Albert Speer

Biography

Albert Speer was born in Mannheim in 1905 and studied architecture at Karlsruhe, Munich and the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, where he became assistant to Heinrich Tessenow. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and his designs for the 1933 Nuremberg rally brought him to Adolf Hitler's attention. He soon joined Hitler's inner circle as the party's chief architect, designing the Zeppelinfeld at Nuremberg and the new Reich Chancellery.

Appointed General Building Inspector for Berlin in 1937, he planned a monumental rebuilding of the capital and used his office to evict tens of thousands of Jewish tenants. When Fritz Todt died in February 1942, Hitler made Speer Minister of Armaments, and by 1943 he controlled most of the war economy. Output rose in what he promoted as an armaments miracle, but historians credit much of the gain to earlier measures and to forced and slave labour, which his ministry exploited on a vast scale, including in underground rocket factories.

In the last months of the war he worked to stop the destruction ordered in Hitler's Nero Decree, and he briefly served in the Flensburg government. At Nuremberg he was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for the use of slave labour and sentenced to twenty years, which he served in full at Spandau.

After his release in 1966 he published Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, presenting himself as an apolitical technocrat who had not known of the Holocaust. Later research showed that he knew of and took part in the persecution of the Jews. He died in London in 1981.