Speer, Albert

Speer, Albert (b. 19 Mar. 1905, d. 1 Sept. 1981). German Minister of Armaments Production 1942–5 Originally of liberal inclination, he was mesmerized by one of Hitler's speeches and joined the Nazi Party in 1931. He became Hitler's architect and, owing to Hitler's passion for art and architecture, one of his closer associates, though he appears not to have been involved in the dictator's political decisions. He planned monumental buildings to satisfy Hitler's quest for grandeur, but in 1942 he became Minister for Armaments Production, and in 1943 he was made responsible for Germany's entire war production. In this capacity he achieved great success, as despite bombings and labour shortages production peaked in 1944. He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials, avoiding the death penalty owing to his insistence that, as a ‘technocrat’, he did not know about the Holocaust, and his remorse at the horrors of the Nazi crimes that were revealed during the trial. More recently, however, it has been revealed that he must have known about the extermination of Jews in the concentration camps (owing to his presence at the Wannsee Conference). There is also evidence that he was fully aware of the horrors which the forced labour encountered in the munitions factories for which he was responsible. He wrote one of the most important personal accounts of the war in his Erinnerungen (Inside the Third Reich, 1969).