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On February 8, 1942, Nazi architect Albert Speer was appointed Minister of Armaments by Adolf Hitler afterthe death of Fritz Todt in a plane crash. From the article:
"The Architecture of Evil
For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe’s.
– Albert Speer
Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps. Someone measured the size and weight of a human corpse to determine how many could be stacked and efficiently incinerated within a crematorium. Someone sketched out on a drafting table the decontamination showers, complete with the fake hot-water spigots used to lull and deceive doomed prisoners. Someone, very well educated, designed the rooftop openings and considered their optimum placement for the cyanide pellets to be dropped among the naked, helpless men, women, and children below. This person was an engineer, an architect, or a technician. This person went home at night, perhaps laughed and played with his children, went to church on Sunday, and kissed his wife goodbye each morning.
The technical professions occupy a unique place in modern society. Engineers and architects possess skills most others lack — skills that allow them to transform dreams of design into reality. Engineers can convert a dry, infertile valley into farmland by constructing a dam to provide irrigation; they have made man fly; and architects have constructed buildings that reach thousands of feet into the sky. But these same technical gifts alone, in the absence of a sense of morality and a capacity for critical thought and judgment, can also make reality of nightmares. Ferdinand Porsche, the engineer who designed the Volkswagen — an automobile that revolutionized personal travel for the common man — also designed a terrifying battle tank that helped kill millions of Russians on the Eastern Front. Wernher von Braun, who would later design the Saturn V rocket that brought American astronauts to the Moon, designed the V-2 rockets with which the Nazis terrorized Antwerp and London in the waning months of the Second World War.
Few men better exemplify this danger than Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. From bold, looming edifices, to giant swastika banners, to the intimidating searchlights of the “cathedral of light” piercing the night sky around one of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg, Speer’s designs became icons of Nazi megalomania. He shared with the dictator a vision of a redesigned Berlin that, when the Third Reich conquered the world, would be a lasting monument to its power for ages to come. “Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for four thousand years,” Hitler told Speer’s wife, reflecting both the scale of their shared ambition and the shared admiration and peculiar friendship that developed between the two men over the course of the war.
Hitler was so enthralled with Speer’s creativity and ability to carry out orders with efficiency and speed that he appointed Speer Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich during the height of World War II. In this powerful office, Speer was for the final three years of the war in charge of supplying the German military. He oversaw the management of a substantial portion of the German economy; he kept the factories running, and the troops supplied with tanks, bombs, planes, and ammunition, continuing to increase production even during the height of Allied bombing. These accomplishments earned him recognition, from both within the Third Reich and outside it.
Among Speer’s major responsibilities was procuring manpower to keep the factories in operation — and he thus played a major role in instituting the Nazi forced-labor programs. On trial at Nuremberg after the war, Speer claimed full moral responsibility for the whole of the actions of the Nazi Party, and yet professed that he had no knowledge of the extermination of the Jews or the atrocities taking place in concentration camps. Whether or not he was telling the truth about his ignorance of these atrocities has been hotly debated ever since. What is indisputable is that the court did not sentence him to death, as it did many of his peers. Instead he spent twenty years in prison, time he spent reflecting on his memories, coming to terms with his actions, and writing about his life and the inner workings of the Nazi Party — writings he later published as Inside the Third Reich (1970) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976).
Albert Speer did not, as far as any historians know, personally design any death chambers, nor did he personally kill another human being. But Speer did use his brilliant technical expertise and talents to enable the war efforts of the most evil regime in history, allowing it to murder millions of human beings. But even as we condemn him, we must ask — especially we engineers and technicians — is Speer so different from us? How many of us would be willing to compartmentalize our emotions, suppress our consciences, almost to sell our souls, for the opportunity to work on the grand projects that Speer was involved in? How many of us are so focused on solving a technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?
To many engineers, Speer and his experiences during the war may seem irrelevant today. But although there seems to be little chance (we hope) of a highly industrialized power again waging a war of world conquest, the essential questions that Speer faced still pertain to the work of many engineers today. You may be an engineer sitting in front of a computer-aided design screen, creating a seemingly benign component that will become part of some sophisticated weapons system that will be sold to unknown people in a far-off land. You may be a computer security researcher, or a virologist, and discover some new potential weapon or security vulnerability, and have to decide how to make the information public to shield against such attacks, but without helping those who would launch them. Or you may design automobile parts, and be faced with a compromise between saving your company production costs and protecting the lives of customers.
Almost every engineer in the course of his career faces moral decisions that are similar to, if less weighty than, the ones that Albert Speer faced. In examining Speer’s life, we must ask to what extent his character is representative of the technical personality in general. The challenge today’s engineer must confront — as, by extension, must each of us who is wrapped up in the modern scientific-technical project — is to wear Speer’s shoes and to ask honestly, without the benefit of historical hindsight, “What would I have done?”
A Technical Mind
Albert Speer was born in 1905 in Mannheim to an upper-middle-class family that had benefited from Germany’s meteoric economic growth. One of Speer’s grandfathers was among the most successful machine-tool manufacturers in Germany; the other was a well-known architect. Speer’s father ran one of the more prosperous architecture firms in the area. In the years before the First World War, young Albert was provided a very comfortable childhood in a Germany that was expanding economically at a rate that made it the envy of the world. He tended to be more serious and studious than his playmates, and showed an early interest in and love for mathematics.
The Speer family was not spared the terror experienced by much of Europe during the First World War, as the early years brought occasional aerial bombings to Mannheim due to its proximity to the French border. The Speers also endured the food shortages faced by much of Germany, including the famous “turnip winter” of 1916-17, until the last summer of the war when the family was able to move out of the city and live in relative comfort.
The Treaty of Versailles that followed the savage war only aggravated the strong feelings of nationalism bordering on paranoia that had permeated Germany since its unification in 1871. Situated in the middle of Europe, between Russia and France, Germany continually feared being encircled and denied its rightful place on the world stage. Drawing on its Prussian roots, the new German state relied heavily on the influence of the military in its culture and public life. In all other Western countries of the time the military was subservient to the state, but in Germany it became the state’s foundation. These factors nurtured a German disposition toward order and unquestioning state loyalty.
Speer recalled his school years during the postwar Weimar Republic where, despite the installation of a democratic government, German society still had difficulty adjusting to Western-style personal freedom and liberty. Students were told what to do and what to think. Politics was not to be discussed at school, he said, and “the traditional authorities were part of the God-given order of things.” Speer’s father was a liberal who supported Germany’s republican experiment, but Albert maintained a total uninterest in politics. As he stated later in Inside the Third Reich:
Father would have surely been glad to talk about politics with me, but I tended to dodge such discussions and he did not insist. The political indifference was characteristic of the youth of the period, tired and disillusioned as they were by a lost war, revolution, and inflation; but it prevented me from forming political standards, from setting up categories on which political judgments could be based.
Speer makes little mention in his autobiography of any religious or spiritual influences other than the fact that as a young man, he formed a sort of pantheistic “closeness with nature” that allowed him a sense of solitude while “escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated.” Speer’s family was Protestant but did not attend church. In a letter written years later to his daughter while serving his sentence at Spandau Prison, Speer suggested that he and his wife attended church mainly to please his wife’s family, and that “when your mother and I did leave the church, it was in reaction to the political opposition of the churches to Hitler — I suppose it was a sort of statement of loyalty.”
Young Albert did not grow up in a warm household. Biographer Joachim Fest, in Speer: The Final Verdict (2001), portrays his relationship with his mother as strained; she was “aloof” and focused on class pretensions, including disapproving of the woman he later chose to marry, deeming her lower-class. Speer admired his father but found him distant and reserved. He eventually viewed his parents as “virtually strangers.”
Fest describes Speer as having a “lack of emotion” and a “shyness that was apparent at an early age.” Later, after completing his twenty-year sentence for war crimes, Speer made friends with a Benedictine monk named Father Athanasius, who told biographer Gitta Sereny, in her 1995 book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, that “everything about Speer was discipline. I often wondered what happened to him as a child to make him into what he was, a brilliant man incapable of abstract thinking and, I think, incapable of sensual love and thus, finally, an incomplete man.” Speer, the architect, designed a chair for his friend once and told him it was a design he “loved.” Father Athanasius recalled, “It was the only time in the ten years I knew him that he pronounced the word ‘love.’”
Speer graduated from high school in Weimar Germany hoping to become a university professor of mathematics. His father rejected the idea, saying, “Can you imagine yourself spending your life teaching in some backwater university? … You’d never make any money. You’d probably end up cramming snotty-nosed little morons. Is that the life you want?” Speer bowed to his father’s wishes and took up the study of architecture. In 1924 he went to the Technical University of Munich. After graduating, he became an assistant professor at the unusually young age of twenty-three.
Speer later recounted that he “took no notice” of Adolf Hitler during his college years, even though Hitler was attracting growing numbers of disillusioned and angry youths to his speeches and rallies. Instead, Speer “was studying far into the night.” But in late 1930, he was persuaded by his students to attend a speech that Hitler was giving in a nearby beer hall. Like many of his countrymen, Speer was swept away by Hitler’s oratorical style after his first encounter with the man: “His irony was softened by a somewhat self-conscious humor; his South German charm reminded me agreeably of my native region…. He spoke urgently and with hypnotic persuasiveness.” As for the substance of Hitler’s ideas, Speer said, “The peril of communism, which seemed inexorably on its way, could be checked, Hitler persuaded us, and instead of hopeless unemployment, Germany could move toward economic recovery.” But “the mood he cast was much deeper than the speech itself, most of which I did not remember for long.” After the speech he felt he had to be alone to contemplate what he had heard, and that evening he went for a long, solitary walk. The next morning he joined the Nazi Party.
From Architecture to Armaments
Speer soon found himself on the road to fame. By luck, he gained small architectural commissions from the party, and he was soon earning notice from party leaders for his efficiency and ability to meet tight schedules. These commissions grew in size, and soon Speer was working with Joseph Goebbels to renovate the party’s headquarters in Berlin prior to the 1932 elections. After the Nazis won the election and Hitler became chancellor, Speer was invited to submit designs for the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Hitler personally approved the plans during his first meeting with Speer, in Hitler’s own apartment in Munich. In the weeks that followed, the two met and dined together on a near-daily basis, and formed a professional and personal friendship.
In 1934, Hitler made Speer the chief architect of the Nazi Party. Not long later, Hitler was declared Führer, absolute ruler of Germany. During the years leading up to the war, Speer was given increasing responsibility for designing buildings on a scale nearly unsurpassed in history, undertaking and quickly completing a series of ambitious projects, including, among many others, the stadium for the 1936 Summer Olympics (not Speer’s original design, but he finished it), the German Pavilion for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, and the construction in 1939 of the new Reich Chancellery. It was the latter that seems to have made the strongest impression on Hitler of Speer’s vision and incredible organizational skills, as Speer managed to design and construct this formidable building within a year.
Perhaps his most iconic work was the “cathedral of light,” created for one of the annual Nuremberg rallies. Speer commandeered over a hundred anti-aircraft searchlights from around Germany and arranged them in a series to create a sort of pillared border around the nighttime rally at the enormous outdoor parade grounds. The effect was solemn, almost spiritual, as the searchlights shone miles upward toward the overhanging clouds. The lights also magnified the apparent grandeur and scale of the rally, broadcasting to the world an exaggerated sense of German rearmament. Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring objected to publicly revealing most of Germany’s stock of searchlights, but Hitler overruled, saying, “If we use them in such large numbers for a thing like this, other countries will think we’re swimming in searchlights.”
Speer quickly moved into the Führer’s inner circle, where Hitler shared his vision with the young architect. Hitler wanted to make Berlin into the most impressive city in the world, conveying the beauty and overwhelming strength of the triumphal Reich that would dominate the world — and Speer was to be the master planner. Speer conceived of the city’s buildings to have what he called “ruin value” — meaning that they were meant to be built to last for thousands of years, like the ancient ruins of Greece. Hitler embraced this concept, which accorded with his vision of a Thousand Year Reich.
The dream of Hitler’s new city, which was to be renamed World Capital Germania, was without parallel in the modern world. Speer planned as the centerpiece a gargantuan domed Great Hall that would hold 180,000 occupants as they listened to the Führer’s speeches. Had it ever been built, Speer’s dome would have dwarfed any structure nearby, and could have contained several domes the size of the U.S. Capitol. Along the sprawling grand avenue leading to the Great Hall would be a German version of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, intended to dwarf Napoleon’s. Elsewhere, at the Nuremberg rally grounds, construction began (but was never completed) on a German Stadium that would have held 400,000 spectators.
It is not certain that these plans could have been realized. Among other issues, Berlin was built on converted swampland, and there are serious doubts that the ground would have been able to support the huge weight of such structures; test structures built by the Nazis suggested that the buildings would sink well beyond tolerable limits. Regardless of the feasibility, this was art and architecture based on ostentation and megalomania. The plans, of course, spoke of the intoxication with power not just of the state, but of the men who ran it. Speer found himself elevated with breathtaking rapidity to the highest echelons of power, and developed a close personal relationship with the most powerful man in Germany, who was idolized and worshiped by millions of Germans and feared by millions more around the world. Speer looked up to Hitler and seemed to crave his approval. Hitler, for his part, spoke of having “the warmest human feelings” for Speer, and regarding him as a “kindred spirit.” Gitta Sereny writes that “in looks and language, the tall, handsome young Speer probably came close to being a German ideal for the Austrian Hitler.” Speer admitted at the Nuremberg trials that “if Hitler had had any friends, I would certainly have been one of his close friends.” Hitler formed a deep admiration for Speer’s architectural style and ambition. He had always considered himself an artist first, who only became a politician to realize his dream of a powerful Germany, and he saw in the young Speer his own unfulfilled self — someone who was technically capable of achieving his artistic dreams for a Germany that would rule the world.
In February 1942, Fritz Todt, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, charged with supplying the German armies with the weapons and munitions needed to establish an empire stretching from North Africa to the Arctic and from France to Soviet Russia, perished in a plane crash. In an astonishing move, Hitler promptly appointed his young architect, who had no military experience, as Todt’s replacement. Speer recounts that he was stunned, but some historians claim he was a young, ambitious technocrat who saw Germany on the brink of conquering the world and maneuvered himself into Hitler’s inner circle for just such an opportunity. Whatever the case, Hitler recognized Speer’s genuine capacities for organization and efficiency.
In his new role, Speer commanded a massive sector of the German economy. He focused on the highest material priorities for the German war machine, and understood how to use Hitler’s backing to bulldoze through the elaborate and inefficient Nazi bureaucracy in order to meet those needs. Speer also had to guide an economy that was not yet fully devoted to the war effort, as the Allied economies largely were. Hitler had at first refused to allow the war effort to interfere with the production of everyday consumer goods; he understood the fragility of power well enough to know he could be toppled should widespread discontent develop. But this all changed after the Battle of Stalingrad concluded in February 1943. After this disastrous and pivotal loss, propaganda shifted to drumming up public support for total war, and the German economy became fully devoted to the war effort.
Despite American and British bombers obliterating the huge factories feeding the Wehrmacht, Speer was actually able to increase German war production. Incredibly, amidst the widespread destruction on the home front, German production peaked as late as 1944. From a technical standpoint, this was an astonishing achievement. The American and British bombers devastated whole cities and entire industrial complexes, yet Speer was able to increase production by moving critical munitions work underground, rapidly repairing damaged factories, decentralizing massive complexes, and scattering the production over a vast area, making it more difficult for Allied bombers to locate and destroy.
But Speer’s success was not solely a matter of his intelligence and organizational skill; it came also from the utilitarian advantages of the Nazis’ perverse moral standards. With millions of young German men serving on two fronts, there was a huge labor shortage in German industry, and Nazi ideology prevented women from filling these roles, as they largely did in Britain and America. Speer was desperate to meet the munitions and armament requirements of the German armed forces in their titanic struggle to stop the Red Army’s advance on the Eastern Front, to end the incessant bombings of German cities and industrial complexes by the British and American air forces, and to stem the Allied invasions of Italy and France. He knowingly employed men who had been forcibly brought to Germany from conquered countries, and when that didn’t fulfill his needs, he turned to slave labor — both captured prisoners of war and concentration-camp labor. Gitta Sereny, in The Healing Wound (2001), reports that Speer directed an enormous workforce of 28 million, of whom 6 million were forcibly imported from conquered countries and 60,000 were concentration-camp prisoners. Through his technical genius and the labor of millions of impressed workers, Speer was able to give Hitler and his armies the weapons needed to prolong the most murderous and devastating of all wars.
Accepting and Excepting Guilt
In March 1945, with the Red Army on the outskirts of the capital, Speer learned of the military’s plan to call up all remaining reserves for the final Battle of Berlin. Speer was certainly intelligent enough to understand that the war was lost. And not only had Hitler brought Germany into a war of annihilation in which it was completely devastated, but he was now proposing an even more radical phase that would in effect wipe out the German nation.
The reserves to be called included young children, old men, and even the members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Speer foiled this plan and had the musicians’ papers shredded. He arranged a concert to be held in April at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall; during the dying days of the Thousand Year Reich, in an unheated, unlit hall, the audience huddled in their overcoats and listened to Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. At the exits, knowing the end was very near, Hitler Youth handed out potassium cyanide capsules to those Berliners who preferred to die rather than face the vengeful soldiers of the Red Army who were now at the gates, and were indeed soon to perpetrate atrocities upon the German civilians.
Speer grew apart from Hitler as the war began to be waged on German soil. His moral epiphany seems to have come when Hitler drew up the Nero Decree on March 19, 1945. Hitler was determined that if the German people could not achieve world domination, then the conquering armies should be left with nothing but a desolate and ruined country. He tasked Speer with destroying the country’s industrial infrastructure before the Allied armies could attain control. To do so, Speer understood, would have meant deepening the suffering of the population after the war’s end; by destroying the electrical grid, the water systems, the bridges, and the means of production, life would become nearly impossible for the defeated German people.
To his credit, Speer made it his responsibility to counter Hitler’s orders and sabotage his scorched-earth plan. Speer knew he was putting his life at risk by working against Hitler. By the end of the war, Hitler was in a satanic rage against his generals and his staff, placing blame on all of them for the war’s failure. Hitler trusted no one and had no remorse at having anyone he considered a traitor killed — including thousands of his own officers and soldiers over the course of the war. Despite the personal risk involved, Speer used the privileged powers of his office to travel around the country that was now being inundated by enemy troops, convincing military leaders not to carry out the Nero Decree.
After the war’s end, Speer and the remaining Nazi elite were tried at Nuremberg, the city once famous for Hitler’s rallies and Speer’s cathedral of light. Despite his lawyer’s advice, Speer admitted guilt — the only of the defendants at Nuremberg to do so. Speer devised a complicated defense stating that as a high official in the Reich government he must be held accountable for its actions — but that he was not personally involved in the atrocities committed by Hitler and his henchmen. He claimed that he was simply a technical person, an architect, and was unaware of the worst crimes being committed by the Nazi regime until it was almost too late.
As with all the Nazi defendants, Speer was continually interviewed and analyzed by a variety of Allied doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals. He struck them as different from all the rest. An article in Life magazine during the trials noted, “Whereas most of his fellow prisoners are unmitigated thugs, Speer, by contrast, is a charming, cultivated and intelligent man. It was these qualities, combined with a conscience that subordinated everything to ambition, that made him one of the most dangerous of all the Nazis.”
Speer indeed asserted that his real crime was ambition — that he did what almost any other architect would have done in his place. He also admitted some responsibility, noting, for example, that he had opposed the use of forced labor only when it seemed tactically unsound, and that “it added to my culpability that I had raised no humane and ethical considerations in these cases.” His contrition helped to distance himself from the crude and unrepentant Nazis standing trial with him, and this along with his contrasting personal charm permitted him to be known as the “good Nazi” in the Western press. While many other Nazi officials were hanged for their crimes, the court favorably viewed Speer’s initiative to prevent Hitler’s scorched-earth policy and sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment.
Responsibility and Denial
Albert Speer spent the two decades of his captivity trying to come to terms with himself and his actions — trying to understand how he allowed himself to become subservient to the most wicked regime in history. “I was not just entangled in a thicket of deceptions, intrigues, baseness, and killing,” he wrote. “I myself had become part of this perverted world. For twelve years … I had lived thoughtlessly among murderers.”
During cross-examination by Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who was serving as the lead American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Speer defended himself from accusations regarding his use of slave labor by claiming a simply pragmatic opposition to the practice: “It is clear that a worker who has not enough food cannot achieve a good work output. I already said yesterday that every head of a plant, and I too at the top, was naturally interested in having well-fed and satisfied workers, because badly fed, dissatisfied workers make more mistakes and produce poor results.” With the distance of time, and his life not at stake, Speer recounts in his autobiography a more credible anecdote of a visit he made to one of his steel plants, where Russian prisoners of war were working as slave labor. Speer noticed the fear and terror in their eyes when he tried to inquire about their conditions, but
I asked no further questions. Why should I have done so; their expressions told me everything. If I were to try today to probe the feelings that stirred me then, if across the span of a lifetime I attempt to analyze what I really felt — pity, irritation, embarrassment, or indignation — it seems to me that the desperate race with time, my obsessional fixation on production and output statistics, blurred all considerations and feelings of humanity. An American historian has said of me that I loved machines more than people. He is not wrong. I realize that the sight of suffering people influenced only my emotions, but not my conduct…. I continued to be ruled by the principles of utility.
But perhaps even more central to understanding Speer’s actions during the war than his complicity in the use of forced labor is the question of his awareness of the Holocaust. The story of Speer is more deeply confounded by the fact that even this basic and central issue remains highly debated among historians. The most current thinking is that Speer was lying at the Nuremberg trials when he claimed he knew nothing of the mass murders. Many scholars now believe he may have presented a clever and cunning defense by stating that he wished to accept responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis on the basis that, as a technocrat, he helped the regime survive and prosper yet he still knew nothing of the death camps. Speer claims he personally was never an anti-Semite, that “I had Jewish friends from my school days and university days,” and even that he could hardly recall any anti-Semitic remarks being made by Hitler. In his autobiography, he says that “Hitler’s hatred for the Jews seemed to me so much a matter of course that I gave it no serious thought.”
As for the concentration camps, Speer stated that a colleague had visited Auschwitz and had warned Speer never to go there. But, still, “I did not query him, I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler, I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate — for I did not want to know what was happening there…. From that moment on, I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes.” Speer did once visit the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, but was given the VIP tour, devised by the SS to limit exposure to anything disturbing. Much of the contention now is over whether Speer was present at Heinrich Himmler’s terrifying 1943 speech at a conference in Posen, where Himmler made certain that all present understood that they were all just as responsible as he was for the extermination of the Jews. (In his disturbing logic, Himmler even stated his sympathy with those who had to endure the crude and heartless work of killing women and children, but assured them that future generations of Germans would be grateful.) Speer denied having been present at the speech, and two Nazi Party members later testified in support of this claim. But Speer in fact gave a speech at the conference earlier that day, and most historians now believe that he was present for the speech, or was at least made aware of it. In 2007, the Guardian reported the discovery of a 1971 letter by Speer that, if authentic, explicitly shows him admitting to being present and fully understanding the message of the speech.
Whatever the facts on this question, it seems certain that a willful denial of reality, and of his own complicity in events, was at work in the actions of Albert Speer from an early stage. Speer admits as much when he discusses in Inside the Third Reich his fateful decision to join the Nazi Party. In retrospect, Speer realized how surprising it was that someone like him — a technical person, someone who relied solely on facts — could have made such a monumental decision without fully understanding what he was committing to:
As an intellectual I might have been expected to collect documentation with the same thoroughness and to examine various points of view with the same lack of bias that I had learned to apply to my preliminary architectural studies. This failure was rooted in my inadequate political schooling. As a result, I remained uncritical, unable to deal with the arguments of my student friends, who were predominately indoctrinated with the National Socialist ideology….
Not to have worked that out for myself; not, given my education, to have read books, magazines, and newspapers of various viewpoints; not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification — was already criminal.
Perhaps even more telling of Speer’s personality were later events in which he was confronted directly, not just implicitly or rhetorically, with the violence of Hitler and the Nazis. In 1934, Hitler brutally consolidated power by rounding up, arresting, and in perhaps hundreds of cases murdering his political opponents, in an event known as the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler sent Speer to begin converting the office of Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen into a security headquarters. Speer writes, “In one of the rooms I saw a large pool of dried blood on the floor. There, on June 30, Herbert von Bose, one of Papen’s assistants, had been shot. I looked away and from then on avoided the room.” Speer would later react similarly to seeing the shattered Jewish storefronts and the smoldering fires from synagogues after Kristallnacht in 1938. He confessed that “what really disturbed me at the time was the aspect of disorder that I saw on [the street]: charred beams, collapsed facades, burned-out walls.”
It is clear also that Speer was subject to the cult of personality surrounding Hitler, and that this effect was greatly deepened by their personal relationship. “All I wanted was for this great man to dominate the globe,” Speer told Gitta Sereny; “that was the whole point of my buildings.” In 1975, the psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich described their relationship as “homo-erotic (not sexual) … the result of needs each could uniquely fulfill for the other.” Hitler saw Speer as fulfilling his own thwarted fantasies, and Speer admired Hitler to the point of viewing him as a personal hero, yearning for his approval and protection. Speer told Sereny that he largely agreed with this analysis.
Speer’s psychology, however, can hardly be seen as childlike; it was more than love and approval he sought. He writes that “feelings of exultation filled me” when he realized his “signature could mean the expenditure of billions of marks and direct hundreds of thousands of people to the construction sites.” Only later, he claims, did he “become aware that as an architect at Hitler’s side I was also seeking the pleasures of power.”
His attempt to wall off his sense of moral responsibility from the ramifications of his actions were at work early on in sophisticated ways; long before he was busy convincing his accusers at Nuremberg that he was just a technocrat, he was busy convincing himself. In the first place, this was a matter of practices. Speer saw his work as primarily goal-oriented; as noted above, he writes that “the desperate race with time, my obsessional fixation on production and output statistics, blurred all considerations and feelings of humanity.” He says of himself and his colleagues that “our burying ourselves in work was an unconscious effort to … anesthetize our conscience.”
But the more telling means by which Speer insulated himself from responsibility was not habitual but rational. Speer writes, “I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political events did not concern me…. I felt that there was no need for me to take any political positions at all. Nazi education, furthermore, aimed at separatist thinking; I was expected to confine myself to the job of building.” These statements chillingly bespeak the compartmentalizing capacities of the human psyche — and especially the technically oriented psyche — when one realizes that what Speer was referring to with a shrug as “political events” and “political positions” were the rise of a brutal dictatorship and the institution of a war of world domination and an extermination program that would each result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Straight Lines and Crooked Timber
Albert Speer’s life is a warning to all engineers that their creative powers to design and build are capable also of unleashing tremendous harm and destruction. In a sense, there were perhaps few more dangerous men in the twentieth century than Albert Speer — all the more so because he did not fully realize what he was doing. It was almost too late in his life, and certainly too late for the world and the lives lost, when Speer finally understood his horrific personal failures.
It might be said that Speer exemplifies what happens when a technical person becomes too absorbed in his work. Speer claimed at his trial that he was simply doing what nearly any other architect would have done; he was too busy “studying far into the night” to even discuss the political world exploding all around him, too lacking in the ability to think discriminately and critically, and so he found himself “unable to deal with the arguments” of his cohorts, and instead just went along. Perhaps it is the inherent nature of the technical disciplines that brings their practitioners to view the world with a practical eye, to possess a preoccupation with efficiency and order — even to the point of ignoring the humane values of dignity and justice. These are characteristics that will surely sound familiar, to some extent, to those who have worked with engineers, even if in far less sinister contexts.
But to accept this interpretation is to accept Speer’s own attempt at self-exoneration at his trial — as somehow genuinely incapable, whether due to isolation or naïveté, of intimating the true nature of his work. Though we might accept that Speer did not have malice or evil deep within him — that at least in his soul he was a far better man than most of the Nazi hierarchy — it seems clear that he knowingly let his remarkable talents be used in service of one of the most evil men in history, and to carry out the work of one of history’s most brutal regimes.
Although extremely intelligent, Speer willfully closed his eyes and helped to implement atrocity. This he accomplished not only by focusing on his work, but most fundamentally by adhering to the notion that his work was independent from affairs that were ostensibly merely “political,” and needn’t concern him. Speer admits to having espoused this idea until shockingly late in the war, well beyond the point when he himself was in charge of supplying the forces of the (decidedly political) German war machine:
The grotesque extent to which I clung to this illusion is indicated by a memorandum of mine to Hitler as late as 1944: “The task I have to fulfill is an unpolitical one. I have felt at ease in my work only so long as my person and my work were evaluated solely by the standard of practical accomplishments.”
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We can see, moreover, that Speer even at the time understood that this was but a useful fiction — and that this was not simply a late-found revelation of wrongdoing but a deliberate, rationalized squelching of his moral capacities. For Speer was not merely in thrall of the delusion that technical work is morally neutral, but seems to admit that he knowingly cultivated this idea in his own workers in order to induce in them the same effects that Hitler was inducing in Speer:
Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without any scruples about their activities. The more technical the world imposed on us by the war, the more dangerous was this indifference of the technician to the direct consequences of his anonymous activities.
To Engineer Is Human
Speer may seem too dramatic an example to be of much relevance to scientists and engineers today, who are seldom given such power, or such opportunities to determine the fates of so many. But his story still resonates, not only because engineers still inevitably face moral choices of some degree, but because of how unsettlingly familiar is the mantra he apparently repeated to permit himself to continue with his work. Speer, that is, convinced himself of what remains one of the shibboleths of the technical professions to this day: that science and technology, no matter what their implications or the ends toward which they are employed, are completely apolitical and amoral in character.
This is a fiction we must devote ourselves to breaking — in our culture at large, but starting with the education of the practitioners of the technological and scientific enterprise. Insofar as they are concerned with discovering truths about nature, scientists can argue that knowledge of the truth, regardless of its implications, is better than ignorance. But engineers, as they convert these scientific truths into technical capacities, must concern themselves with the moral consequences of where their engineering creativity may lead. Increasingly today, we focus our engineering education almost exclusively on the analytical core of science and mathematics. The authors of the textbook Engineering and Society: Challenges of Professional Practice point out that “as the technical content of engineering programs has increased, treatment of broader social issues has tended to be squeezed out. An underlying assumption has been that technology is value-free and that therefore any consideration of human emotions, needs, and aspirations is extraneous, if not irrational. Many engineering courses have been structured so that they avoid explicit value judgments.”
Today’s engineers need a more well-rounded education — one that stresses not only the analytical skills necessary to be a good engineer but also the liberal arts that are necessary to teach these good engineers the wisdom of history, to provide the foundation for young students to grow and mature as citizens with responsibilities beyond the immediate technical concerns of their work. And the liberal arts can train a young mind to think critically and discriminately about moral questions — aiding in the ability to determine what is right and what is wrong. Most engineers are gifted in math and science; this alone is not sufficient to make them responsible or moral human beings.
Peter Drucker, the business consultant who was instrumental in pushing the management team running General Motors to train its managers in the liberal arts, once wrote that “first-rate engineers … tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind.” Perhaps it is time that the engineering profession acknowledged this attitude, and rejected it. We engineers are better and more than the machines we create; we are responsible, not only to ourselves and to our employers, but to our fellow human beings. The humanities offer engineering students the lessons of life and history that are not found in our technical world.
We should not expect to add an entire liberal arts curriculum to the already strained requirements of engineering schools. Nevertheless, there are stratagems we can adopt that will help our students to achieve a more humane education without undermining their analytical knowledge and skills.
First, as engineering educators, we can lead those we instruct by changing the prevailing attitude toward the humanities. We can admit that, although we can create wonders, we don’t know everything and we don’t have all the answers — that there is far more to wisdom than being able to design an aircraft or create a microprocessor. We can admit that the responsibilities of the engineering profession are far greater than we can easily apprehend when we are lost in a computer screen, enraptured with the expansive yet still critically limited view of the act of technical creation. And we can admit and openly discuss that, in the past, engineers have been responsible for creating many of the problems that we struggle with as a society every day.
Second, we can collaborate with our colleagues in the humanities to structure engineering ethics courses that will interest engineers. Perhaps we need to relate ethics in a way that focuses less on universals and abstractions, and that makes sense to the practical and pragmatic mind. Engineers needn’t become great philosophers to appreciate the power, influence, and responsibility they possess as engineers. An engineering ethics course centered on case studies, such as Albert Speer’s, could drive home this point. And of course there are many others, of countless kinds: the creation of napalm and the atomic bomb; the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters; the I-35W Mississippi River bridge and Hyatt Regency walkway collapses; innumerable product-safety recalls; and on and on.
When engineers are presented with situations and stories they can personally relate to, their pragmatic approach to understanding can become much more focused than when presented with abstract philosophical debates that appear to be unending, divorced from reality, and eternally inconclusive to the technical mind. Teaching with real case studies can breathe life into ethical dilemmas faced by other engineers.
Teaching about the specific personalities involved in these disasters may also allow the student to see that there’s much more involved in engineering than science and technical skill — that social ramifications, and personal responsibility for them, are integral to everything they design and create. There are many engineers who, like Speer, had extraordinary technical skills but lacked or neglected their capacity for critical judgment. Students could study Henry Ford or Howard Hughes to realize that their true technical genius wasn’t enough to make either of them complete men, and that efficiency, pragmatism, and utility all have their limits outside of engineering where, after all, we spend most of our lives.
But while culture and education are surely important for making decent citizens of engineers, one of the essential lessons that we can learn from the story of Albert Speer is that it is the individual technician himself who bears the ultimate responsibility for his work. The need for this responsibility only deepens as society and technology become more complex, allowing the engineer to become progressively more insulated and isolated from the effects of his creations. Prewar Germany, after all, hardly lacked for education and culture; what was needed most direly was the conscience and decency of individual people. “The more technological the world becomes,” Speer wrote, “the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology.”
Hitler and his henchmen inspired the evil that culminated in the Holocaust and the other atrocities of the Third Reich and deaths of World War II. But they were not alone; there were millions who also contributed, either directly by actively participating or indirectly by their silence and disregard. There were engineers, technicians, and architects whose ostensibly amoral technical abilities and organizational capacities supported a regime that nearly brought about the end of Western civilization.
A man who once controlled the productive output of a modern industrial empire later found himself alone in a bleak, cold, gray prison cell, thinking of his past and what went wrong. Albert Speer thought back to a day in the war — the day, in fact, before he was appointed Minister of Armaments — when he found himself lost while traveling through the frozen Ukrainian countryside, and encountered Russian peasants who helped treat his near-frostbite. They had helped him as a human being who was suffering, not a despised conqueror who was destroying their country. At the time, Speer said, he felt “touched” by their kindness, but simply could not understand it.
Years later, while serving his sentence for crimes against humanity, Speer would begin to finally understand why these Russian peasants acted to help him. Speer was guarded by Soviet soldiers, who he knew must have suffered tremendously during the war. The German war machine — which Speer fed with bullets, tanks, and bombs — killed soldiers and civilians mercilessly and indiscriminately. The Soviets lost nearly 30 million people in the war; of those families that survived, nearly every one felt the pain of a lost family member. Yet among the Russian guards, Speer said, “not one of them bore a grudge toward me.” Rather, he “encountered uncorrupted feelings of sympathy, helpfulness, human understanding, feelings that bypassed the prison rules.” He then recalled his meeting, long ago, with the Ukrainian peasants who saved him from frostbite. He finally understood what he couldn’t comprehend back then: the meaning of genuine human kindness. “I forgot,” Speer later said, shortly before the end of his own life, 'that humanity is the most important part of life.'”
"The Architecture of Evil
For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe’s.
– Albert Speer
Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps. Someone measured the size and weight of a human corpse to determine how many could be stacked and efficiently incinerated within a crematorium. Someone sketched out on a drafting table the decontamination showers, complete with the fake hot-water spigots used to lull and deceive doomed prisoners. Someone, very well educated, designed the rooftop openings and considered their optimum placement for the cyanide pellets to be dropped among the naked, helpless men, women, and children below. This person was an engineer, an architect, or a technician. This person went home at night, perhaps laughed and played with his children, went to church on Sunday, and kissed his wife goodbye each morning.
The technical professions occupy a unique place in modern society. Engineers and architects possess skills most others lack — skills that allow them to transform dreams of design into reality. Engineers can convert a dry, infertile valley into farmland by constructing a dam to provide irrigation; they have made man fly; and architects have constructed buildings that reach thousands of feet into the sky. But these same technical gifts alone, in the absence of a sense of morality and a capacity for critical thought and judgment, can also make reality of nightmares. Ferdinand Porsche, the engineer who designed the Volkswagen — an automobile that revolutionized personal travel for the common man — also designed a terrifying battle tank that helped kill millions of Russians on the Eastern Front. Wernher von Braun, who would later design the Saturn V rocket that brought American astronauts to the Moon, designed the V-2 rockets with which the Nazis terrorized Antwerp and London in the waning months of the Second World War.
Few men better exemplify this danger than Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. From bold, looming edifices, to giant swastika banners, to the intimidating searchlights of the “cathedral of light” piercing the night sky around one of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg, Speer’s designs became icons of Nazi megalomania. He shared with the dictator a vision of a redesigned Berlin that, when the Third Reich conquered the world, would be a lasting monument to its power for ages to come. “Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for four thousand years,” Hitler told Speer’s wife, reflecting both the scale of their shared ambition and the shared admiration and peculiar friendship that developed between the two men over the course of the war.
Hitler was so enthralled with Speer’s creativity and ability to carry out orders with efficiency and speed that he appointed Speer Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich during the height of World War II. In this powerful office, Speer was for the final three years of the war in charge of supplying the German military. He oversaw the management of a substantial portion of the German economy; he kept the factories running, and the troops supplied with tanks, bombs, planes, and ammunition, continuing to increase production even during the height of Allied bombing. These accomplishments earned him recognition, from both within the Third Reich and outside it.
Among Speer’s major responsibilities was procuring manpower to keep the factories in operation — and he thus played a major role in instituting the Nazi forced-labor programs. On trial at Nuremberg after the war, Speer claimed full moral responsibility for the whole of the actions of the Nazi Party, and yet professed that he had no knowledge of the extermination of the Jews or the atrocities taking place in concentration camps. Whether or not he was telling the truth about his ignorance of these atrocities has been hotly debated ever since. What is indisputable is that the court did not sentence him to death, as it did many of his peers. Instead he spent twenty years in prison, time he spent reflecting on his memories, coming to terms with his actions, and writing about his life and the inner workings of the Nazi Party — writings he later published as Inside the Third Reich (1970) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976).
Albert Speer did not, as far as any historians know, personally design any death chambers, nor did he personally kill another human being. But Speer did use his brilliant technical expertise and talents to enable the war efforts of the most evil regime in history, allowing it to murder millions of human beings. But even as we condemn him, we must ask — especially we engineers and technicians — is Speer so different from us? How many of us would be willing to compartmentalize our emotions, suppress our consciences, almost to sell our souls, for the opportunity to work on the grand projects that Speer was involved in? How many of us are so focused on solving a technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?
To many engineers, Speer and his experiences during the war may seem irrelevant today. But although there seems to be little chance (we hope) of a highly industrialized power again waging a war of world conquest, the essential questions that Speer faced still pertain to the work of many engineers today. You may be an engineer sitting in front of a computer-aided design screen, creating a seemingly benign component that will become part of some sophisticated weapons system that will be sold to unknown people in a far-off land. You may be a computer security researcher, or a virologist, and discover some new potential weapon or security vulnerability, and have to decide how to make the information public to shield against such attacks, but without helping those who would launch them. Or you may design automobile parts, and be faced with a compromise between saving your company production costs and protecting the lives of customers.
Almost every engineer in the course of his career faces moral decisions that are similar to, if less weighty than, the ones that Albert Speer faced. In examining Speer’s life, we must ask to what extent his character is representative of the technical personality in general. The challenge today’s engineer must confront — as, by extension, must each of us who is wrapped up in the modern scientific-technical project — is to wear Speer’s shoes and to ask honestly, without the benefit of historical hindsight, “What would I have done?”
A Technical Mind
Albert Speer was born in 1905 in Mannheim to an upper-middle-class family that had benefited from Germany’s meteoric economic growth. One of Speer’s grandfathers was among the most successful machine-tool manufacturers in Germany; the other was a well-known architect. Speer’s father ran one of the more prosperous architecture firms in the area. In the years before the First World War, young Albert was provided a very comfortable childhood in a Germany that was expanding economically at a rate that made it the envy of the world. He tended to be more serious and studious than his playmates, and showed an early interest in and love for mathematics.
The Speer family was not spared the terror experienced by much of Europe during the First World War, as the early years brought occasional aerial bombings to Mannheim due to its proximity to the French border. The Speers also endured the food shortages faced by much of Germany, including the famous “turnip winter” of 1916-17, until the last summer of the war when the family was able to move out of the city and live in relative comfort.
The Treaty of Versailles that followed the savage war only aggravated the strong feelings of nationalism bordering on paranoia that had permeated Germany since its unification in 1871. Situated in the middle of Europe, between Russia and France, Germany continually feared being encircled and denied its rightful place on the world stage. Drawing on its Prussian roots, the new German state relied heavily on the influence of the military in its culture and public life. In all other Western countries of the time the military was subservient to the state, but in Germany it became the state’s foundation. These factors nurtured a German disposition toward order and unquestioning state loyalty.
Speer recalled his school years during the postwar Weimar Republic where, despite the installation of a democratic government, German society still had difficulty adjusting to Western-style personal freedom and liberty. Students were told what to do and what to think. Politics was not to be discussed at school, he said, and “the traditional authorities were part of the God-given order of things.” Speer’s father was a liberal who supported Germany’s republican experiment, but Albert maintained a total uninterest in politics. As he stated later in Inside the Third Reich:
Father would have surely been glad to talk about politics with me, but I tended to dodge such discussions and he did not insist. The political indifference was characteristic of the youth of the period, tired and disillusioned as they were by a lost war, revolution, and inflation; but it prevented me from forming political standards, from setting up categories on which political judgments could be based.
Speer makes little mention in his autobiography of any religious or spiritual influences other than the fact that as a young man, he formed a sort of pantheistic “closeness with nature” that allowed him a sense of solitude while “escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated.” Speer’s family was Protestant but did not attend church. In a letter written years later to his daughter while serving his sentence at Spandau Prison, Speer suggested that he and his wife attended church mainly to please his wife’s family, and that “when your mother and I did leave the church, it was in reaction to the political opposition of the churches to Hitler — I suppose it was a sort of statement of loyalty.”
Young Albert did not grow up in a warm household. Biographer Joachim Fest, in Speer: The Final Verdict (2001), portrays his relationship with his mother as strained; she was “aloof” and focused on class pretensions, including disapproving of the woman he later chose to marry, deeming her lower-class. Speer admired his father but found him distant and reserved. He eventually viewed his parents as “virtually strangers.”
Fest describes Speer as having a “lack of emotion” and a “shyness that was apparent at an early age.” Later, after completing his twenty-year sentence for war crimes, Speer made friends with a Benedictine monk named Father Athanasius, who told biographer Gitta Sereny, in her 1995 book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, that “everything about Speer was discipline. I often wondered what happened to him as a child to make him into what he was, a brilliant man incapable of abstract thinking and, I think, incapable of sensual love and thus, finally, an incomplete man.” Speer, the architect, designed a chair for his friend once and told him it was a design he “loved.” Father Athanasius recalled, “It was the only time in the ten years I knew him that he pronounced the word ‘love.’”
Speer graduated from high school in Weimar Germany hoping to become a university professor of mathematics. His father rejected the idea, saying, “Can you imagine yourself spending your life teaching in some backwater university? … You’d never make any money. You’d probably end up cramming snotty-nosed little morons. Is that the life you want?” Speer bowed to his father’s wishes and took up the study of architecture. In 1924 he went to the Technical University of Munich. After graduating, he became an assistant professor at the unusually young age of twenty-three.
Speer later recounted that he “took no notice” of Adolf Hitler during his college years, even though Hitler was attracting growing numbers of disillusioned and angry youths to his speeches and rallies. Instead, Speer “was studying far into the night.” But in late 1930, he was persuaded by his students to attend a speech that Hitler was giving in a nearby beer hall. Like many of his countrymen, Speer was swept away by Hitler’s oratorical style after his first encounter with the man: “His irony was softened by a somewhat self-conscious humor; his South German charm reminded me agreeably of my native region…. He spoke urgently and with hypnotic persuasiveness.” As for the substance of Hitler’s ideas, Speer said, “The peril of communism, which seemed inexorably on its way, could be checked, Hitler persuaded us, and instead of hopeless unemployment, Germany could move toward economic recovery.” But “the mood he cast was much deeper than the speech itself, most of which I did not remember for long.” After the speech he felt he had to be alone to contemplate what he had heard, and that evening he went for a long, solitary walk. The next morning he joined the Nazi Party.
From Architecture to Armaments
Speer soon found himself on the road to fame. By luck, he gained small architectural commissions from the party, and he was soon earning notice from party leaders for his efficiency and ability to meet tight schedules. These commissions grew in size, and soon Speer was working with Joseph Goebbels to renovate the party’s headquarters in Berlin prior to the 1932 elections. After the Nazis won the election and Hitler became chancellor, Speer was invited to submit designs for the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Hitler personally approved the plans during his first meeting with Speer, in Hitler’s own apartment in Munich. In the weeks that followed, the two met and dined together on a near-daily basis, and formed a professional and personal friendship.
In 1934, Hitler made Speer the chief architect of the Nazi Party. Not long later, Hitler was declared Führer, absolute ruler of Germany. During the years leading up to the war, Speer was given increasing responsibility for designing buildings on a scale nearly unsurpassed in history, undertaking and quickly completing a series of ambitious projects, including, among many others, the stadium for the 1936 Summer Olympics (not Speer’s original design, but he finished it), the German Pavilion for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, and the construction in 1939 of the new Reich Chancellery. It was the latter that seems to have made the strongest impression on Hitler of Speer’s vision and incredible organizational skills, as Speer managed to design and construct this formidable building within a year.
Perhaps his most iconic work was the “cathedral of light,” created for one of the annual Nuremberg rallies. Speer commandeered over a hundred anti-aircraft searchlights from around Germany and arranged them in a series to create a sort of pillared border around the nighttime rally at the enormous outdoor parade grounds. The effect was solemn, almost spiritual, as the searchlights shone miles upward toward the overhanging clouds. The lights also magnified the apparent grandeur and scale of the rally, broadcasting to the world an exaggerated sense of German rearmament. Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring objected to publicly revealing most of Germany’s stock of searchlights, but Hitler overruled, saying, “If we use them in such large numbers for a thing like this, other countries will think we’re swimming in searchlights.”
Speer quickly moved into the Führer’s inner circle, where Hitler shared his vision with the young architect. Hitler wanted to make Berlin into the most impressive city in the world, conveying the beauty and overwhelming strength of the triumphal Reich that would dominate the world — and Speer was to be the master planner. Speer conceived of the city’s buildings to have what he called “ruin value” — meaning that they were meant to be built to last for thousands of years, like the ancient ruins of Greece. Hitler embraced this concept, which accorded with his vision of a Thousand Year Reich.
The dream of Hitler’s new city, which was to be renamed World Capital Germania, was without parallel in the modern world. Speer planned as the centerpiece a gargantuan domed Great Hall that would hold 180,000 occupants as they listened to the Führer’s speeches. Had it ever been built, Speer’s dome would have dwarfed any structure nearby, and could have contained several domes the size of the U.S. Capitol. Along the sprawling grand avenue leading to the Great Hall would be a German version of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, intended to dwarf Napoleon’s. Elsewhere, at the Nuremberg rally grounds, construction began (but was never completed) on a German Stadium that would have held 400,000 spectators.
It is not certain that these plans could have been realized. Among other issues, Berlin was built on converted swampland, and there are serious doubts that the ground would have been able to support the huge weight of such structures; test structures built by the Nazis suggested that the buildings would sink well beyond tolerable limits. Regardless of the feasibility, this was art and architecture based on ostentation and megalomania. The plans, of course, spoke of the intoxication with power not just of the state, but of the men who ran it. Speer found himself elevated with breathtaking rapidity to the highest echelons of power, and developed a close personal relationship with the most powerful man in Germany, who was idolized and worshiped by millions of Germans and feared by millions more around the world. Speer looked up to Hitler and seemed to crave his approval. Hitler, for his part, spoke of having “the warmest human feelings” for Speer, and regarding him as a “kindred spirit.” Gitta Sereny writes that “in looks and language, the tall, handsome young Speer probably came close to being a German ideal for the Austrian Hitler.” Speer admitted at the Nuremberg trials that “if Hitler had had any friends, I would certainly have been one of his close friends.” Hitler formed a deep admiration for Speer’s architectural style and ambition. He had always considered himself an artist first, who only became a politician to realize his dream of a powerful Germany, and he saw in the young Speer his own unfulfilled self — someone who was technically capable of achieving his artistic dreams for a Germany that would rule the world.
In February 1942, Fritz Todt, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, charged with supplying the German armies with the weapons and munitions needed to establish an empire stretching from North Africa to the Arctic and from France to Soviet Russia, perished in a plane crash. In an astonishing move, Hitler promptly appointed his young architect, who had no military experience, as Todt’s replacement. Speer recounts that he was stunned, but some historians claim he was a young, ambitious technocrat who saw Germany on the brink of conquering the world and maneuvered himself into Hitler’s inner circle for just such an opportunity. Whatever the case, Hitler recognized Speer’s genuine capacities for organization and efficiency.
In his new role, Speer commanded a massive sector of the German economy. He focused on the highest material priorities for the German war machine, and understood how to use Hitler’s backing to bulldoze through the elaborate and inefficient Nazi bureaucracy in order to meet those needs. Speer also had to guide an economy that was not yet fully devoted to the war effort, as the Allied economies largely were. Hitler had at first refused to allow the war effort to interfere with the production of everyday consumer goods; he understood the fragility of power well enough to know he could be toppled should widespread discontent develop. But this all changed after the Battle of Stalingrad concluded in February 1943. After this disastrous and pivotal loss, propaganda shifted to drumming up public support for total war, and the German economy became fully devoted to the war effort.
Despite American and British bombers obliterating the huge factories feeding the Wehrmacht, Speer was actually able to increase German war production. Incredibly, amidst the widespread destruction on the home front, German production peaked as late as 1944. From a technical standpoint, this was an astonishing achievement. The American and British bombers devastated whole cities and entire industrial complexes, yet Speer was able to increase production by moving critical munitions work underground, rapidly repairing damaged factories, decentralizing massive complexes, and scattering the production over a vast area, making it more difficult for Allied bombers to locate and destroy.
But Speer’s success was not solely a matter of his intelligence and organizational skill; it came also from the utilitarian advantages of the Nazis’ perverse moral standards. With millions of young German men serving on two fronts, there was a huge labor shortage in German industry, and Nazi ideology prevented women from filling these roles, as they largely did in Britain and America. Speer was desperate to meet the munitions and armament requirements of the German armed forces in their titanic struggle to stop the Red Army’s advance on the Eastern Front, to end the incessant bombings of German cities and industrial complexes by the British and American air forces, and to stem the Allied invasions of Italy and France. He knowingly employed men who had been forcibly brought to Germany from conquered countries, and when that didn’t fulfill his needs, he turned to slave labor — both captured prisoners of war and concentration-camp labor. Gitta Sereny, in The Healing Wound (2001), reports that Speer directed an enormous workforce of 28 million, of whom 6 million were forcibly imported from conquered countries and 60,000 were concentration-camp prisoners. Through his technical genius and the labor of millions of impressed workers, Speer was able to give Hitler and his armies the weapons needed to prolong the most murderous and devastating of all wars.
Accepting and Excepting Guilt
In March 1945, with the Red Army on the outskirts of the capital, Speer learned of the military’s plan to call up all remaining reserves for the final Battle of Berlin. Speer was certainly intelligent enough to understand that the war was lost. And not only had Hitler brought Germany into a war of annihilation in which it was completely devastated, but he was now proposing an even more radical phase that would in effect wipe out the German nation.
The reserves to be called included young children, old men, and even the members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Speer foiled this plan and had the musicians’ papers shredded. He arranged a concert to be held in April at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall; during the dying days of the Thousand Year Reich, in an unheated, unlit hall, the audience huddled in their overcoats and listened to Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. At the exits, knowing the end was very near, Hitler Youth handed out potassium cyanide capsules to those Berliners who preferred to die rather than face the vengeful soldiers of the Red Army who were now at the gates, and were indeed soon to perpetrate atrocities upon the German civilians.
Speer grew apart from Hitler as the war began to be waged on German soil. His moral epiphany seems to have come when Hitler drew up the Nero Decree on March 19, 1945. Hitler was determined that if the German people could not achieve world domination, then the conquering armies should be left with nothing but a desolate and ruined country. He tasked Speer with destroying the country’s industrial infrastructure before the Allied armies could attain control. To do so, Speer understood, would have meant deepening the suffering of the population after the war’s end; by destroying the electrical grid, the water systems, the bridges, and the means of production, life would become nearly impossible for the defeated German people.
To his credit, Speer made it his responsibility to counter Hitler’s orders and sabotage his scorched-earth plan. Speer knew he was putting his life at risk by working against Hitler. By the end of the war, Hitler was in a satanic rage against his generals and his staff, placing blame on all of them for the war’s failure. Hitler trusted no one and had no remorse at having anyone he considered a traitor killed — including thousands of his own officers and soldiers over the course of the war. Despite the personal risk involved, Speer used the privileged powers of his office to travel around the country that was now being inundated by enemy troops, convincing military leaders not to carry out the Nero Decree.
After the war’s end, Speer and the remaining Nazi elite were tried at Nuremberg, the city once famous for Hitler’s rallies and Speer’s cathedral of light. Despite his lawyer’s advice, Speer admitted guilt — the only of the defendants at Nuremberg to do so. Speer devised a complicated defense stating that as a high official in the Reich government he must be held accountable for its actions — but that he was not personally involved in the atrocities committed by Hitler and his henchmen. He claimed that he was simply a technical person, an architect, and was unaware of the worst crimes being committed by the Nazi regime until it was almost too late.
As with all the Nazi defendants, Speer was continually interviewed and analyzed by a variety of Allied doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals. He struck them as different from all the rest. An article in Life magazine during the trials noted, “Whereas most of his fellow prisoners are unmitigated thugs, Speer, by contrast, is a charming, cultivated and intelligent man. It was these qualities, combined with a conscience that subordinated everything to ambition, that made him one of the most dangerous of all the Nazis.”
Speer indeed asserted that his real crime was ambition — that he did what almost any other architect would have done in his place. He also admitted some responsibility, noting, for example, that he had opposed the use of forced labor only when it seemed tactically unsound, and that “it added to my culpability that I had raised no humane and ethical considerations in these cases.” His contrition helped to distance himself from the crude and unrepentant Nazis standing trial with him, and this along with his contrasting personal charm permitted him to be known as the “good Nazi” in the Western press. While many other Nazi officials were hanged for their crimes, the court favorably viewed Speer’s initiative to prevent Hitler’s scorched-earth policy and sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment.
Responsibility and Denial
Albert Speer spent the two decades of his captivity trying to come to terms with himself and his actions — trying to understand how he allowed himself to become subservient to the most wicked regime in history. “I was not just entangled in a thicket of deceptions, intrigues, baseness, and killing,” he wrote. “I myself had become part of this perverted world. For twelve years … I had lived thoughtlessly among murderers.”
During cross-examination by Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who was serving as the lead American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Speer defended himself from accusations regarding his use of slave labor by claiming a simply pragmatic opposition to the practice: “It is clear that a worker who has not enough food cannot achieve a good work output. I already said yesterday that every head of a plant, and I too at the top, was naturally interested in having well-fed and satisfied workers, because badly fed, dissatisfied workers make more mistakes and produce poor results.” With the distance of time, and his life not at stake, Speer recounts in his autobiography a more credible anecdote of a visit he made to one of his steel plants, where Russian prisoners of war were working as slave labor. Speer noticed the fear and terror in their eyes when he tried to inquire about their conditions, but
I asked no further questions. Why should I have done so; their expressions told me everything. If I were to try today to probe the feelings that stirred me then, if across the span of a lifetime I attempt to analyze what I really felt — pity, irritation, embarrassment, or indignation — it seems to me that the desperate race with time, my obsessional fixation on production and output statistics, blurred all considerations and feelings of humanity. An American historian has said of me that I loved machines more than people. He is not wrong. I realize that the sight of suffering people influenced only my emotions, but not my conduct…. I continued to be ruled by the principles of utility.
But perhaps even more central to understanding Speer’s actions during the war than his complicity in the use of forced labor is the question of his awareness of the Holocaust. The story of Speer is more deeply confounded by the fact that even this basic and central issue remains highly debated among historians. The most current thinking is that Speer was lying at the Nuremberg trials when he claimed he knew nothing of the mass murders. Many scholars now believe he may have presented a clever and cunning defense by stating that he wished to accept responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis on the basis that, as a technocrat, he helped the regime survive and prosper yet he still knew nothing of the death camps. Speer claims he personally was never an anti-Semite, that “I had Jewish friends from my school days and university days,” and even that he could hardly recall any anti-Semitic remarks being made by Hitler. In his autobiography, he says that “Hitler’s hatred for the Jews seemed to me so much a matter of course that I gave it no serious thought.”
As for the concentration camps, Speer stated that a colleague had visited Auschwitz and had warned Speer never to go there. But, still, “I did not query him, I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler, I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate — for I did not want to know what was happening there…. From that moment on, I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes.” Speer did once visit the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, but was given the VIP tour, devised by the SS to limit exposure to anything disturbing. Much of the contention now is over whether Speer was present at Heinrich Himmler’s terrifying 1943 speech at a conference in Posen, where Himmler made certain that all present understood that they were all just as responsible as he was for the extermination of the Jews. (In his disturbing logic, Himmler even stated his sympathy with those who had to endure the crude and heartless work of killing women and children, but assured them that future generations of Germans would be grateful.) Speer denied having been present at the speech, and two Nazi Party members later testified in support of this claim. But Speer in fact gave a speech at the conference earlier that day, and most historians now believe that he was present for the speech, or was at least made aware of it. In 2007, the Guardian reported the discovery of a 1971 letter by Speer that, if authentic, explicitly shows him admitting to being present and fully understanding the message of the speech.
Whatever the facts on this question, it seems certain that a willful denial of reality, and of his own complicity in events, was at work in the actions of Albert Speer from an early stage. Speer admits as much when he discusses in Inside the Third Reich his fateful decision to join the Nazi Party. In retrospect, Speer realized how surprising it was that someone like him — a technical person, someone who relied solely on facts — could have made such a monumental decision without fully understanding what he was committing to:
As an intellectual I might have been expected to collect documentation with the same thoroughness and to examine various points of view with the same lack of bias that I had learned to apply to my preliminary architectural studies. This failure was rooted in my inadequate political schooling. As a result, I remained uncritical, unable to deal with the arguments of my student friends, who were predominately indoctrinated with the National Socialist ideology….
Not to have worked that out for myself; not, given my education, to have read books, magazines, and newspapers of various viewpoints; not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification — was already criminal.
Perhaps even more telling of Speer’s personality were later events in which he was confronted directly, not just implicitly or rhetorically, with the violence of Hitler and the Nazis. In 1934, Hitler brutally consolidated power by rounding up, arresting, and in perhaps hundreds of cases murdering his political opponents, in an event known as the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler sent Speer to begin converting the office of Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen into a security headquarters. Speer writes, “In one of the rooms I saw a large pool of dried blood on the floor. There, on June 30, Herbert von Bose, one of Papen’s assistants, had been shot. I looked away and from then on avoided the room.” Speer would later react similarly to seeing the shattered Jewish storefronts and the smoldering fires from synagogues after Kristallnacht in 1938. He confessed that “what really disturbed me at the time was the aspect of disorder that I saw on [the street]: charred beams, collapsed facades, burned-out walls.”
It is clear also that Speer was subject to the cult of personality surrounding Hitler, and that this effect was greatly deepened by their personal relationship. “All I wanted was for this great man to dominate the globe,” Speer told Gitta Sereny; “that was the whole point of my buildings.” In 1975, the psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich described their relationship as “homo-erotic (not sexual) … the result of needs each could uniquely fulfill for the other.” Hitler saw Speer as fulfilling his own thwarted fantasies, and Speer admired Hitler to the point of viewing him as a personal hero, yearning for his approval and protection. Speer told Sereny that he largely agreed with this analysis.
Speer’s psychology, however, can hardly be seen as childlike; it was more than love and approval he sought. He writes that “feelings of exultation filled me” when he realized his “signature could mean the expenditure of billions of marks and direct hundreds of thousands of people to the construction sites.” Only later, he claims, did he “become aware that as an architect at Hitler’s side I was also seeking the pleasures of power.”
His attempt to wall off his sense of moral responsibility from the ramifications of his actions were at work early on in sophisticated ways; long before he was busy convincing his accusers at Nuremberg that he was just a technocrat, he was busy convincing himself. In the first place, this was a matter of practices. Speer saw his work as primarily goal-oriented; as noted above, he writes that “the desperate race with time, my obsessional fixation on production and output statistics, blurred all considerations and feelings of humanity.” He says of himself and his colleagues that “our burying ourselves in work was an unconscious effort to … anesthetize our conscience.”
But the more telling means by which Speer insulated himself from responsibility was not habitual but rational. Speer writes, “I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political events did not concern me…. I felt that there was no need for me to take any political positions at all. Nazi education, furthermore, aimed at separatist thinking; I was expected to confine myself to the job of building.” These statements chillingly bespeak the compartmentalizing capacities of the human psyche — and especially the technically oriented psyche — when one realizes that what Speer was referring to with a shrug as “political events” and “political positions” were the rise of a brutal dictatorship and the institution of a war of world domination and an extermination program that would each result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Straight Lines and Crooked Timber
Albert Speer’s life is a warning to all engineers that their creative powers to design and build are capable also of unleashing tremendous harm and destruction. In a sense, there were perhaps few more dangerous men in the twentieth century than Albert Speer — all the more so because he did not fully realize what he was doing. It was almost too late in his life, and certainly too late for the world and the lives lost, when Speer finally understood his horrific personal failures.
It might be said that Speer exemplifies what happens when a technical person becomes too absorbed in his work. Speer claimed at his trial that he was simply doing what nearly any other architect would have done; he was too busy “studying far into the night” to even discuss the political world exploding all around him, too lacking in the ability to think discriminately and critically, and so he found himself “unable to deal with the arguments” of his cohorts, and instead just went along. Perhaps it is the inherent nature of the technical disciplines that brings their practitioners to view the world with a practical eye, to possess a preoccupation with efficiency and order — even to the point of ignoring the humane values of dignity and justice. These are characteristics that will surely sound familiar, to some extent, to those who have worked with engineers, even if in far less sinister contexts.
But to accept this interpretation is to accept Speer’s own attempt at self-exoneration at his trial — as somehow genuinely incapable, whether due to isolation or naïveté, of intimating the true nature of his work. Though we might accept that Speer did not have malice or evil deep within him — that at least in his soul he was a far better man than most of the Nazi hierarchy — it seems clear that he knowingly let his remarkable talents be used in service of one of the most evil men in history, and to carry out the work of one of history’s most brutal regimes.
Although extremely intelligent, Speer willfully closed his eyes and helped to implement atrocity. This he accomplished not only by focusing on his work, but most fundamentally by adhering to the notion that his work was independent from affairs that were ostensibly merely “political,” and needn’t concern him. Speer admits to having espoused this idea until shockingly late in the war, well beyond the point when he himself was in charge of supplying the forces of the (decidedly political) German war machine:
The grotesque extent to which I clung to this illusion is indicated by a memorandum of mine to Hitler as late as 1944: “The task I have to fulfill is an unpolitical one. I have felt at ease in my work only so long as my person and my work were evaluated solely by the standard of practical accomplishments.”
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We can see, moreover, that Speer even at the time understood that this was but a useful fiction — and that this was not simply a late-found revelation of wrongdoing but a deliberate, rationalized squelching of his moral capacities. For Speer was not merely in thrall of the delusion that technical work is morally neutral, but seems to admit that he knowingly cultivated this idea in his own workers in order to induce in them the same effects that Hitler was inducing in Speer:
Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without any scruples about their activities. The more technical the world imposed on us by the war, the more dangerous was this indifference of the technician to the direct consequences of his anonymous activities.
To Engineer Is Human
Speer may seem too dramatic an example to be of much relevance to scientists and engineers today, who are seldom given such power, or such opportunities to determine the fates of so many. But his story still resonates, not only because engineers still inevitably face moral choices of some degree, but because of how unsettlingly familiar is the mantra he apparently repeated to permit himself to continue with his work. Speer, that is, convinced himself of what remains one of the shibboleths of the technical professions to this day: that science and technology, no matter what their implications or the ends toward which they are employed, are completely apolitical and amoral in character.
This is a fiction we must devote ourselves to breaking — in our culture at large, but starting with the education of the practitioners of the technological and scientific enterprise. Insofar as they are concerned with discovering truths about nature, scientists can argue that knowledge of the truth, regardless of its implications, is better than ignorance. But engineers, as they convert these scientific truths into technical capacities, must concern themselves with the moral consequences of where their engineering creativity may lead. Increasingly today, we focus our engineering education almost exclusively on the analytical core of science and mathematics. The authors of the textbook Engineering and Society: Challenges of Professional Practice point out that “as the technical content of engineering programs has increased, treatment of broader social issues has tended to be squeezed out. An underlying assumption has been that technology is value-free and that therefore any consideration of human emotions, needs, and aspirations is extraneous, if not irrational. Many engineering courses have been structured so that they avoid explicit value judgments.”
Today’s engineers need a more well-rounded education — one that stresses not only the analytical skills necessary to be a good engineer but also the liberal arts that are necessary to teach these good engineers the wisdom of history, to provide the foundation for young students to grow and mature as citizens with responsibilities beyond the immediate technical concerns of their work. And the liberal arts can train a young mind to think critically and discriminately about moral questions — aiding in the ability to determine what is right and what is wrong. Most engineers are gifted in math and science; this alone is not sufficient to make them responsible or moral human beings.
Peter Drucker, the business consultant who was instrumental in pushing the management team running General Motors to train its managers in the liberal arts, once wrote that “first-rate engineers … tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human beings, they believe, are much too disorderly for the good engineering mind.” Perhaps it is time that the engineering profession acknowledged this attitude, and rejected it. We engineers are better and more than the machines we create; we are responsible, not only to ourselves and to our employers, but to our fellow human beings. The humanities offer engineering students the lessons of life and history that are not found in our technical world.
We should not expect to add an entire liberal arts curriculum to the already strained requirements of engineering schools. Nevertheless, there are stratagems we can adopt that will help our students to achieve a more humane education without undermining their analytical knowledge and skills.
First, as engineering educators, we can lead those we instruct by changing the prevailing attitude toward the humanities. We can admit that, although we can create wonders, we don’t know everything and we don’t have all the answers — that there is far more to wisdom than being able to design an aircraft or create a microprocessor. We can admit that the responsibilities of the engineering profession are far greater than we can easily apprehend when we are lost in a computer screen, enraptured with the expansive yet still critically limited view of the act of technical creation. And we can admit and openly discuss that, in the past, engineers have been responsible for creating many of the problems that we struggle with as a society every day.
Second, we can collaborate with our colleagues in the humanities to structure engineering ethics courses that will interest engineers. Perhaps we need to relate ethics in a way that focuses less on universals and abstractions, and that makes sense to the practical and pragmatic mind. Engineers needn’t become great philosophers to appreciate the power, influence, and responsibility they possess as engineers. An engineering ethics course centered on case studies, such as Albert Speer’s, could drive home this point. And of course there are many others, of countless kinds: the creation of napalm and the atomic bomb; the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters; the I-35W Mississippi River bridge and Hyatt Regency walkway collapses; innumerable product-safety recalls; and on and on.
When engineers are presented with situations and stories they can personally relate to, their pragmatic approach to understanding can become much more focused than when presented with abstract philosophical debates that appear to be unending, divorced from reality, and eternally inconclusive to the technical mind. Teaching with real case studies can breathe life into ethical dilemmas faced by other engineers.
Teaching about the specific personalities involved in these disasters may also allow the student to see that there’s much more involved in engineering than science and technical skill — that social ramifications, and personal responsibility for them, are integral to everything they design and create. There are many engineers who, like Speer, had extraordinary technical skills but lacked or neglected their capacity for critical judgment. Students could study Henry Ford or Howard Hughes to realize that their true technical genius wasn’t enough to make either of them complete men, and that efficiency, pragmatism, and utility all have their limits outside of engineering where, after all, we spend most of our lives.
But while culture and education are surely important for making decent citizens of engineers, one of the essential lessons that we can learn from the story of Albert Speer is that it is the individual technician himself who bears the ultimate responsibility for his work. The need for this responsibility only deepens as society and technology become more complex, allowing the engineer to become progressively more insulated and isolated from the effects of his creations. Prewar Germany, after all, hardly lacked for education and culture; what was needed most direly was the conscience and decency of individual people. “The more technological the world becomes,” Speer wrote, “the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology.”
Hitler and his henchmen inspired the evil that culminated in the Holocaust and the other atrocities of the Third Reich and deaths of World War II. But they were not alone; there were millions who also contributed, either directly by actively participating or indirectly by their silence and disregard. There were engineers, technicians, and architects whose ostensibly amoral technical abilities and organizational capacities supported a regime that nearly brought about the end of Western civilization.
A man who once controlled the productive output of a modern industrial empire later found himself alone in a bleak, cold, gray prison cell, thinking of his past and what went wrong. Albert Speer thought back to a day in the war — the day, in fact, before he was appointed Minister of Armaments — when he found himself lost while traveling through the frozen Ukrainian countryside, and encountered Russian peasants who helped treat his near-frostbite. They had helped him as a human being who was suffering, not a despised conqueror who was destroying their country. At the time, Speer said, he felt “touched” by their kindness, but simply could not understand it.
Years later, while serving his sentence for crimes against humanity, Speer would begin to finally understand why these Russian peasants acted to help him. Speer was guarded by Soviet soldiers, who he knew must have suffered tremendously during the war. The German war machine — which Speer fed with bullets, tanks, and bombs — killed soldiers and civilians mercilessly and indiscriminately. The Soviets lost nearly 30 million people in the war; of those families that survived, nearly every one felt the pain of a lost family member. Yet among the Russian guards, Speer said, “not one of them bore a grudge toward me.” Rather, he “encountered uncorrupted feelings of sympathy, helpfulness, human understanding, feelings that bypassed the prison rules.” He then recalled his meeting, long ago, with the Ukrainian peasants who saved him from frostbite. He finally understood what he couldn’t comprehend back then: the meaning of genuine human kindness. “I forgot,” Speer later said, shortly before the end of his own life, 'that humanity is the most important part of life.'”
The Architecture of Evil
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Hitler's Henchmen: The Architect Albert Speer (WW2 MILITARY HISTORY DOCUMENTARY)
Hitler's Henchmen: The Architect Albert Speer (WW2 MILITARY HISTORY DOCUMENTARY)Profile of Albert Speer, who masterminded Nazi propaganda and helped Hitler d...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on February 8, 1942 German architect, engineer, production supervisor and early Nazi supporter of Adolf Hitler was appointed was appointed Minister of Armaments by Adolf Hitler after the death of Minister of Armaments Fritz Todt in a plane crash.
Albert Speer was a consummate technocrat who focused on achieving goals generally independent of human cost. The execution of his armament dreams and plans caused the death of thousands. Too late he learned to appreciate the value of human life. That being said he was the only senior Nazi official who accepted responsibility for what they did [during the Nuremburg trials.
Hitler's Henchmen: The Architect Albert Speer (WW2 MILITARY HISTORY DOCUMENTARY)
Profile of Albert Speer, who masterminded Nazi propaganda and helped Hitler draw up plans for a new Berlin. Despite professing no interest in politics and being thought to be the most impartial member of the Third Reich, he was an ambitious man who eventually became minister of armaments and munitions, and is alleged to have known earlier than most about the Fuehrer's plans for a mass extermination of Jews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBWETZYPa5A
Images:
1. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in 1943.
2. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in discussion, Nürnberg, Germany, circa 1933-1937.
3. Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, and Alfred Jodl immediately after being arrested by British troops, 23 May 1945.
4. Albert Speer during the Nuremberg Trials, Germany, 1946
Background from {[ https://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=519
World War II Database
Albert Speer
Surname Speer
Given Name Albert
Born 19 Mar 1905
Died 1 Sep 1981
Contributor: C. Peter Chen
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany, into a wealthy middle class family to Albert and Luise Speer. In 1918, moved to Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg, Heidelberg, Germany. He originally wanted to become a mathematician, but his father advised against the wish, suggesting that he would "lead a life without money, without a position, and without a future". Instead, Speer followed his father's footsteps and became an architect after studying at University of Karlsruhe, Technical University of Munich, and Technical University of Berlin. In 1927, he worked as Heinrich Tessenow's assistant, who was also his teacher at Technical University of Berlin prior to his graduation. In the summer of 1922, he met Margarete Weber, who he married on 28 Aug 1928; they would later have six children.
In Dec 1930, Speer attended a Nazi Party rally and was impressed with Adolf Hitler. Several weeks later, he attended another rally, and was disturbed by the way Joseph Goebbels emotionally triggered the crowd into a frenzy. Nevertheless, he joined the party on 1 Mar 1931, largely due to the impression Hitler made on him. As the only person in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin, Germany who owned a car, he became the Nazi Party's motorist association for the area. In 1931, he resigned as Tessenow's assistant and became a property manager for his father's several real estate properties. In Jul 1932, he visited Berlin to offer help for the Nazi Party for the upcoming Reichstag elections, and he was recommended by Karl Hanke, a former Nazi Party superior of Speer's, to Goebbels to renovate the Nazi Party's Berlin headquarters. After the Nazi Party gained power in Berlin, now Propaganda Minister Goebbels commissioned Speer to renovate his ministry building on Wilhelmplatz and to design the 1933 May Day commemoration. When he worked on the 1933 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, he came in contact with Hitler for the first time, though Hitler hardly paid attention to him as he presented the plans; absent-mindedly, Hitler made Speer the Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Party Rallies and Demonstrations. It was not until Speer took on the project to design Hitler's Chancellery that Hitler and Speer actually worked together. After one of the daily meetings, Hitler invited Speer to join him for lunch, and asked him to help designing structures for a new Germany. Hitler described Speer as his "kindred spirit" for whom he had always maintained "the warmest human feelings". Later, during the Nuremberg Trials, Speer noted that from that "[i]f Hitler had had any friends at all, [he] certainly would have been one of his close friends." In 1934, Hitler appointed him as the head of the Chief Office for Construction. In this role, he designed the 340,000-seat stadium Zeppelinfeld, which was surrounded by 130 large anti-aircraft searchlights; the grand stadium was later described by British Ambassador Neville Henderson as a "cathedral of ice" or by others "cathedral of light". He employed an unorthodox planning method nicknamed "ruin value"; when he designed the grand Nazi-themed structures, he designed them in such a way that, when they became ruins thousands of years in the future, they would leave a legacy for Germany in the same manner as Greek and Roman ruins. In 1936, he was one of the architects working on the Berlin Olympic Stadium, and in 1937, he designed the German Pavilion for the international exposition in Paris, France. In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as the General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital with the rank of undersecretary of state in the government; it also made him a member of the Reichstag. In this position, he was charged to rebuild Berlin; his plan involved building a grand boulevard called Prachtstrasse, an assembly hall with a dome over 210 meters high, and a large arc at the opposite end of the assembly hall, but the plans were delayed, then abandoned, due to the start of the European War. When Speer's father saw the model for the new Berlin, he said to Speer "[y]ou've all gone completely insane." In 1938, he rebuilt the Chancellery on the same site as the existing structure in only nine months; Hitler was extremely impressed with the new structure, but his former mentor Tessenow thought the work was too rushed thus almost unacceptable.
As the European War began, Speer voiced support for the conquest of Poland. "Of course I was perfectly aware that [Hitler] sought world domination", he later said. "That was the whole point of my buildings. They would have looked grotesque if Hitler had sat still in Germany. All I wanted was for this great man to dominate the globe." In war time, Speer organized squads to construct roads or clear away debris in order to assist the military; he also worked with the Army and the Air Force to construct military facilities. In 1940, Joseph Stalin invited Speer to visit Moscow, Russia, but Hitler ordered Speer to reject the invitation. On 8 Feb 1942, Minister of Armaments Fritz Todt died in a plane crash, and Hitler appointed Speer the successor. Speer centralized power over the war economy in order to improve Germany's war time production capabilities, and placed military experts as departmental leadership positions in his ministry. Goebbels noted in his diary in Jun 1943 that "He is truly a genius with organization." Some of his efforts were undermined by Hitler's dabbling; for example, when Speer suggested that German women could be drafted to work in armament production, Hitler, at Fritz Sauckel's suggestion, imported forced laborers from conquered territories instead. On 10 Dec 1943, when Speer visited the underground Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory, he was appalled by the treatment of workers drafted from concentration camps. He ordered the working and living conditions to improve for these workers, but his ministry put forth little effort toward that order. After the war, Speer maintained that witnessing the forced laborers were essentially the extent of his knowledge of the Holocaust during the war; he claimed that he would not realize the full horrors of concentration camps until after the war. His claim of not realizing the extent of the Holocaust is still widely disputed.
In Jan 1944, Speer fell ill, and was unable to work for three months. During that time, Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler conspired to usurp Speer's influence. In Apr 1944, the responsibility for construction was removed from Speer, and he wrote Hitler a bitter letter to offer his resignation. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, however, brokered a deal between Hitler and Speer, which included the return of construction responsibilities to Speer. In Jul 1944, a plot to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government commenced and failed, and Speer was implicated as his name appeared on a plan to establish a post-Hitler government. He escaped from prosecution as a question mark was drawn next to his name, with the comment "to be won over".
On 19 Mar 1945, Hitler issued the Nero Degree, which was essentially a scorched earth policy for territories about to be taken over by Germany's enemies. Originally Hitler's order circumvented Speer's authority, but Speer was able to persuade Hitler otherwise, and then used the newly regained power to work with various local Nazi Party leaders to save various buildings, factories, and infrastructure from being destroyed, which would harm the post-war Germany. He had the thought of assassinating Hitler at this late stage of the war in an attempt to save Germany from further destruction, going as far as scouting the Chancellery grounds for a suitable vent to drop poison gas capsules, giving up when he had discovered that all vents were placed on 12-foot high chimneys, out of his reach. When Germany was about to fall, he was relatively safe in Hamburg, Germany, but he chose to return to Berlin to see Hitler one more time. On 22 Apr, he entered Hitler's bunker and saw Hitler for the last time, where he admitted his efforts to sabotage Hitler's scorched earth orders, and he was forgiven by Hitler. Speer left the bunker in the morning of 23 Apr, toured the damaged Chancellery for the last time, and returned to Hamburg.
On 29 Apr, the day before Hitler's suicide, Hitler compiled a list of government officials to succeed his government. Speer's name was missing from the list; in fact, Hitler specified that Speer was to be replaced by Karl-Otto Saur.
After Hitler's death, Speer was a member of Karl Dönitz's government. Between 15 and 23 May, he provided information to the Americans on the effects of the air war on German production. On 23 May, he was arrested and was taken to several internment camps for Nazi German officials. In Sep 1945, at the Nuremberg Trials, he was accused of crime against peace, waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crime against humanity. United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, alleged that "Speer joined in planning and executing the program to dragoon prisoners of war and foreign workers into German war industries, which waxed in output while the workers waned in starvation." Speer's attorney Dr. Hans Flächsner presented Speer as an architect who was an unwilling player in German politics, but Speer particularly noted that he was willing to hold responsibility as he was one of Hitler's closest associates. During the trial, Speer also confessed of his plot to assassinate Hitler in early 1945 after realizing Hitler's actions would bring Germany to ruin, but this confession was largely met with skepticism, both with the Tribunal as well as the other defendants. He was found guilty on war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on 1 Oct 1946. The judgment stated that
in the closing stages of the war [Speer] was one of the few men who had the courage to tell Hitler that the war was lost and to take steps to prevent the senseless destruction of production facilities, both in occupied territories and in Germany. He carried out his opposition to Hitler's scorched earth program... by deliberately sabotaging it at considerable personal risk.
On 18 Jul 1947, Speer and six fellow prisoners were transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin. His fellow prisoners treated him with disrespect as he was the only one who accepted responsibility for crimes conducted by the Nazi government. In secret, against the rules, he wrote his memoirs which would eventually become the book Inside the Third Reich. His letters to his children, also sent in secret, became the basis for the later book Spandau: The Secret Diaries. While imprisoned, he meticulously calculated the distance he walked each day in the exercise yard, and imagined that he was traveling the world on foot. When he was released on 1 Oct 1966, he had, in his imagination, walked from northern Germany to the Middle East, across Siberia into Alaska, and down to near Guadalajara, Mexico. While in prison, he also read over 500 books and built a garden that the American commander at Spandau described as "Speer's Garden of Eden".
ww2dbaseUpon his release, Speer abandoned initial wishes to return to architecture. He published the two books that he had started while in prison, and then began researching on what would become a book on Heinrich Himmler and the SS. He donated large sums of money to Jewish charities, estimated at about 80% of his royalty income, and most of the donations were made anonymously in fear of rejection. As his experience in Spandau, former colleagues kept their distance from him as Speer called many former Nazi leaders "criminals", including Adolf Hitler. In Oct 1973, he traveled to the United Kingdom under a fake name for a BBC interview, and was discovered at Heathrow Airport; he was allowed by Home Secretary Robert Carr a special 48-hour pass to conduct the interview. He returned to London, England, United Kingdom in 1981 for another BBC interview; during this trip, he suffered a stroke and passed away at the age of 76.
William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Last Major Revision: May 2009
Albert Speer Timeline
19 Mar 1905 Albert Speer was born.
8 Feb 1942 - In Germany, Albert Speer was appointed the Minister of Armaments and Munitions to succeed Fritz Todt who was killed when his aircraft exploded shortly after take off near Rastenburg, Ostpreußen (East Prussia), Germany.
25 May 1943 - In a conference in Berlin, Germany, Albert Speer recommended that the funding for military research be focused on the V-2 rocket program rather than being spread around a wide range of projects that included jets, heat-seeking missiles, sound-seeking torpedoes, and others. Ultimately this recommendation would be ignored.
30 Jan 1945 - Albert Speer noted to Adolf Hitler that, having lost the Silesia region to Soviet forces, Germany had now lost an important source of coal and steel, the war was now lost.
15 Mar 1945 - Albert Speer wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler in an attempt to dissuade him from destroying German infrastructure. This letter would be presented to Hitler three days later.
18 Mar 1945 - Albert Speer, sensing Adolf Hitler's wish to potentially order the destruction of Germany to prevent Allied capture, attempted to persuade Hitler not to destroy the future of Germany.
19 Mar 1945 - Hitler issued the Nero Decree, which was a scorched Earth policy to prevent any industry, utility, or transportation from being used by the advancing Allied and Soviet armies. Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister, recognized the need for this infrastructure after the war and undermined efforts to carry out the decree.
23 Apr 1945 - After sundown, Albert Speer bid his final farewell to Adolf Hitler. He admitted to Hitler that he had sabotaged Hitler's scorched earth policies, and Hitler forgave him for disobeying the order. Speer toured the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany for the last time before leaving for Hamburg, Germany.
1 Sep 1981 - Albert Speer passed away."
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Albert Speer was a consummate technocrat who focused on achieving goals generally independent of human cost. The execution of his armament dreams and plans caused the death of thousands. Too late he learned to appreciate the value of human life. That being said he was the only senior Nazi official who accepted responsibility for what they did [during the Nuremburg trials.
Hitler's Henchmen: The Architect Albert Speer (WW2 MILITARY HISTORY DOCUMENTARY)
Profile of Albert Speer, who masterminded Nazi propaganda and helped Hitler draw up plans for a new Berlin. Despite professing no interest in politics and being thought to be the most impartial member of the Third Reich, he was an ambitious man who eventually became minister of armaments and munitions, and is alleged to have known earlier than most about the Fuehrer's plans for a mass extermination of Jews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBWETZYPa5A
Images:
1. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in 1943.
2. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in discussion, Nürnberg, Germany, circa 1933-1937.
3. Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, and Alfred Jodl immediately after being arrested by British troops, 23 May 1945.
4. Albert Speer during the Nuremberg Trials, Germany, 1946
Background from {[ https://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=519
World War II Database
Albert Speer
Surname Speer
Given Name Albert
Born 19 Mar 1905
Died 1 Sep 1981
Contributor: C. Peter Chen
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany, into a wealthy middle class family to Albert and Luise Speer. In 1918, moved to Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg, Heidelberg, Germany. He originally wanted to become a mathematician, but his father advised against the wish, suggesting that he would "lead a life without money, without a position, and without a future". Instead, Speer followed his father's footsteps and became an architect after studying at University of Karlsruhe, Technical University of Munich, and Technical University of Berlin. In 1927, he worked as Heinrich Tessenow's assistant, who was also his teacher at Technical University of Berlin prior to his graduation. In the summer of 1922, he met Margarete Weber, who he married on 28 Aug 1928; they would later have six children.
In Dec 1930, Speer attended a Nazi Party rally and was impressed with Adolf Hitler. Several weeks later, he attended another rally, and was disturbed by the way Joseph Goebbels emotionally triggered the crowd into a frenzy. Nevertheless, he joined the party on 1 Mar 1931, largely due to the impression Hitler made on him. As the only person in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin, Germany who owned a car, he became the Nazi Party's motorist association for the area. In 1931, he resigned as Tessenow's assistant and became a property manager for his father's several real estate properties. In Jul 1932, he visited Berlin to offer help for the Nazi Party for the upcoming Reichstag elections, and he was recommended by Karl Hanke, a former Nazi Party superior of Speer's, to Goebbels to renovate the Nazi Party's Berlin headquarters. After the Nazi Party gained power in Berlin, now Propaganda Minister Goebbels commissioned Speer to renovate his ministry building on Wilhelmplatz and to design the 1933 May Day commemoration. When he worked on the 1933 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, he came in contact with Hitler for the first time, though Hitler hardly paid attention to him as he presented the plans; absent-mindedly, Hitler made Speer the Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Party Rallies and Demonstrations. It was not until Speer took on the project to design Hitler's Chancellery that Hitler and Speer actually worked together. After one of the daily meetings, Hitler invited Speer to join him for lunch, and asked him to help designing structures for a new Germany. Hitler described Speer as his "kindred spirit" for whom he had always maintained "the warmest human feelings". Later, during the Nuremberg Trials, Speer noted that from that "[i]f Hitler had had any friends at all, [he] certainly would have been one of his close friends." In 1934, Hitler appointed him as the head of the Chief Office for Construction. In this role, he designed the 340,000-seat stadium Zeppelinfeld, which was surrounded by 130 large anti-aircraft searchlights; the grand stadium was later described by British Ambassador Neville Henderson as a "cathedral of ice" or by others "cathedral of light". He employed an unorthodox planning method nicknamed "ruin value"; when he designed the grand Nazi-themed structures, he designed them in such a way that, when they became ruins thousands of years in the future, they would leave a legacy for Germany in the same manner as Greek and Roman ruins. In 1936, he was one of the architects working on the Berlin Olympic Stadium, and in 1937, he designed the German Pavilion for the international exposition in Paris, France. In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as the General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital with the rank of undersecretary of state in the government; it also made him a member of the Reichstag. In this position, he was charged to rebuild Berlin; his plan involved building a grand boulevard called Prachtstrasse, an assembly hall with a dome over 210 meters high, and a large arc at the opposite end of the assembly hall, but the plans were delayed, then abandoned, due to the start of the European War. When Speer's father saw the model for the new Berlin, he said to Speer "[y]ou've all gone completely insane." In 1938, he rebuilt the Chancellery on the same site as the existing structure in only nine months; Hitler was extremely impressed with the new structure, but his former mentor Tessenow thought the work was too rushed thus almost unacceptable.
As the European War began, Speer voiced support for the conquest of Poland. "Of course I was perfectly aware that [Hitler] sought world domination", he later said. "That was the whole point of my buildings. They would have looked grotesque if Hitler had sat still in Germany. All I wanted was for this great man to dominate the globe." In war time, Speer organized squads to construct roads or clear away debris in order to assist the military; he also worked with the Army and the Air Force to construct military facilities. In 1940, Joseph Stalin invited Speer to visit Moscow, Russia, but Hitler ordered Speer to reject the invitation. On 8 Feb 1942, Minister of Armaments Fritz Todt died in a plane crash, and Hitler appointed Speer the successor. Speer centralized power over the war economy in order to improve Germany's war time production capabilities, and placed military experts as departmental leadership positions in his ministry. Goebbels noted in his diary in Jun 1943 that "He is truly a genius with organization." Some of his efforts were undermined by Hitler's dabbling; for example, when Speer suggested that German women could be drafted to work in armament production, Hitler, at Fritz Sauckel's suggestion, imported forced laborers from conquered territories instead. On 10 Dec 1943, when Speer visited the underground Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory, he was appalled by the treatment of workers drafted from concentration camps. He ordered the working and living conditions to improve for these workers, but his ministry put forth little effort toward that order. After the war, Speer maintained that witnessing the forced laborers were essentially the extent of his knowledge of the Holocaust during the war; he claimed that he would not realize the full horrors of concentration camps until after the war. His claim of not realizing the extent of the Holocaust is still widely disputed.
In Jan 1944, Speer fell ill, and was unable to work for three months. During that time, Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler conspired to usurp Speer's influence. In Apr 1944, the responsibility for construction was removed from Speer, and he wrote Hitler a bitter letter to offer his resignation. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, however, brokered a deal between Hitler and Speer, which included the return of construction responsibilities to Speer. In Jul 1944, a plot to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government commenced and failed, and Speer was implicated as his name appeared on a plan to establish a post-Hitler government. He escaped from prosecution as a question mark was drawn next to his name, with the comment "to be won over".
On 19 Mar 1945, Hitler issued the Nero Degree, which was essentially a scorched earth policy for territories about to be taken over by Germany's enemies. Originally Hitler's order circumvented Speer's authority, but Speer was able to persuade Hitler otherwise, and then used the newly regained power to work with various local Nazi Party leaders to save various buildings, factories, and infrastructure from being destroyed, which would harm the post-war Germany. He had the thought of assassinating Hitler at this late stage of the war in an attempt to save Germany from further destruction, going as far as scouting the Chancellery grounds for a suitable vent to drop poison gas capsules, giving up when he had discovered that all vents were placed on 12-foot high chimneys, out of his reach. When Germany was about to fall, he was relatively safe in Hamburg, Germany, but he chose to return to Berlin to see Hitler one more time. On 22 Apr, he entered Hitler's bunker and saw Hitler for the last time, where he admitted his efforts to sabotage Hitler's scorched earth orders, and he was forgiven by Hitler. Speer left the bunker in the morning of 23 Apr, toured the damaged Chancellery for the last time, and returned to Hamburg.
On 29 Apr, the day before Hitler's suicide, Hitler compiled a list of government officials to succeed his government. Speer's name was missing from the list; in fact, Hitler specified that Speer was to be replaced by Karl-Otto Saur.
After Hitler's death, Speer was a member of Karl Dönitz's government. Between 15 and 23 May, he provided information to the Americans on the effects of the air war on German production. On 23 May, he was arrested and was taken to several internment camps for Nazi German officials. In Sep 1945, at the Nuremberg Trials, he was accused of crime against peace, waging wars of aggression, war crimes, and crime against humanity. United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, alleged that "Speer joined in planning and executing the program to dragoon prisoners of war and foreign workers into German war industries, which waxed in output while the workers waned in starvation." Speer's attorney Dr. Hans Flächsner presented Speer as an architect who was an unwilling player in German politics, but Speer particularly noted that he was willing to hold responsibility as he was one of Hitler's closest associates. During the trial, Speer also confessed of his plot to assassinate Hitler in early 1945 after realizing Hitler's actions would bring Germany to ruin, but this confession was largely met with skepticism, both with the Tribunal as well as the other defendants. He was found guilty on war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on 1 Oct 1946. The judgment stated that
in the closing stages of the war [Speer] was one of the few men who had the courage to tell Hitler that the war was lost and to take steps to prevent the senseless destruction of production facilities, both in occupied territories and in Germany. He carried out his opposition to Hitler's scorched earth program... by deliberately sabotaging it at considerable personal risk.
On 18 Jul 1947, Speer and six fellow prisoners were transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin. His fellow prisoners treated him with disrespect as he was the only one who accepted responsibility for crimes conducted by the Nazi government. In secret, against the rules, he wrote his memoirs which would eventually become the book Inside the Third Reich. His letters to his children, also sent in secret, became the basis for the later book Spandau: The Secret Diaries. While imprisoned, he meticulously calculated the distance he walked each day in the exercise yard, and imagined that he was traveling the world on foot. When he was released on 1 Oct 1966, he had, in his imagination, walked from northern Germany to the Middle East, across Siberia into Alaska, and down to near Guadalajara, Mexico. While in prison, he also read over 500 books and built a garden that the American commander at Spandau described as "Speer's Garden of Eden".
ww2dbaseUpon his release, Speer abandoned initial wishes to return to architecture. He published the two books that he had started while in prison, and then began researching on what would become a book on Heinrich Himmler and the SS. He donated large sums of money to Jewish charities, estimated at about 80% of his royalty income, and most of the donations were made anonymously in fear of rejection. As his experience in Spandau, former colleagues kept their distance from him as Speer called many former Nazi leaders "criminals", including Adolf Hitler. In Oct 1973, he traveled to the United Kingdom under a fake name for a BBC interview, and was discovered at Heathrow Airport; he was allowed by Home Secretary Robert Carr a special 48-hour pass to conduct the interview. He returned to London, England, United Kingdom in 1981 for another BBC interview; during this trip, he suffered a stroke and passed away at the age of 76.
William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Last Major Revision: May 2009
Albert Speer Timeline
19 Mar 1905 Albert Speer was born.
8 Feb 1942 - In Germany, Albert Speer was appointed the Minister of Armaments and Munitions to succeed Fritz Todt who was killed when his aircraft exploded shortly after take off near Rastenburg, Ostpreußen (East Prussia), Germany.
25 May 1943 - In a conference in Berlin, Germany, Albert Speer recommended that the funding for military research be focused on the V-2 rocket program rather than being spread around a wide range of projects that included jets, heat-seeking missiles, sound-seeking torpedoes, and others. Ultimately this recommendation would be ignored.
30 Jan 1945 - Albert Speer noted to Adolf Hitler that, having lost the Silesia region to Soviet forces, Germany had now lost an important source of coal and steel, the war was now lost.
15 Mar 1945 - Albert Speer wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler in an attempt to dissuade him from destroying German infrastructure. This letter would be presented to Hitler three days later.
18 Mar 1945 - Albert Speer, sensing Adolf Hitler's wish to potentially order the destruction of Germany to prevent Allied capture, attempted to persuade Hitler not to destroy the future of Germany.
19 Mar 1945 - Hitler issued the Nero Decree, which was a scorched Earth policy to prevent any industry, utility, or transportation from being used by the advancing Allied and Soviet armies. Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister, recognized the need for this infrastructure after the war and undermined efforts to carry out the decree.
23 Apr 1945 - After sundown, Albert Speer bid his final farewell to Adolf Hitler. He admitted to Hitler that he had sabotaged Hitler's scorched earth policies, and Hitler forgave him for disobeying the order. Speer toured the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany for the last time before leaving for Hamburg, Germany.
1 Sep 1981 - Albert Speer passed away."
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LTC Stephen F.
Albert Speer: The Nazi who said Sorry
This is a documentary focused on the work of Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect and Minister for Armaments from 1942. From the acclaimed 'Reputations...
Albert Speer: The Nazi who said Sorry
This is a documentary focused on the work of Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect and Minister for Armaments from 1942. From the acclaimed 'Reputations' series, the film examines Speer's complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich, and also his attempts to find some sort of rehabilitation. There is considerable input from the late Gitta Sereny who interviewed Speer in old age. Uploaded for educational purposes only.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtHEuU50S8M
Images:
1. Albert Speer inspecting a captured Russian T-34 tank, 28 Jun 1943.
2. Albert Speer with five of his children sitting in his car.
3. Albert Speer sitting on doorsteps, 22 Dec 1942.
4. Albert Speer is arrested along with members of the Flensburg Government in May 1945.
Background from {[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-candor-and-lies-of-nazi-officer-albert-speer-324737/}
The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert Speer
The minister of armaments was happy to tell his captors about the war machine he had built. But it was a different story when he was asked about the Holocaust
By Gilbert King SMITHSONIANMAG.COM; JANUARY 8, 2013
On April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought toward the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in street-to-street combat, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and fired. Berlin quickly surrendered and World War II in Europe was effectively over. Yet Hitler’s chosen successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, decamped with others of the Nazi Party faithful to northern Germany and formed the Flensburg Government.
As Allied troops and the U.N. War Crimes Commission closed in on Flensburg, one Nazi emerged as a man of particular interest: Albert Speer, the brilliant architect, minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich and a close friend to Hitler. Throughout World War II, Speer had directed an “armaments miracle,” doubling Hitler’s production orders and prolonging the German war effort while under relentless Allied air attacks. He did this through administrative genius and by exploiting millions of slave laborers who were starved and worked to death in his factories.
Speer arrived in Flensburg aware that the Allies were targeting Nazi leaders for war-crimes trials. He—like many other Nazi Party members and SS officers—concluded that he could expect no mercy once captured. Unlike them, he did not commit suicide.
The hunt for Albert Speer was unusual. The U.N. War Crimes Commission was determined to bring him to justice, but a U.S. government official hoped to reach the Nazi technocrat first. A former investment banker named Paul Nitze, who was then vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, believed it was imperative to get to Speer. As the war in Europe was winding down, the Americans were hoping that strategic bombing in Japan could end the war in the Pacific. But in order to achieve that, they hoped to learn more about how Germany had maintained its war machine while withstanding heavy bombing. Thus Nitze needed Speer. In May 1945, the race was on to capture and interrogate one of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen.
Just after Hitler’s death, President Donitz and his cabinet took up residence at the Naval Academy at Murwik, overlooking the Flensburg Fjord. On his first evening in power, the new leader gave a nationwide radio address; though he knew German forces could not resist Allied advances, he promised his people that Germany would continue to fight. He also appointed Speer his minister of industry and production.
On May 15, American forces arrived in Flensburg and got to Speer first. Nitze arrived at Glucksburg Castle, where Speer was being held, along with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also working for the Strategic Bombing Survey, and a team of interpreters and assistants. They interrogated Speer for seven straight days, during which he talked freely with the Americans, taking them through what he termed “bombing high school.” Each morning Speer, dressed in a suit, would pleasantly answer questions with what struck his questioners as remarkable candor—enough candor that Nitze and his associates dared not ask what Speer knew of the Holocaust, out of fear that his mood might change. Speer knew his best chance to survive was to cooperate and seem indispensable to the Americans, and his cooperation had a strange effect on his interrogators. One of them said he “evoked in us a sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed.”
He demonstrated an unparalleled understanding of the Nazi war machine. He told Nitze how he had reduced the influence of the military and the Nazi Party in decision-making, and how he had followed Henry Ford’s manufacturing principles to run the factories more efficiently. He told his interrogators why certain British and American air attacks had failed and why others had been effective. He explained how he’d traveled around Germany to urge his workers on in speeches he later termed “delusional,” because he already knew the war was lost.
In March 1945, he said, with the end in sight, Hitler had called for a “scorched earth” plan (his “Nero Decree”) to destroy any industrial facilities, supply depots, military equipment or infrastructure that might be valuable to advancing enemy forces. Speer said he was furious and disobeyed Hitler’s orders, transferring his loyalty from der Fuhrer to the German people and the future of the nation.
After a week, Nitze received a message from a superior: “Paul, if you’ve got any further things you want to find out from Speer you’d better get him tomorrow.” The Americans were planning on arresting the former minister of armaments and war production, and he would no longer be available for interrogation. Nitze did have something else he wanted to find out from Speer: He wanted to know all about Hitler’s last days in the bunker, since Speer was among the last men to meet with him. According to Nitze, Speer “leaned over backwards” to help, pointing the Americans to where they could find records of his reports to Hitler—many of which were held in a safe in Munich. Nitze said Speer “gave us the keys to the safe and combination, and we sent somebody down to get these records.” But Speer was evasive, Nitze thought, and not credible when he claimed no knowledge of the Holocaust or war crimes against Jews laboring in his factories.
“It became evident right away that Speer was worried he might be declared a war criminal,” Nitze later said. On May 23, British and American officials called for a meeting with Flensburg government cabinet members aboard the ship Patria and had them all arrested. Tanks rolled up to Glucksburg Castle, and heavily armed troops burst into Speer’s bedroom to take him away. “So now the end has come,” he said. “That’s good. It was all only kind of an opera anyway.”
Nitze, Galbraith and the men from the bombing survey moved on. In September 1945, Speer was informed that he would be charged with war crimes and incarcerated pending trial at Nuremberg, along with more than 20 other surviving members of the Nazi high command. The series of military tribunals beginning in November 1945 were designed to show the world that the mass crimes against humanity by German leaders would not go unpunished.
As films from concentration camps were shown as evidence, and as witnesses testified to the horrors they endured at the hands of the Nazis, Speer was observed to have tears in his eyes. When he took the stand, he insisted that he had no knowledge of the Holocaust, but the evidence of slave labor in his factories was damning. Speer apologized to the court and claimed responsibility for the slave labor, saying he should have known but did not. He was culpable, he said, but he insisted he had no knowledge of the crimes. Later, to show his credentials as a “good Nazi” and to distance himself from his co-defendants, Speer would claim that he’d planned to kill Hitler two years before by dropping a poison gas canister into an air intake in his bunker. On hearing that, the other defendants laughed in the courtroom.
In the fall of 1946, most of the Nazi elites at Nuremberg were sentenced either to death or to life in prison. Speer received 20 years at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he was known as prisoner number 5. He read continuously, tended a garden and, against prison rules, wrote the notes for what would become bestselling books, including Inside the Third Reich. There was no question that Speer’s contrition in court, and perhaps his cooperation with Nitze, saved his life.
After serving the full 20 years, Speer was released in 1966. He grew wealthy, lived in a cottage in Heidelberg, West Germany, and cultivated his image as a “good Nazi” who had spoken candidly about his past. But questions about Speer’s truthfulness began to dog him soon after his release. In 1971, Harvard University’s Erich Goldhagen alleged that Speer had been aware of the extermination of Jews, based on evidence that Speer had attended a Nazi conference in 1943 at which Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s military commander, had spoken openly about “wiping the Jews from the face of the earth.” Speer admitted that he’d attended the conference but said he had left before Himmler gave his infamous “Final Solution” speech.
Speer died in a London hospital in 1981. His legacy as an architect was ephemeral: None of his buildings, including the Reich Chancellery or the Zeppelinfeld stadium, are standing today. Speer’s legacy as a Nazi persists. A quarter-century after his death, a collection of 100 letters emerged from his ten-year correspondence with Helene Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance leader. In one of the letters, Speer admitted that he had indeed heard Himmler’s speech about exterminating the Jews. “There is no doubt—I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed,” Speer wrote. “Who would believe me that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?”
Sources
Books: Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, Henry Holt and Company, 2009. Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, Simon & Schuster, 2006. Dan Van Der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.
Articles: “Letter Proves Speer Knew of Holocaust Plan,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, March 12, 2007. “Wartime Reports Debunk Speer as the Good Nazi,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, May 11, 2005. “Paul Nitze: Master Strategist of the Cold War,” Academy of Achievement, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/nit0int-5. ”Speer on the Last Days of the Third Reich,” USSBS Special Document, http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/pdf/Batch_14/Vol_CIV_51_01_03.pdf. “The Long Arm of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,” by Rebecca Grant, Air Force Magazine, February, 2008."
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This is a documentary focused on the work of Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect and Minister for Armaments from 1942. From the acclaimed 'Reputations' series, the film examines Speer's complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich, and also his attempts to find some sort of rehabilitation. There is considerable input from the late Gitta Sereny who interviewed Speer in old age. Uploaded for educational purposes only.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtHEuU50S8M
Images:
1. Albert Speer inspecting a captured Russian T-34 tank, 28 Jun 1943.
2. Albert Speer with five of his children sitting in his car.
3. Albert Speer sitting on doorsteps, 22 Dec 1942.
4. Albert Speer is arrested along with members of the Flensburg Government in May 1945.
Background from {[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-candor-and-lies-of-nazi-officer-albert-speer-324737/}
The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert Speer
The minister of armaments was happy to tell his captors about the war machine he had built. But it was a different story when he was asked about the Holocaust
By Gilbert King SMITHSONIANMAG.COM; JANUARY 8, 2013
On April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought toward the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in street-to-street combat, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and fired. Berlin quickly surrendered and World War II in Europe was effectively over. Yet Hitler’s chosen successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, decamped with others of the Nazi Party faithful to northern Germany and formed the Flensburg Government.
As Allied troops and the U.N. War Crimes Commission closed in on Flensburg, one Nazi emerged as a man of particular interest: Albert Speer, the brilliant architect, minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich and a close friend to Hitler. Throughout World War II, Speer had directed an “armaments miracle,” doubling Hitler’s production orders and prolonging the German war effort while under relentless Allied air attacks. He did this through administrative genius and by exploiting millions of slave laborers who were starved and worked to death in his factories.
Speer arrived in Flensburg aware that the Allies were targeting Nazi leaders for war-crimes trials. He—like many other Nazi Party members and SS officers—concluded that he could expect no mercy once captured. Unlike them, he did not commit suicide.
The hunt for Albert Speer was unusual. The U.N. War Crimes Commission was determined to bring him to justice, but a U.S. government official hoped to reach the Nazi technocrat first. A former investment banker named Paul Nitze, who was then vice chairman of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, believed it was imperative to get to Speer. As the war in Europe was winding down, the Americans were hoping that strategic bombing in Japan could end the war in the Pacific. But in order to achieve that, they hoped to learn more about how Germany had maintained its war machine while withstanding heavy bombing. Thus Nitze needed Speer. In May 1945, the race was on to capture and interrogate one of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen.
Just after Hitler’s death, President Donitz and his cabinet took up residence at the Naval Academy at Murwik, overlooking the Flensburg Fjord. On his first evening in power, the new leader gave a nationwide radio address; though he knew German forces could not resist Allied advances, he promised his people that Germany would continue to fight. He also appointed Speer his minister of industry and production.
On May 15, American forces arrived in Flensburg and got to Speer first. Nitze arrived at Glucksburg Castle, where Speer was being held, along with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also working for the Strategic Bombing Survey, and a team of interpreters and assistants. They interrogated Speer for seven straight days, during which he talked freely with the Americans, taking them through what he termed “bombing high school.” Each morning Speer, dressed in a suit, would pleasantly answer questions with what struck his questioners as remarkable candor—enough candor that Nitze and his associates dared not ask what Speer knew of the Holocaust, out of fear that his mood might change. Speer knew his best chance to survive was to cooperate and seem indispensable to the Americans, and his cooperation had a strange effect on his interrogators. One of them said he “evoked in us a sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed.”
He demonstrated an unparalleled understanding of the Nazi war machine. He told Nitze how he had reduced the influence of the military and the Nazi Party in decision-making, and how he had followed Henry Ford’s manufacturing principles to run the factories more efficiently. He told his interrogators why certain British and American air attacks had failed and why others had been effective. He explained how he’d traveled around Germany to urge his workers on in speeches he later termed “delusional,” because he already knew the war was lost.
In March 1945, he said, with the end in sight, Hitler had called for a “scorched earth” plan (his “Nero Decree”) to destroy any industrial facilities, supply depots, military equipment or infrastructure that might be valuable to advancing enemy forces. Speer said he was furious and disobeyed Hitler’s orders, transferring his loyalty from der Fuhrer to the German people and the future of the nation.
After a week, Nitze received a message from a superior: “Paul, if you’ve got any further things you want to find out from Speer you’d better get him tomorrow.” The Americans were planning on arresting the former minister of armaments and war production, and he would no longer be available for interrogation. Nitze did have something else he wanted to find out from Speer: He wanted to know all about Hitler’s last days in the bunker, since Speer was among the last men to meet with him. According to Nitze, Speer “leaned over backwards” to help, pointing the Americans to where they could find records of his reports to Hitler—many of which were held in a safe in Munich. Nitze said Speer “gave us the keys to the safe and combination, and we sent somebody down to get these records.” But Speer was evasive, Nitze thought, and not credible when he claimed no knowledge of the Holocaust or war crimes against Jews laboring in his factories.
“It became evident right away that Speer was worried he might be declared a war criminal,” Nitze later said. On May 23, British and American officials called for a meeting with Flensburg government cabinet members aboard the ship Patria and had them all arrested. Tanks rolled up to Glucksburg Castle, and heavily armed troops burst into Speer’s bedroom to take him away. “So now the end has come,” he said. “That’s good. It was all only kind of an opera anyway.”
Nitze, Galbraith and the men from the bombing survey moved on. In September 1945, Speer was informed that he would be charged with war crimes and incarcerated pending trial at Nuremberg, along with more than 20 other surviving members of the Nazi high command. The series of military tribunals beginning in November 1945 were designed to show the world that the mass crimes against humanity by German leaders would not go unpunished.
As films from concentration camps were shown as evidence, and as witnesses testified to the horrors they endured at the hands of the Nazis, Speer was observed to have tears in his eyes. When he took the stand, he insisted that he had no knowledge of the Holocaust, but the evidence of slave labor in his factories was damning. Speer apologized to the court and claimed responsibility for the slave labor, saying he should have known but did not. He was culpable, he said, but he insisted he had no knowledge of the crimes. Later, to show his credentials as a “good Nazi” and to distance himself from his co-defendants, Speer would claim that he’d planned to kill Hitler two years before by dropping a poison gas canister into an air intake in his bunker. On hearing that, the other defendants laughed in the courtroom.
In the fall of 1946, most of the Nazi elites at Nuremberg were sentenced either to death or to life in prison. Speer received 20 years at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he was known as prisoner number 5. He read continuously, tended a garden and, against prison rules, wrote the notes for what would become bestselling books, including Inside the Third Reich. There was no question that Speer’s contrition in court, and perhaps his cooperation with Nitze, saved his life.
After serving the full 20 years, Speer was released in 1966. He grew wealthy, lived in a cottage in Heidelberg, West Germany, and cultivated his image as a “good Nazi” who had spoken candidly about his past. But questions about Speer’s truthfulness began to dog him soon after his release. In 1971, Harvard University’s Erich Goldhagen alleged that Speer had been aware of the extermination of Jews, based on evidence that Speer had attended a Nazi conference in 1943 at which Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s military commander, had spoken openly about “wiping the Jews from the face of the earth.” Speer admitted that he’d attended the conference but said he had left before Himmler gave his infamous “Final Solution” speech.
Speer died in a London hospital in 1981. His legacy as an architect was ephemeral: None of his buildings, including the Reich Chancellery or the Zeppelinfeld stadium, are standing today. Speer’s legacy as a Nazi persists. A quarter-century after his death, a collection of 100 letters emerged from his ten-year correspondence with Helene Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance leader. In one of the letters, Speer admitted that he had indeed heard Himmler’s speech about exterminating the Jews. “There is no doubt—I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed,” Speer wrote. “Who would believe me that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?”
Sources
Books: Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, Henry Holt and Company, 2009. Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, Simon & Schuster, 2006. Dan Van Der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.
Articles: “Letter Proves Speer Knew of Holocaust Plan,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, March 12, 2007. “Wartime Reports Debunk Speer as the Good Nazi,” By Kate Connolly, The Guardian, May 11, 2005. “Paul Nitze: Master Strategist of the Cold War,” Academy of Achievement, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/nit0int-5. ”Speer on the Last Days of the Third Reich,” USSBS Special Document, http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/pdf/Batch_14/Vol_CIV_51_01_03.pdf. “The Long Arm of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,” by Rebecca Grant, Air Force Magazine, February, 2008."
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Architects of Darkness: Albert Speer - Architect of the Reich (WWII Documentary)
Hitler's Architect - The man who designed the Nuremberg Rallies and headed up the slave labor organization who helped create the V1 and V2 rockets.Recorded b...
Architects of Darkness: Albert Speer - Architect of the Reich (WWII Documentary)
Hitler's Architect - The man who designed the Nuremberg Rallies and headed up the slave labor organization who helped create the V1 and V2 rockets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEtilFyHD-g
Images:
1. Margarete Speer-Weber and Albert Speer.jpg
2. Ernst Gall, Adolf Hitler, and Albert Speer at Munich, Germany, 21 Mar 1936.
3. Hermann Göring, Bruno Loerzer, Adolf Galland, and Albert Speer, Germany, Aug 1943
4. German Minister of Armaments Albert Speer (front) and Field Marshal Erhard Milch (rear) in an automobile en route to inspect a defense plant, Germany, May 1944.
5. Margarete Speer-Weber
Biographies
1. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/albert-Speer
2. encyclopedia.com/people/history/German-history-biographies/Albert-spear
1. Background from {[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/albert-speer]}
Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany. He was educated in architectural studies at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, and later at the Universities of Munich and Berlin. Inspired by Hitler's oratory prowess, he joined the National Socialist party in January 1931, where he developed a close friendship with Hitler. He believed Hitler and the Nazis could answer the communist threat and restore the glory of the German empire that he considered lacking under the Weimar Republic.
Speer quickly proved his worth by his efficient and creative staging of Nazi events. He designed monuments and decorations, as well as the parade grounds at Nuremberg where a party congress was held in 1934 and captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will. That Nuremberg rally was the archetype of what became identifiable as a Nazi-style of public rallies as spectacles, characterized by huge crowds of uniformed marchers, striking lighting effects, and impressive flag displays directed by Speer.
In 1937, Hitler gave Speer the opportunity to fulfill his youthful architectural ambitions by appointing him Inspector General of the Reich. Hitler selected Speer, his "architect of genius," to construct the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and the Party palace in Nuremberg. Hitler also commissioned him to refurbish Berlin, a project for which Speer prepared grandiose designs that were never completed.
Speer became one of the most loyal members of the Nazi regime and was a member of Hitler's inner circle. In 1938, he was awarded the Nazi Golden Party Badge of Honor. A year later, Speer's office assumed control of the allocation of apartments belonging to Berlin Jews who were evicted. His workload grew in 1941 after Berlin's Jews were deported to the east.
When Fritz Todt was killed in an air accident in February 1942, Speer was appointed to succeed him as Minister of Armaments. He later took on the grander title of Minister of Armaments and War Production and became the principal planner of the German war economy, responsible for the construction of strategic roads and defenses, as well as military hardware.
Despite the unrelenting Allied bombing attacks designed to disrupt war production, Speer managed to increase armament production dramatically. In 1941, Germany produced 9,540 front-line machines and 4,900 heavy tanks; in 1944, output reached 35,350 machines and 17,300 tanks. This impressive growth was achieved as a result of Speer's use of prisoners of war and civilian slave laborers in the munitions factories. By September 1944, some seven and a half million foreigners worked as slave laborers and, in violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, Speer exploited two million prisoners of war in the production effort.
Speer's relations with Hitler deteriorated when Speer disobeyed Hitler's order to destroy Nazi industrial installations in areas close to the advancing Allies. He later claimed that he independently conspired to assassinate Hitler, though historians doubt whether he ever meant to execute this plan.
Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946. He had been charged with employing forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners in the German armaments industry. His testimony was notable because he was the lone defendant to accept responsibility for the practices of the Nazi regime — both for his actions and for those not under his control. He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment in Spandau prison, after which he published his best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich (1970). He described himself in this account as a technician unconcerned with politics, but he still took responsibility for his role in aiding the Nazis, and expressed his regret at having done so. Again, he assumed responsibility for those actions beyond his immediate control, and expressed regret for his inaction during the slaughter of the Jews.
Speer died in London in 1981.
2. Background from {[https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/german-history-biographies/albert-speer]}
Albert Speer
Albert Speer (1905-1081) may have known of the atrocities committed in Germany during the Nazi era, but claimed he did not. He insisted that he was only "following orders" and had no knowledge of the details. Speer received a 20-year prison sentence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials at the end of World War II.
Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany, on March 19, 1905, but grew up in the German city of Heidelberg. His father was an architect. Although Speer wanted to be a mathematician, he studied hard and became an architect in order to please his father. His girlfriend and eventual wife, Margarethe Weber, waited for him to complete his studies. Speer's family made it clear that Margarethe did not, in their opinion, measure up to the social standards of the Speer family, but the young couple ignored them and were eventually married.
Germany was in political and economic chaos following their defeat in World War I, and had not recovered years after the war's end. Adolf Hitler, who had been released from jail in 1925, after serving nine months of a five-year sentence, had reclaimed his leadership of the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) party. While in jail, Hitler wrote his political mandate, Mein Kampf. The party and Hitler's book appealed to young Speer. He joined the Nazi party in 1931 and was soon designing and building for the Nazis. Speer was pleased with the high level of responsibility given to such a young architect. In a Germany with high levels of unemployment, especially for architects, Speer was doing what he loved and being paid for it.
A Budding Friendship
In 1933, the Nazi party was swept into power on a rising tide of German nationalism and economic discontent. Hitler was named chancellor and assumed the title of fuhrer (supreme leader). Speer was advancing rapidly in the party heirarchy. Hitler had a deep interest in architecture, and the two men became friends and collaborators on many projects. Hitler wanted buildings in Germany that would last one thousand years, and he felt Speer was the man who could design and build them. When Hitler wanted a balcony built so that he could appear before his people, he would draw a very skillful sketch. Then Speer would take the sketch, make up the blueprints, and oversee its construction. It was a comfortable partnership between two men who liked and respected each other.
By the age of 28, Speer was in the "inner circle" of power. Where Hitler went, he went. He designed the vast stadiums where Hitler held his great rallies and many other Nazi monuments.
No order for a building was too impossible for Hitler to give, and no challenge was too great for Speer to accept. Hitler wanted a new Reichs Chancellery in Berlin, and he ordered that it be one of the largest and most splendid office buildings of its day. Furthermore, he wanted it completed in only one year. With an army of laborers working in day and night shifts, and with Speer handling every detail of the planning and building, the architect finished the great building ahead of schedule. He proved to his fuhrer that he was an organizer as well as a builder, for the building was ready to be used when Hitler walked in on the first day. If there was any doubt of Speer's skill, it was gone.
The two men began to plan an entirely new Berlin. They had elaborate models constructed showing various buildings and street layouts. It was planned to be the most beautiful city in all of Europe. World War II stopped the plans, although both Hitler and Speer felt that the delay would be only temporary. Despite later claims to the contrary, Speer had become a dedicated party member who supported whatever Hitler wanted to do.
Minister Of Armaments And Munitions
When German troops moved into neighboring countries, Allied nations became increasingly disturbed. The invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 led to a declaration of war. As battles against Allied troops were being fiercely fought, Hitler lost one of his most experienced munitions experts. Doctor Todt, the genius behind the autobahns and other projects in Germany, was killed in a plane crash. Hitler asked Speer, to take over as minister of armaments and munitions. It was a job that required the organization of industry. Although Speer didn't really want the assignment, he knew that his leader needed him. He accepted.
As the organizer of the German wartime economy, Speer held an extremely powerful position. Instead of ordering, commanding, and punishing, he approached industries in a friendly way. This led Speer to be accepted by the German workers, who labored twice as hard as before. His attempts to avoid bureaucracy worked well. He kept the wishes of working men and women in mind and, in the process, won many new friends. In spite of severe and constant Allied bombing of German factories, Speer did his job well and production continued until close to the end of the war.
A Change Of Heart
It was a disillusioned Speer, who violated Hitler's "scorched earth" orders near the end of the war. Hitler ordered the destruction of roads, factories, bridges, entire cities, in an effort to delay the end. Speer sided with the generals who refused to destroy Paris and other cities. Hitler would issue ruthless orders, then Speer, who had the power and the respect of those in charge of the army, would countermand them. Speer felt the German people would need the things that Hitler wanted to destroy. In his book, Inside the Third Reich, Speer explained that he could see no need to hurt the civilian population needlessly, since he knew the war was lost.
Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in 1945 as the Russian army approached Berlin. Admiral Karl Doenitz took over as the new leader in Berlin, but there was still an army-occupied area in northern Germany. Speer and others were in charge there. They attempted to negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies, but were unsuccessful and finally had to surrender.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials
Soon after the war ended, the world was riveted by the war crimes trials held in the German city of Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946. Nazi leaders, including Speer, were put on trial for the crimes they had committed. He said later that he was certain he would be convicted and hanged, as was the fate of many of his Nazi high-command friends. He even confessed and pleaded guilty to what the Nazis had done, although he said he didn't really know all the details. Still, he was shown to have been one of the first to provide the labor needed to keep the war plants operating. He personally provided a labor force of 75,000 German Jews. Many experts believe that this group represented the first stage of the Holocaust, though Speer denied that he was aware of the killing of millions of Jews in concentration camps. He claimed that he was an "unwitting collaborator" in the horror.
Speer received a 20-year prison sentence and was sent to Germany's Spandau Prison. With the exception of three life sentences, Speer received the longest prison sentence of any Nazi leader. He was released in 1966, and began writing Inside the Third Reich. The book was published and quickly became a best seller. In 1976, he wrote another successful book, titled Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Speer died in London on September 1, 1981.
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)."
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Hitler's Architect - The man who designed the Nuremberg Rallies and headed up the slave labor organization who helped create the V1 and V2 rockets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEtilFyHD-g
Images:
1. Margarete Speer-Weber and Albert Speer.jpg
2. Ernst Gall, Adolf Hitler, and Albert Speer at Munich, Germany, 21 Mar 1936.
3. Hermann Göring, Bruno Loerzer, Adolf Galland, and Albert Speer, Germany, Aug 1943
4. German Minister of Armaments Albert Speer (front) and Field Marshal Erhard Milch (rear) in an automobile en route to inspect a defense plant, Germany, May 1944.
5. Margarete Speer-Weber
Biographies
1. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/albert-Speer
2. encyclopedia.com/people/history/German-history-biographies/Albert-spear
1. Background from {[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/albert-speer]}
Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany. He was educated in architectural studies at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, and later at the Universities of Munich and Berlin. Inspired by Hitler's oratory prowess, he joined the National Socialist party in January 1931, where he developed a close friendship with Hitler. He believed Hitler and the Nazis could answer the communist threat and restore the glory of the German empire that he considered lacking under the Weimar Republic.
Speer quickly proved his worth by his efficient and creative staging of Nazi events. He designed monuments and decorations, as well as the parade grounds at Nuremberg where a party congress was held in 1934 and captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will. That Nuremberg rally was the archetype of what became identifiable as a Nazi-style of public rallies as spectacles, characterized by huge crowds of uniformed marchers, striking lighting effects, and impressive flag displays directed by Speer.
In 1937, Hitler gave Speer the opportunity to fulfill his youthful architectural ambitions by appointing him Inspector General of the Reich. Hitler selected Speer, his "architect of genius," to construct the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and the Party palace in Nuremberg. Hitler also commissioned him to refurbish Berlin, a project for which Speer prepared grandiose designs that were never completed.
Speer became one of the most loyal members of the Nazi regime and was a member of Hitler's inner circle. In 1938, he was awarded the Nazi Golden Party Badge of Honor. A year later, Speer's office assumed control of the allocation of apartments belonging to Berlin Jews who were evicted. His workload grew in 1941 after Berlin's Jews were deported to the east.
When Fritz Todt was killed in an air accident in February 1942, Speer was appointed to succeed him as Minister of Armaments. He later took on the grander title of Minister of Armaments and War Production and became the principal planner of the German war economy, responsible for the construction of strategic roads and defenses, as well as military hardware.
Despite the unrelenting Allied bombing attacks designed to disrupt war production, Speer managed to increase armament production dramatically. In 1941, Germany produced 9,540 front-line machines and 4,900 heavy tanks; in 1944, output reached 35,350 machines and 17,300 tanks. This impressive growth was achieved as a result of Speer's use of prisoners of war and civilian slave laborers in the munitions factories. By September 1944, some seven and a half million foreigners worked as slave laborers and, in violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, Speer exploited two million prisoners of war in the production effort.
Speer's relations with Hitler deteriorated when Speer disobeyed Hitler's order to destroy Nazi industrial installations in areas close to the advancing Allies. He later claimed that he independently conspired to assassinate Hitler, though historians doubt whether he ever meant to execute this plan.
Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946. He had been charged with employing forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners in the German armaments industry. His testimony was notable because he was the lone defendant to accept responsibility for the practices of the Nazi regime — both for his actions and for those not under his control. He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment in Spandau prison, after which he published his best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich (1970). He described himself in this account as a technician unconcerned with politics, but he still took responsibility for his role in aiding the Nazis, and expressed his regret at having done so. Again, he assumed responsibility for those actions beyond his immediate control, and expressed regret for his inaction during the slaughter of the Jews.
Speer died in London in 1981.
2. Background from {[https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/german-history-biographies/albert-speer]}
Albert Speer
Albert Speer (1905-1081) may have known of the atrocities committed in Germany during the Nazi era, but claimed he did not. He insisted that he was only "following orders" and had no knowledge of the details. Speer received a 20-year prison sentence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials at the end of World War II.
Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany, on March 19, 1905, but grew up in the German city of Heidelberg. His father was an architect. Although Speer wanted to be a mathematician, he studied hard and became an architect in order to please his father. His girlfriend and eventual wife, Margarethe Weber, waited for him to complete his studies. Speer's family made it clear that Margarethe did not, in their opinion, measure up to the social standards of the Speer family, but the young couple ignored them and were eventually married.
Germany was in political and economic chaos following their defeat in World War I, and had not recovered years after the war's end. Adolf Hitler, who had been released from jail in 1925, after serving nine months of a five-year sentence, had reclaimed his leadership of the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) party. While in jail, Hitler wrote his political mandate, Mein Kampf. The party and Hitler's book appealed to young Speer. He joined the Nazi party in 1931 and was soon designing and building for the Nazis. Speer was pleased with the high level of responsibility given to such a young architect. In a Germany with high levels of unemployment, especially for architects, Speer was doing what he loved and being paid for it.
A Budding Friendship
In 1933, the Nazi party was swept into power on a rising tide of German nationalism and economic discontent. Hitler was named chancellor and assumed the title of fuhrer (supreme leader). Speer was advancing rapidly in the party heirarchy. Hitler had a deep interest in architecture, and the two men became friends and collaborators on many projects. Hitler wanted buildings in Germany that would last one thousand years, and he felt Speer was the man who could design and build them. When Hitler wanted a balcony built so that he could appear before his people, he would draw a very skillful sketch. Then Speer would take the sketch, make up the blueprints, and oversee its construction. It was a comfortable partnership between two men who liked and respected each other.
By the age of 28, Speer was in the "inner circle" of power. Where Hitler went, he went. He designed the vast stadiums where Hitler held his great rallies and many other Nazi monuments.
No order for a building was too impossible for Hitler to give, and no challenge was too great for Speer to accept. Hitler wanted a new Reichs Chancellery in Berlin, and he ordered that it be one of the largest and most splendid office buildings of its day. Furthermore, he wanted it completed in only one year. With an army of laborers working in day and night shifts, and with Speer handling every detail of the planning and building, the architect finished the great building ahead of schedule. He proved to his fuhrer that he was an organizer as well as a builder, for the building was ready to be used when Hitler walked in on the first day. If there was any doubt of Speer's skill, it was gone.
The two men began to plan an entirely new Berlin. They had elaborate models constructed showing various buildings and street layouts. It was planned to be the most beautiful city in all of Europe. World War II stopped the plans, although both Hitler and Speer felt that the delay would be only temporary. Despite later claims to the contrary, Speer had become a dedicated party member who supported whatever Hitler wanted to do.
Minister Of Armaments And Munitions
When German troops moved into neighboring countries, Allied nations became increasingly disturbed. The invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 led to a declaration of war. As battles against Allied troops were being fiercely fought, Hitler lost one of his most experienced munitions experts. Doctor Todt, the genius behind the autobahns and other projects in Germany, was killed in a plane crash. Hitler asked Speer, to take over as minister of armaments and munitions. It was a job that required the organization of industry. Although Speer didn't really want the assignment, he knew that his leader needed him. He accepted.
As the organizer of the German wartime economy, Speer held an extremely powerful position. Instead of ordering, commanding, and punishing, he approached industries in a friendly way. This led Speer to be accepted by the German workers, who labored twice as hard as before. His attempts to avoid bureaucracy worked well. He kept the wishes of working men and women in mind and, in the process, won many new friends. In spite of severe and constant Allied bombing of German factories, Speer did his job well and production continued until close to the end of the war.
A Change Of Heart
It was a disillusioned Speer, who violated Hitler's "scorched earth" orders near the end of the war. Hitler ordered the destruction of roads, factories, bridges, entire cities, in an effort to delay the end. Speer sided with the generals who refused to destroy Paris and other cities. Hitler would issue ruthless orders, then Speer, who had the power and the respect of those in charge of the army, would countermand them. Speer felt the German people would need the things that Hitler wanted to destroy. In his book, Inside the Third Reich, Speer explained that he could see no need to hurt the civilian population needlessly, since he knew the war was lost.
Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in 1945 as the Russian army approached Berlin. Admiral Karl Doenitz took over as the new leader in Berlin, but there was still an army-occupied area in northern Germany. Speer and others were in charge there. They attempted to negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies, but were unsuccessful and finally had to surrender.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials
Soon after the war ended, the world was riveted by the war crimes trials held in the German city of Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946. Nazi leaders, including Speer, were put on trial for the crimes they had committed. He said later that he was certain he would be convicted and hanged, as was the fate of many of his Nazi high-command friends. He even confessed and pleaded guilty to what the Nazis had done, although he said he didn't really know all the details. Still, he was shown to have been one of the first to provide the labor needed to keep the war plants operating. He personally provided a labor force of 75,000 German Jews. Many experts believe that this group represented the first stage of the Holocaust, though Speer denied that he was aware of the killing of millions of Jews in concentration camps. He claimed that he was an "unwitting collaborator" in the horror.
Speer received a 20-year prison sentence and was sent to Germany's Spandau Prison. With the exception of three life sentences, Speer received the longest prison sentence of any Nazi leader. He was released in 1966, and began writing Inside the Third Reich. The book was published and quickly became a best seller. In 1976, he wrote another successful book, titled Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Speer died in London on September 1, 1981.
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)."
FYI LTC John Shaw SPC Diana D. LTC Hillary Luton
1SG Steven ImermanSSG Pete FishGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSPC Chris Bayner-CwikSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnPO2 Frederick DunnSP5 Dennis LobergerCPO John BjorgeSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaMSG Fred Bucci
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Speer was a cultured and intelligent man who was comfortable in the presence of, and in working with, stone cold thugs. He reminds me of the title of Hannah Arendt's book on Eichmann, The Banality of Evil. Evil is not this horrible and great crime committed by twisted geniuses, evil is ordinary little men doing nasty things when they can get away with them. At bottom, Speer was an ordinary little man doing things for nasty little men, all for promotions and position.
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