served?

Speer’s relationship with Hitler began to deteriorate

early in 1944 when illness kept him away from the Führer’s

headquarters from February until June. By the beginning

of 1945, Speer was convinced that the war was lost. Hitler,

however, was determined to destroy Germany rather than

admit defeat.

According to Speer’s testimony at Nuremberg, he hatched

a plot to kill Hitler in February 1945 by introducing poison

gas to the Führer’s bunker via a ventilation shaft that lay at

ground level in the chancellery garden. He was thwarted, so he

claimed, because in the time taken to obtain the gas, armed SS

guards had been posted on nearby roofs and the ventilation

shaft at ground level had become a chimney over three metres

high. Having ‘reluctantly’ given the Nuremberg judges the

details of the assassination attempt, it could only have served

to incline the judges more favourably towards him. But is the

story true? We only have Speer’s word for it, and others have

observed rather cynically that the second most powerful man

in the Reich seemed unable to find a ladder!

This assassination attempt, combined with Speer’s efforts

to thwart Hitler’s scorched-earth policy after March 1945,

may be taken at face value as Speer’s attempt to rescue

as much as he could from this lost cause for the benefit of

future Germans. However, we have seen all through this

study that there were two sides to Albert Speer. If this was,

as Noakes alleges, merely a rehabilitation attempt, it came to

its climax at Nuremberg. And though twenty years in prison

is not to be ignored, Speer did save his neck and enjoy his

rehabilitation as the ‘Gentleman Nazi’.

Long after his death, Albert Speer remains an enigma.

The only leading Nazi to accept responsibility for the crimes

of the regime and a man who accepted his punishment

without rancour, he has been admired as an essentially

decent man who was swept away by his surroundings, saw

the error of his ways, and paid the price. Yet if this were the

case, surely he would wish, if he could have his time again,

to alter the past? When Speer was asked whether he would

have behaved differently after all that he had since learned

about Hitler and the system created by him, he replied, after

a pause: ‘I don’t think so.’ (Fest 2002, p. 348)

PERSONAL I TY S TUDY REV I EW QUEST IONS

1 What were Speer’s achievements as an architect?

2 List the different positions that Speer held in the Nazi leadership and the dates when he was appointed to those positions.

3 Outline Speer’s achievements in his wartime ministerial roles.

4 What factors hindered Speer in his wartime work?

5. Using the evidence provided, assess Speer’s relationship with Hitler.

4 What are the contentious issues that concern Speer in his wartime role?

6 From what you have read, how do you assess Speer’s role in Hitler’s Reich? Was the Nuremberg verdict fair?