Speer, Albert

Speer, Albert (1905–81),German architect who became a close confidant of Hitler and served as minister for armaments and munitions from 1942 to 1945.

Speer was an early admirer of Hitler but did not join the Nazi Party until 1932. He then also became a member of the SS and arranged the spectacle of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. His first war appointment was to oversee the construction of armament factories and military installations. When the head of the Todt Organization died in a plane crash in February 1942 Speer succeeded him as minister for armaments and munitions, and as head of the organization; and the following year he was given overall responsibility for the direction of Germany's war economy (see Speer Plan, below). He proved himself an outstanding and ruthless administrator who, despite the Allied strategic air offensive, which unleashed almost constant bombing raids on Germany's industrial centres, managed to triple armaments production between 1942 and 1944. His foresight in planning the production of synthetic oil (see alsoraw and synthetic materials) enabled the German war machine to keep running almost until the end.

After Hitler's death in April 1945, which Speer, so he said, had earlier contemplated trying to achieve by poison gas, he served as economy minister in Dönitz's seven-day government. At the Nuremberg trials he disassociated himself from Hitler's regime but dramatically accepted ‘collective responsibility’ for its crimes. This did not save him from a 20-year sentence for his complicity in using forced labour, which he served in full. But it gave birth to the spurious belief—which Speer perpetuated in his two memoirs, Inside the Third Reich (London, 1970) and Spandau: the Secret Diaries (New York, 1976)—that he had been an apolitical technocrat who had known nothing of the Final Solution, a master builder too involved in his work to understand the criminality of the regime he served.

Bibliography

Schmidt, M. , Albert Speer: The End Of A Myth (New York, 1984).