Albert speer
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer (Mannheim, March 19, 1905-London, September 1, 1981), known as Albert Speer, was an architect German who served as Nazi Germany's Minister of Armaments and War Production for much of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
An architect by training, Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1930 or 1931. Also in 1931 he joined the SA. His knowledge of architecture allowed him to stand out within the party[quote required] and became a member of Hitler's closest circle. The Führer commissioned him to design and build buildings such as the Reich Chancellery and the Field Zeppelin for the Nuremberg Congresses. In 1937 Hitler appointed him General Inspector of Buildings in Berlin, a position from which he was in charge of the Central Resettlement Department, which evicted Jewish owners from their homes in the German capital. In February 1942, Speer was appointed Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Using doctored statistics, he touted himself as responsible for the "arms miracle" that kept Germany in the war. In 1944 he created a task force to increase the production of combat aircraft. He was also one of the main perpetrators in the exploitation of forced laborers for the benefit of the German war effort.
After the war, Speer was among twenty-four "major war criminals" arrested and charged with the crimes of the Nazi regime at the Nuremberg trials. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, notably for employing forced laborers, narrowly escaping the death penalty. After serving his entire sentence, he was released in 1966. He used his prison writings as the basis for two autobiographical books, Memoirs: Hitler and the Third Reich as Seen from Within and Diary of Spandau. His books were a success because readers were fascinated by getting an inside look at the Third Reich. Albert Speer died of a stroke during a visit to London in 1981. Very little of his architectural work has survived.
Through his autobiographies and interviews, Speer carefully constructed an image of himself as a man who deeply regretted not uncovering the monstrous crimes of the Third Reich. He continued to deny explicit knowledge of and responsibility for the Holocaust, an image of him that dominated historiography in the decades after the war, during which "The Speer Myth" was created: he was seen as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionizing the german war machine The myth began to unravel in the 1980s, when the weapons miracle was blamed on Nazi propaganda. British historian Adam Tooze wrote that the idea that Speer was an apolitical technocrat was "absurd", while Martin Kitchen stated that much of the increase in Germany's arms production was actually due to systems created by his predecessor. Fritz Todt and, furthermore, that Speer was intimately involved in the "Final Solution".
Early Years
Albert Speer was born in Mannheim to a wealthy upper-middle-class family, the second of three children born to Luise Máthilde Wilhelmine (Hommel) and Albert Friedrich Speer. In 1918 the family leased their residence in Mannheim and he moved into a house they owned in Heidelberg. According to Henry T. King, assistant prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials who later wrote a book about Speer, "love and warmth were in short supply in Speer's youth home." He was bullied as a child by his brothers Ernst and Hermann. Speer was an active sportsman who practiced skiing and mountaineering. He followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and studied architecture.
He began his architectural studies at the University of Karlsruhe instead of a more prestigious institution because of the hyperinflation crisis of 1923, which limited his parents' income. The following year, with the relief of the crisis, he transferred to the "much more reputable" Technical University of Munich and in 1925 he transferred again, this time to the Technical University of Berlin, where he studied under Heinrich Tessenow, whom Speer admired. After passing his exams at In 1927, Speer became Tessenow's assistant, a great honor at age 22 because he was able to teach some of Tessenow's classes while continuing his graduate studies. In Munich and Berlin he began a close friendship that would last half a century with Rudolf Wolters, who also studied with Tessenow.
In mid-1922 Speer began courting Margarete (Margret) Weber (1905–1987), the daughter of a prosperous industrialist who employed 50 workers. This relationship was not approved by the class consciousness of her mother, who felt that the Webers were lower class, despite which the couple married in Berlin on August 28, 1928; it was seven years before Margarete Speer was invited to stay with her in-laws. The couple had six children, but Speer increasingly distanced himself from his family after 1933 and also after his release from prison in 1966, despite the his efforts to forge closer ties.
Party architect and government official
Join the party (1931-1934)
In January 1931, Speer applied for membership in the Nazi Party and, on March 1, 1931, became its 474,481st member. That same year, with stipends dwindling amid the Great Depression, he resigned. to his position as Tessenow's assistant and moved to Mannheim, hoping to make a living as an architect. Failing in this endeavor, his father gave her a part-time job as manager of his property. In July 1932, the Speers visited Berlin to give support to the Party before the Reichstag elections and while they were there their friend, Nazi party official Karl Hanke, recommended the young architect to Joseph Goebbels to help renovate the headquarters of the Speers. party in Berlin. When he completed this commission, Speer returned to Mannheim while Hitler took over as Chancellor in January 1933.
The organizers of the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg in 1933 called Speer to present his designs and put him in contact with Hitler for the first time. Neither the organizers nor Rudolf Hess were willing to decide which plan was approved, so Hess sent Speer to Hitler's apartment in Munich to seek his approval. This job gave him his first national post as "Commissioner for Artistic Presentation and Technique of Party Congresses and Demonstrations".
Shortly after coming to power, Hitler began making plans to rebuild the chancellery and in late 1933 hired Paul Troost to renovate the entire building and Speer, whose work for Goebbels had impressed him, to manage the works. Chancellor, Hitler had a residence in the building and came every day to be briefed by Speer on the progress of the construction. After one of these meetings, Hitler invited him to lunch, much to the architect's excitement. He quickly became part of Hitler's inner circle, awaiting the chancellor's call in the morning to walk or chat, offer advice on architectural matters. and discuss your ideas. Most days he was invited to dinner.
In his memoirs Speer claims the Nazi party offered him a "new mission" and in an interview with William Hamsher he said he joined the party to "save Germany from communism." After the war, he claimed to have had little interest in politics and that he had joined it almost by chance. Like many of those who held power in the Third Reich, he was not an ideologue, but "an instinctive anti-Semite". of his anti-Semitic actions and that, throughout his life, his motivations were to accumulate power, rule and acquire wealth.
Nazi architect (1934-1937)
On Troost's death on January 21, 1934, Speer replaced him as the party's chief architect. Hitler appointed him head of the Main Construction Office, a position with which he nominally entered Rudolf Hess's team. One of his first assignments after Troost's death was Field Zeppelin, the military parade ground featured in the Leni Riefenstahl's documentary Triumph of the Will and which had a capacity for 340,000 people. Speer insisted that as many shows as possible be held at night both to enhance lighting effects and to hide to members of the Nazi Party, many of whom were overweight. Nuremberg was home to many of the official Nazi Party buildings, but some were never built, such as the Deutsches Stadion, which could have accommodated to 400,000 spectators. He modified Werner March's plans for the Olympic Stadium for the 1936 Berlin Olympics by adding a stone exterior that Hitler liked. He also designed the German pavilion for the World Expo International Building in Paris in 1937. While planning these structures, he invented the theory of "ruin value" – Die Ruinenwerttheorie –: the building is not only built to be used by its contemporaries, but also to arouse the admiration of those who will find it in the vestigial state a thousand years later.
General Building Inspector of Berlin (1937-1942)
In 1937 Hitler appointed Speer General Inspector of Buildings in the Reich capital with the rank of Under-Secretary of State in the Reich government. This position gave extraordinary powers over the government of the city of Berlin and made it responsible only to Hitler. It also made the architect a member of the Reichstag, although this body then had very little effective power. The chancellor ordered him to draw up plans to rebuild Berlin as the capital of the world, Welthauptstadt Germania. Speer drew up a layout that was based on a five-kilometre long avenue that ran from north to south and that the architect called Prachtstrasse, the Street of Magnificence, or also the "North-South Axis". At the north end of this avenue he arranged the Volkshalle, a huge assembly building enclosed by a gigantic dome over 200 meters high and with interior space for 180 000 people. At the southern end of the avenue would be a triumphal arch, also of colossal proportions, at least 120 meters high and capable of containing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The existing main railway station was to be demolished and two other large stations were to be erected in its place. He hired Wolters to his design team and gave him special responsibility for designing Prachtstrasse. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 forced these plans to be postponed and eventually abandoned.
Since 1934 the construction of a new Reich Chancellery had been planned. The land was acquired at the end of 1934 and at the beginning of March 1936 some buildings were demolished to widen the street Voßstraße. Speer was virtually involved in this project. After the Night of the Long Knives he had been commissioned to renovate Borsig Palace at the corner of Voßstraße and Wilhelmstraße as the headquarters of the SA. Preliminary work for the new chancellery they were complete by May 1936. In June of that year the architect collected a personal fee of 30,000 Reichsmark and estimated that the chancellery would be completed within three to four years. Detailed plans were ready in July 1937, and the first structure was completed on January 1, 1938. Shortly thereafter, on January 27, Speer was given full power by Hitler to have the new chancellery completed by the deadline of January 1. on January 2, 1939. For propaganda purposes, Hitler claimed during the completion ceremony on August 2, 1938 that he had ordered Speer to finish the chancellorship that year. Due to a labor shortage, Speer forced the workers to leave. work in two shifts of ten and twelve hours. The Schutzstaffel (SS) built two concentration camps in 1938 and forced the inmates to extract stones for their construction. At Speer's urging, a brickyard was built near the Oranienburg concentration camp; when told of the poor condition of the site, the architect said, "The Jews got used to making bricks when they were slaves to the Egyptians." The chancellery was completed in early January 1939, and the building was hailed by Hitler as "the crowning glory of the great German political empire".
_1b.jpg)
During the project for the new chancellery, the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) pogrom took place. Speer made no mention of this event in the first draft of his Memoirs, and it was only after urgent notice from his editor that he added a note stating that he saw from his car the ruins of the Central Synagogue of Berlin. Kristallnacht accelerated Speer's efforts to evict Berlin's Jews from their homes. From 1939 onwards the Department he headed applied the Nuremberg Laws to evict Jewish tenants in Berlin, in order to make room for non-Jewish tenants displaced by redevelopment or bombing. Ultimately, 75,000 Jews were displaced by these measures. Speer denied that he knew they were being loaded onto the Holocaust trains, stating that the displaced were "completely free and their families were still in their apartments". He also said: "...on my way to my ministry on the highway from the city, I could see... crowds of people on the platforms of the nearby Nikolassee Railway Station. He knew that these must be Jews from Berlin who were being evacuated. I'm sure an oppressive feeling hit me in passing. Presumably I sensed dark events". The German historian Matthias Schmidt claimed that Speer himself inspected concentration camps and described his accounts as "an utter farce". Martin Kitchen wrote that Speer often hollowly repeated that he knew nothing of the "terrible things", because he was not only fully aware of the fate of the Jews, but was also an active participant in their persecution.
When Germany broke out World War II in Europe, Speer set up quick reaction squads to build roads or clear rubble. He used forced laborers for these jobs alongside free German workers. Construction work stopped. in Berlin and Nuremberg with the outbreak of the war. Although storage of materials and other work continued, this too stopped as more resources were needed for the arms industry. Speer's offices undertook construction work for each branch of the army and for the SS using forced labor. The construction business made him one of the wealthiest members of the Nazi elite.
Minister of Armaments
Appointment and growing power
On February 8, 1942, Minister of Armaments Fritz Todt died in a plane crash shortly after taking off from Hitler's eastern headquarters in Rastenburg. Speer, who had arrived in Rastenburg the night before, had accepted Todt's offer to fly with him to Berlin, but canceled a few hours before takeoff because he had been up late in a late-night meeting with Hitler. The Führer appointed Speer to replace Todt, an unsurprising choice according to British historian Martin Kitchen because the architect was a Hitler loyalist who also had experience building prison camps and other military structures. head of the Todt Organization, a huge state-owned construction company. As was customary, the chancellor gave Speer no clear mandate, instead allowing him to carve out a niche among Nazism's elite in the struggle for power and control, a an endeavor in which he would be ambitious, ruthless, and ruthless. The new minister set out not only to gain control of arms production for the army, but for the entire armed forces. his political rivals that his calls for rationalization and reorganization hid his desire to push them aside and seize control.
Speer was feted at this time, as he was in the postwar period, for the "miracle of armaments" that consisted of a spectacular increase in German war production. This miracle came to a halt in the summer of 1943 due to, among other things, the persistent Allied bombing of Germany. Other factors than Speer himself probably contributed to that increase in production. Arms manufacturing in Germany had already begun to increase earlier, under the leadership of his predecessor Todt. Naval armaments were not under Speer's control until October 1943, and that of the air force until June of the following year, despite which all showed an increase comparable to that controlled by the Minister of Arms. Another factor contributing to the boom of ammunition was the policy of allocating more coal to the steel industry. Production of each type of gun peaked in June and July 1944, but from August 1944 Romanian crude became unavailable and therefore the fuel began to be scarce. Oil production declined so much that it made any offensive action impossible and the weapons were stored.
As Minister of Armaments, he was responsible for supplying the army with weapons. After agreeing with Hitler, he decided to prioritize the construction of main battle tanks and was given full power to ensure their success. Hitler was heavily involved in the design of the tanks, but continually changed his mind about their specifications, which delayed the program without Speer being able to remedy the situation. Consequently, despite the fact that tank production had the highest priority, relatively little of the armaments budget was spent on it and this led to a major defeat of the German army at the Battle of Prokhorovka, a major turning point on the front. East against the Soviet Red Army.
As head of the Todt Organization, he was directly involved in the construction and modification of concentration camps. He agreed to expand Auschwitz and some other camps, allocating 13.7 million Reichsmark for those works. This allowed an additional 300 barracks to be built at Auschwitz, increasing its total capacity to 132,000 inmates. The works included material to build gas chambers, crematoriums and morgues. The SS called this "Professor Speer's Special Program".
Speer realized that, with six million enlisted workers in the military, there was a significant labor shortage in the war economy and not enough workers for his factories. Hitler's response was to appoint Fritz Sauckel as a "manpower dictator" to get new workers, an effort in which he collaborated with the minister. Hitler gave Sauckel complete freedom to get workers, something that delighted Speer, who had requested a million "volunteer" workers to meet the needs of the arms industry. Sauckel ordered the inhabitants of entire villages in France, the Netherlands and Belgium to be forcibly rounded up and sent to the factories. On other occasions he used even more brutal methods, such as in parts of the Soviet Union where groups had operated. of partisans and in which men and women were rounded up en masse and sent to work by force in Germany. By April 1943, Sauckel had procured 1,568,801 "volunteer" workers for Speer, who were actually forced laborers, prisoners of war and inmates of concentration camps that the minister used in his arms factories. It was primarily for mistreatment of these people that Speer was convicted at the Nuremberg trials.
Consolidation of arms production
The appointment as Armaments Minister gave Speer control only over weapons production for the army, but he coveted control of supply production for the Luftwaffe (air force) and the Air Force as well. Kriegsmarine (navy). He began to extend his power and influence with unexpected ambition by drawing on his close relationship with Hitler, which provided him with political protection to be able to outwit and outmaneuver his rivals in the regime. Hitler's cabinet did not take kindly to his tactics, despite which he was able to accumulate new responsibilities and more power. By July 1943 he had already obtained control of arms production for the Luftwaffe i> and the Kriegsmarine. In August 1943, he seized control of most of the Ministry of Finance, becoming, in the words of Admiral Karl Dönitz, "Europe's economic dictator". His formal title changed to "Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production". He had become one of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany.
Speer and his chosen submarine construction manager, Otto Merker, believed that the shipping industry was being held back by outdated methods, and that revolutionary new approaches they introduced would drastically improve production. This belief proved incorrect, and their attempt to build the new generation of Kriegsmarine submarines, Type XXI and Type XXIII, from prefabricated sections at different facilities rather than individual shipyards contributed to the failure of this strategically important program. Designs were being sent to production too quickly, so new submarines were plagued with failures due to new construction techniques. Although dozens of submarines were built, very few entered service.
In December 1943, Speer visited the workers of the Todt Organization in Lapland, but while there he severely damaged his knee and was incapacitated for several months. He placed himself under the dubious care of Dr. Karl Gebhardt at a medical clinic called Hohenlychen, where the patients "mysteriously failed to survive". In mid-January 1944, he suffered a pulmonary embolism and became seriously ill. Eager to retain power from him, he did not appoint a delegate and continued to direct the work of the Ministry of Armaments from his bed. His illness coincided with the Allied "Great Week", a wave of air raids on German factories that dealt a devastating blow to aircraft production. His political rivals used the opportunity to undermine his authority and damage his reputation with Hitler, whose unconditional support he lost along with much of his power.
In response to Allied bombing, Adolf Hitler authorized the creation of a fighter jet committee with the goal of ensuring the preservation and increased production of fighter aircraft. The task force was created by an order of Speer on 1 March 1944 with the support of Erhard Milch of the Reich Air Ministry. The result was that fighter aircraft production doubled in Germany between 1943 and 1944, although this growth was due in large part to the construction of already obsolete aircraft which proved easy prey for Allied fighters. On 1 August 1944, the minister merged this body with the newly created Armaments Committee (< i>Rüstungsstab).
The fighter committee was instrumental in increasing the exploitation of forced laborers in the war economy. The SS provided 64,000 prisoners for twenty different projects in various concentration camps, including Mittelbau-Dora. The prisoners worked for companies such as Junkers, Messerschmitt, Henschel, and BMW, among others. To increase production, Speer introduced a system of punishment for his workers, whereby those who feigned illness, relaxed, sabotaged production, or tried to escape, were denied food or sent to concentration camps. By 1944 this was already commonplace and more than half a million workers were arrested. At that time 140,000 people were forced to work in the underground factories, which were true death traps due to brutal discipline and regular executions. For example, so many corpses accumulated in Dora's underground factory that the crematorium was overwhelmed. Speer's own staff described conditions there as "hell".
The greatest technological advance under his command occurred in the rocket program, which had started in 1932, but had not supplied any noteworthy weapons. Speer enthusiastically supported him and in March 1942 he placed an order for A4 rockets, the predecessor of the world's first ballistic missile, the V2 rocket. The research for its development, as well as that of the V1 flying bomb, was done at the Peenemünde facility. The V2's first target was Paris on 8 September 1944. The programme, though well advanced, proved to be an impediment to the war economy because it required significant capital investment without military effectiveness. The rockets were built in a factory underground at Mittelwerk, where the labor to build the A4 rockets came from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Of the 60,000 inmates in this camp, 20,000 died due to the appalling conditions.
By the summer of 1944, Speer had already lost control of the Todt Organization and arms production. He opposed the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, was not involved in the plot, and played a minor role in the regime's efforts to regain control over Berlin after the Führer survived. Uncovered this plot, the minister's rivals attacked some of his closest allies and his management system fell out of favor before the radicals of the party, with which he lost even more authority.
Defeat of Nazi Germany
Territorial losses and the relentless Allied strategic bombing campaign caused the German economy to collapse in late 1944. Air raids on the transportation network were particularly effective, cutting off major production centers for the essential supplies of coal. In January 1945, Speer told Goebbels that armaments production could be sustained for at least a year. However, he concluded that the war was lost after Soviet forces captured the important industrial region of Silesia at the end of that month. Despite everything, the minister believed that Germany should continue in the war as long as possible with the aim of obtaining better terms from the Allies than the unconditional surrender on which they insisted. During January and February, he stated that his ministry would deliver "decisive weapons" and increase the production of weapons, which "would bring about a dramatic change in the field of defense." e battle". Speer gained control over the railways in February and asked Himmler to supply concentration camp prisoners to work on their repairs.
By mid-March, Speer had accepted that Germany's economy would collapse in the next eight weeks. Although he tried to thwart orders to destroy industrial facilities in areas at risk of capture so they could be used after the war, he still supported continuing the war. He handed Hitler a memorandum on March 15 detailing Germany's dire economic situation and seeking his approval to cease infrastructure demolitions. Three days later, he also proposed to Hitler that Germany's remaining military resources be concentrated along the Rhine and Vistula rivers in an attempt to prolong the fighting. All of this ignored the military reality, which was that the German armed forces could not match the firepower of the Allies and faced total defeat. Hitler not only rejected his proposal to cease demolitions, but issued the " Nero Order» on March 19, which called for the destruction of all infrastructure as the army withdrew. The minister was appalled by this order and convinced various military and political leaders to ignore it. During a meeting with Speer on 28–29 March, Hitler rescinded the decree and gave him authority over the demolitions. He stopped them. although the army continued to blow up bridges.
By April, little remained of the German arms industry, and Speer had few official duties. He visited the Führerbunker on 22 April for the last time, meeting Hitler and touring the damaged chancellery earlier to leave Berlin to return to Hamburg. On April 29, the day before committing suicide, Hitler dictated a final political testament leaving Speer out of the new government; his replacement would be his subordinate, Karl Saur. He was disappointed that the Führer did not choose him as his successor. After Hitler's death, he offered his services to the so-called Flensburg Government, headed by Hitler's successor, Karl Dönitz. He assumed a role in that short-lived regime as Minister of Industry and Production.From May 10, Speer provided information to the Allies on the effects of the air war and on many other subjects. On May 23, two weeks after the surrender of German forces, British troops arrested members of the Flensburg Government and formally ended Nazi Germany.
Postwar
Nuremberg Trials
Speer was taken to various internment centers for Nazi officials and interrogated. In September 1945, he was told that he would be tried for war crimes, and several days later, he was transferred to Nuremberg and imprisoned there. He was charged with four counts: participation in a common plan or conspiracy to commit a crime against peace, planning, starting and waging aggressive wars and other crimes against peace, war crimes, and lastly, crimes against humanity.
Robert H. Jackson, a United States Supreme Court justice and chief US attorney in Nuremberg, alleged: "Speer joined in the planning and execution of the program to employ prisoners of war and foreign workers in the war industry. German, which grew in production while the workers starved to death".
Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, though he was acquitted of the other two charges. He had claimed that he knew nothing of the Nazi extermination plans and that probably saved him from hanging. His claim was found to be false after the discovery of a private letter written in 1971 and publicly revealed in 2007. On October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Although three of the eight judges (two Soviet and the American Francis Biddle) initially advocated sentencing him to death, the other judges did not, and the sentencing agreement was reached after two days of debate.
Imprisonment
On 18 July 1947, Speer was transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin to serve his sentence. There he became known as Prisoner Number Five. Both of his parents died while he was incarcerated: his father, who died in 1947, despised the Nazis and was silent when meeting Hitler, while his mother, who died in 1952, was a Nazi who had greatly enjoyed dining with the Führer. Rudolf Wolters and his secretary for For years Annemarie Kempf, who were not allowed direct communication with the former minister, did what they could to help her family and carry out the requests that Speer sent to his wife, the only written communication she was officially allowed. Beginning in 1948, Speer relied on the services of Toni Proost, a Dutch sympathizer who smuggled his mail and his writings.
In 1949 Wolters opened a bank account for Speer and began raising funds among architects and industrialists who had profited from the minister's wartime activities. Initially, the funds were used only to support Speer's family, but over time the money was used for other purposes, such as paying Toni Proost for a holiday and bribing those who could secure his release. Once the inmate learned of the fund's existence, Speer sent detailed instructions on what to do with the money. Wolters raised a total of DM 158,000 for Speer over the last seventeen years of his sentence.
Prisoners were forbidden to write memoirs. However, Speer managed to send 20,000 pages of writing to Wolters. He had completed his memoirs by November 1953, which would become the basis of the book Inside the Third Reich. The Spandau Diaries was intended to portray a tragic hero who had made a pact with the devil for which he endured a harsh prison sentence.
Much of his energies went into keeping fit, both physically and mentally, during his long confinement. Spandau had a large enclosed courtyard where inmates were allotted plots for gardening and Speer created an elaborate lawn garden, flowers, shrubs and fruit trees. To make his daily walks in the garden more attractive, he embarked on an imaginary journey around the world. Carefully measuring the distance of his travel, he translated them into real-world geography and eventually walked more than 30,000 km until he was released, at which point he was, imaginarily, near Guadalajara, Mexico. He also read, studied magazines of architecture and reviewed the English and French languages. In his writings, he claimed to have read five thousand books while in prison, an exaggeration because he had little more than a day to finish each one.
Albert Speer's defenders continued to call for his release. Among those who pledged support for his sentence to be commuted were the President of the French Republic Charles de Gaulle, the American diplomat George Wildman Ball and Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany, who ended the denazification proceedings against him. which could have resulted in the confiscation of his assets. His efforts to obtain an early release came to nothing. The Soviet Union, which had demanded a death sentence at the trial, never consented, so he served his entire sentence and was released at midnight on October 1, 1966.
Liberation and Afterlife
The release of Albert Speer was a global media event. Journalists packed both the streets around Spandau and the lobby of the Berlin hotel where Speer spent the night. He spoke little, reserving most of his words for a major interview published in the newspaper Der Spiegel in November 1966. Although he stated that he hoped to resume an architectural career, his only project, a collaboration for a brewery, was unsuccessful. Instead, he revised his Spandau writings into two autobiographical books. He later he published a third on Himmler and the SS. His books include Memoirs (German Erinnerungen, literally Memories) and Spandau Diary, for which he received the advice of Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler, of the Ullstein publishing house. On the other hand, he found himself unable to resume the relationship with his children, even with his son Albert Speer Jr., who was also an architect. According to his daughter Hilde, “One by one my sisters and brothers quit. There was no communication.” He helped his brother Hermann financially after the war, but his other brother Ernst had been killed in the Battle of Stalingrad, despite repeated requests from his parents to help him. will repatriate
After his release, Speer donated his personal diary to the Federal Archive of Germany. It had been edited by Wolters and contained no mention of Jews. English writer David Irving discovered discrepancies between the misleadingly edited diary and independent documents. Speer had asked Wolters to destroy the material he had omitted from his donation, but Wolters refused, keeping an original copy. Their friendship deteriorated, and a year before Speer's death, Wolters gave the German historian Matthias Schmidt access to the diary unaltered. Schmidt would write the book Albert Speer: The End of a Myth, the first to be highly critical of the former Nazi minister.
Speer's memoir was a phenomenal success. Readers were fascinated by an insider's view of the Third Reich and thus a major war criminal became a popular figure almost overnight. Importantly, he provided an alibi for the old German ex-Nazis, because if Albert Speer himself, so close and powerful to Hitler, did not know the full extent of the Nazi regime's crimes and was only "following orders", they too could tell themselves and others that they did the same. Speer provided a facelift for an entire generation of former Nazis. So great was the need for all of them to believe this "Speer myth", that Fest and Siedler were able to strengthen it, even in the face of mounting historical evidence to the contrary.
Speer was made available to historians and anyone else interested. In October 1973 the German architect made his first trip to the UK to be interviewed on the BBC's Midweek programme. That same year he was interviewed in the documentary series El mundo en guerra. He returned to London in 1981 to appear on the BBC's Newsnight program, but while there he suffered a stroke and died on 1 September 1981. Although he had not divorced his wife, he had filed a relationship with a German woman who lived in London and was with her at the time of her death. His daughter Margret Nissen wrote in her memoirs published in 2005 that after being released from prison, her father had spent all his time building " The myth of Speer".
The myth of Speer
The Good Nazi
After his release from Spandau, Speer built for himself the image of the "good Nazi". to the "bad Nazis". In his memoirs and interviews he had so distorted the truth and covered up so much that his lies became known as "myths". Speer took his mythmaking to the media and his "sly apologies". they were reproduced countless times in postwar Germany. Isabell Trommer writes in her biography of Speer that Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler co-authored Speer's memoirs and co-created his myths in exchange for a share of his royalties and other financial incentives. Speer, Siedler and Fest had built a masterpiece, the image of the "good Nazi", which remained unchanged for decades, despite historical evidence indicating that it was false.
Speer had carefully constructed an image of himself as an apolitical technocrat who deeply regretted his failure to uncover the monstrous crimes of the Third Reich. After Speer's death, Matthias Schmidt published a book proving that he had ordered the eviction. of Jews from their homes in Berlin. As early as 1999, historians had clearly shown that he had lied extensively. Despite this, Speer's reputation did not change substantially until film director Heinrich Breloer shot a 2004 production biographical television that would be the beginning of a process of demystification and critical reappraisal. British historian Adam Tooze states in his book The Wages of Destruction that Speer had moved through the ranks of the regime deftly and ruthless, and that the idea that he was a technocrat blindly following orders was "absurd". Trommer said that he was not an apolitical technocrat, but one of the leading s more powerful and less scrupulous of the Nazi regime. Martin Kitchen said that he had misled the Nuremberg Tribunal and post-war Germany, while Magnus Brechtken opined that if his deep involvement in the Holocaust had been known at the time of his trial, he would have been sentenced to death.
The image of the good Nazi was supported by numerous myths about Speer. In addition to the myth that he was an apolitical technocrat, he claimed that he had no full knowledge of the Holocaust or the persecution of the Jews. Another myth posits that Speer revolutionized the German war machine after his appointment as Minister of Armaments thanks to a spectacular increase in arms shipments that was publicized as the reason for Germany to stay in the war. Another myth was that he devised a false plan to assassinate Hitler with poison gas, a falsehood he came up with as he recalled the panic he felt when the car fumes entered the air vent system, to which he added the details. Brechtken wrote that his lie The most blatant was made up during an interview with a French journalist in 1952. The journalist described a made-up scene in which Speer refused Hitler's orders and the Führer left with tears in his eyes. Speer liked it so much that he added it to his memories, with which the journalist had inadvertently collaborated in one of his myths.
Speer also sought to portray himself as an opponent of Hitler's leadership. Despite his opposition to the July 20 plot, he falsely claimed in his memoir that he sympathized with the conspirators. He maintained that Hitler was nice to him for the rest of his life after learning that he had been put on a list of potential ministers, another key element of his mythos. He also falsely claimed that he had realized very early that the war was lost, and therefore worked to preserve the resources necessary for the survival of the civilian population. In reality, he had tried to prolong the war until it was impossible to resist any longer, thus contributing to the great number of deaths and the enormous destruction that Germany suffered in the last months of the conflict.
Disclaimer
Speer maintained at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs that he had no direct knowledge of the Holocaust. He only admitted to being uncomfortable with Jews in the published version of the Spandau Diaries More generally, Speer accepted responsibility for the actions of the Nazi regime. Historian Martin Kitchen claims that Speer was "fully aware of what had happened to the Jews" and that he was "intimately involved in the 'Final Solution'". Magnus Brechtken said that Speer only admitted responsibility. Holocaust general to hide his direct and actual responsibility. Speer was photographed with slave laborers in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942 and Blaine Taylor maintains that if the photo had been available at the Nuremberg trials he would have been hanged. In 2005, the newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported that documents had emerged indicating that Speer had approved the allocation of materials for the expansion of the Auschwitz concentration camp after an inspection of the facilities by his assistants in a day when almost a thousand Jews were massacred. Heinrich Breoler, speaking about the construction of Auschwitz, said that Speer was not just a cog in the work low, but was "terror itself".
Speer also denied being present at the Posen (Poznan) speeches to Nazi leaders at a conference on October 6, 1943, at which Heinrich Himmler said: "The grave decision had to be made to make these people from the earth"; and later, "The Jews must be exterminated". Himmler mentions and addresses Speer several times during this speech. In 2007, The Guardian newspaper > reported that a letter from Speer dated 23 December 1971 had been found in a collection of his correspondence with Hélène Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance fighter, in which the former minister admits that "There is no doubt: I was present when Himmler announced on October 6, 1943 that all Jews would be killed."
The weapons miracle
Speer was credited with being responsible for the "arms miracle." During the winter of 1941-1942, in light of Germany's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Moscow, German leaders, including Fromm, Thomas, and Todt, came to the conclusion that the war was unwinnable. The rational approach to adopt was to seek a political solution that would end the war without defeat, but Speer's response was to use his propaganda skills to demonstrate a new dynamism in the war economy. He published some spectacular statistics alleging that he had multiplied the production of artillery by six and managed to spread that propaganda throughout the country. Thus he managed to silence the discussion that the war should end.
The weapons "miracle" was a sustained myth about Speer's statistical manipulation to back up his claims. Weapons production did indeed increase; however, it was due to the logical consequences of the reorganization carried out before Speer took office, the relentless mobilization of forced laborers, and a deliberate reduction in the quality of production in favor of quantity. In July 1943, Speer's arms production propaganda became irrelevant because a series of dramatic defeats on the battlefield that put Germany in the prospect of losing the war could no longer be hidden from the German people. Brechtken writes that Speer knew that Germany was going to lose the war and deliberately extended its duration, causing the deaths on the battlefields of millions of people who would otherwise have lived. Kitchen said: "There can be no doubt that Speer it really helped prolong the war longer than many thought possible, as a result of which millions of people died and Germany was reduced to a heap of rubble."
Architectural legacy
Little remains, beyond photos and plans, of Albert Speer's most personal architectural works. Almost no building designed by the architect in the Nazi era remains in Berlin, except for the Schwerbelastungskörper, a heavy-duty body built around 1941 in the shape of a huge 14-meter-high concrete cylinder that used to measure ground subsidence as part of feasibility studies for a gigantic triumphal arch and other large structures proposed as part of Welthauptstadt Germania, the post-war Berlin renovation project proposed by Hitler. The cylinder is now a protected landmark and is open to the public. The grandstand at the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, although partially demolished, can be visited.
The Reich Chancellery, which Speer was involved in building, was badly damaged during air raids in the Battle of Berlin. Its outer walls survived, but were dismantled by the Soviets. Unsubstantiated rumors held that its remains were used for other constructions such as the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Mohrenstraße subway station or Soviet war memorials in Berlin.