Speer, Albert

Speer, Albert (1905–81). German architect of the Nazi period (1933–45). He studied under Bestelmeyer, Billing, and Tessenow, and rose to prominence on the death of Troost, becoming Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) friend, confidant, and architect from 1934. His interest in archaeology led him to evolve a style of architecture that would be as expressive as anything left by Ancient Rome, and his main influences were Boullée (for megalomaniac scale) and Schinkel (for a columnar and trabeated Neo-Classical architecture). He became known for his theatrical staging of Nazi Party rallies, using searchlights to suggest ‘cathedrals of light’ in the night skies, massed flags, and blocky forms for buildings. His Party Congress-Grounds at Nuremberg, with a vast grandstand and other structures (from 1934—partly destroyed), were impressive in their simplified Neo-Classicism, drawing on para-phrases from Queen Hatshepsut's Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Temple at Deïr-el-Bahari, Roman architecture, and themes derived from the work of Schinkel and Boullée. He designed the German Pavilion, World's Fair, Paris (1937), which was much admired at the time, but his masterpiece was the Chancellery, Berlin (1938–9— destroyed), the plan of which was ingenious and the architecture designed to awe the visitor by suggesting stability, opulence, and power. He remodelled the interior of the German Embassy in 7–9 Carlton House Terrace, London, at the same period: his work there (since 1967 The Royal Society) partially survives. He was in charge of a team to re-plan Berlin with a huge north–south axis joining a gigantic domed hall to a new railway terminus, the whole lined by enormous official buildings, all in a stripped Neo-Classical style, but vast in scale.

In 1942 Fritz Todt was killed in an aircrash, and Speer succeeded him as head of the Organization Todt, which carried out the most ambitious and vast construction programme since the Roman Empire, employing one and a half million men. However, as Jaskot and others have shown, much of the stone and other material was obtained by slave labour (some concentration camps (e.g. Natzweiler, Flossenburg, Mauthausen, and Gross-Rosen) were sited near quarries), and Speer must have known about this. He was also Minister for Armaments and Munitions (1942–3), and in 1943 was given responsibility (as Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production) for the direction of the Reich's war economy, which expanded threefold in two years under the Speer Plan. The organizational abilities Speer had demonstrated as architect of the Chancellery were now channelled throughout the Reich and occupied territories. In particular, his planning of the production of synthetic oil enabled the German war effort to continue long after access to naturally occurring fuels had been stopped. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the Nuremberg Trials, and afterwards published his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich (1970), and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976).

Bibliography

P. Adam (1992);
Arnst et al. (1978);
Fest (2001);
Jaskot (2000);
L. Krier (ed.) (1985);
Lane (1985);
Larsson (1983);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
Petsch (1978);
Scarrocchia (1999);
Sereny (1995);
Speer (1970, 1976, 1981);
Spotts (2002);
Stephan (1939);
Jane Turner (1996);
Teut (ed.) (1967)