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Documente Cultură
Timeline
1905
1927
1928
1931
1933
1934
He runs the Beauty of Labour section of the Strength through Joy campaign, and becomes the First Architect of
the Reich.
Commissioned to redesign the Nuremberg Rally grounds; work was begun but never completed.
1937
His design for the German pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition wins the gold medal.
He is appointed to rebuild Berlin as Germania, directly answerable to Hitler.
1938
1942
1943
September: his position is expanded to Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production.
1945
He is sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials, principally for his use of forced and slave labour; the Soviets want him hanged.
1966
1969
1975
1981
Speer dies.
Background
Albert Speer was born in Mannheim on 19 March 1905.
He came from a normal upper-middle-class family and
enjoyed the typical upbringing of a provincial child in
those circumstances. Speers father, like his grandfather,
was an architect who had made a name for himself in the
Mannheim area. His mother had come from a wealthy
merchant family in Mainz, by the river Rhine, and was
never reconciled to the move to industrial Mannheim
upon marriage. She compensated for the less glamorous
surroundings by being socially ambitious and running
an aristocratic household complete with servants and
fine furniture. In 1918, the family moved to a new home
surrounded by woodland and overlooking the town
of Heidelberg.
Speer was not close to his parents, who were virtually
strangers to him (Fest 2002, p. 14). Nor did he get on well
with his brothers, Hermann (b. 1902) and Ernst (b. 1906), who
were robust and outgoing, while he was physically delicate
and had unstable health. The inhibitions that all observers
later remarked on were already conspicuous in those early
years. Speers mother, who had sought refuge from various
disappointments in a restless social life filled with receptions
and house parties, remained aloof (Fest 2002, p. 14). When
he passed his school-leaving exam, Albert wanted to study
mathematics, but his father persuaded him to follow the
family tradition into architecture.
Figure 11.44
In 1922 he fell in love with Margarete Weber, the daughter of a joiner. Both sets of parents objected
and tried to keep the young people aparthe being sent to Karlsruhe to begin studies, she to a
boarding school in Freiburg. They kept in touch by letter and in 1925 Speer moved from Munich to
Berlin to continue his studies. There he came under the influence of Heinrich Tessenow, who appointed
Speer as his assistant in 1928. This well-paid post enabled him to marry in that year. Albert and
Margarete spent their time in cultural activities, mountain walks and canoeing.
In his parents home, open discussion of politics had been banned. Albert remained apolitical,
apparently untouched by developments during the Weimar years. His father was a liberal, despising
Hitler as a criminal upstart. Yet Speers mother, after being impressed by an SA march through the
streets of Heidelberg in 1931, secretly joined the Nazi Party.
Fest sums up this early phase of Speers life by describing him as an immature but gifted young
man, caught up in the prejudices and moods of his day. Nothing in him suggests any disorder caused
by parental neglect, or any complexes or deformations. He had even remained untouched by the
political and artistic extremes of the wild twenties, which captured almost everybody, at least for a time
(Fest 2002, p. 24).
Speer first heard Hitler speak when he addressed a meeting of arts students in Berlin in December
1930, and Speer declared himself captivated by the magic of Hitlers voice. On 1 March 1931 he joined
the Nazi Party.
Rise to prominence
Speer the architect
Speers first architectural commission for the Nazis came
from Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, to renovate the
Gauhaus in that city. That was quickly followed by the task
of organising the backdrop for the May Day rally at the
Templehof airfield in Berlin in 1933. The black, white and
red flags of the old Reich, each ten storeys high, were hung
vertically. In between them a similarly large Nazi standard
was placed, the whole lit up at night.
The Fhrer was pleased with the effect and Speer was
asked to organise the Nuremberg rally of 1933, followed
by a commission to build entirely new rally grounds at
Nuremberg for the 1934 party rally. Hitler began to forge a
close relationship with the young architect.
In 1934, Speer was given responsibility for the Beauty
of Labour section of the new Strength through Joy
campaign. This involved improving workers conditions by
providing canteen facilities, turning paved areas into parks,
and improving lighting and ventilation. These changes,
while part of Nazi policy, never interested Hitler, whose
main interest lay in architecture. In January 1934, Paul
Troost, Hitlers favourite architect, died, and Speer replaced
Figure 11.46 Speers cathedral of light formed by hundreds of searchlights pointing vertically to give the impression of huge columns
surrounding the rally grounds.
Germania
In 1937 Speer was handed the most ambitious architectural
project of his career: to rebuild Berlin, to be renamed
Germania, as the capital of the new Reich. The whole project
was the brainchild of Hitler who, in subsequent years, spent
many hours going over the designs of the new city with
Speer. A start was made by clearing away 52 000 flats in
the centre of Berlin to make way for one of the imposing
avenues of the new capital.
Figure 11.47 The centre of Germania. The arch in the centre would contain the names of all 1.8 million Germans who had died in the
First World War.
Obstacles to efciency
On 12 July 1943, Speer sent a memorandum to Hitler urging the use of more women for the war effort:
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However, the Nazis conservative ideology still opposed maximising the use of women for war work,
and Speer had to turn to forced labour from the camps and conquered countries for his workforce.
Another source of opposition was the Gauleiters. These Nazi regional leaders were antagonistic
towards Speers attempts to impose a central control of resources, particularly when it took resources
away from their own Gaus. As late as 1943 Speer was still pressing for the closure of non-essential
plants, in the face of opposition from the local Gauleiter.
Achievements
The transformation in armaments output between 194142 and 194445 was remarkable. The higher
production was achieved in the face of intensified Allied bombing of industrial plants.
1941
1942
1943
1944
11 030
14 700
25 220
37 950
20 100
23 600
26 200
26 500
Source: D. van der Vat, The Good Nazi: the Life and Lies of Albert Speer, 1997, p. 178.
By August 1944 Speer was responsible for the whole of German war economy, with fourteen
million workers under his direction. It was Speer who, by a remarkable feat of organisation, patched
up bombed communications and factories, and somehow maintained the bare minimum of transport
and production, without which the war on the German side would have come to a standstill. His efforts
enabled Germany to stay in the war for another year or possibly two.
Source 11.26
Source 11.27
D. van der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert
Speer, 1997, p. 241.
D. van der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert
Speer, 1997, p. 366.
rulers was to ensure that the German people should be left with some possibility of reconstructing
their lives in the future. Hitler did not agree and issued orders for the scorched-earth policy. Noakes
comments that Speers determination to thwart the destruction of German industry was motivated
partly by a genuine concern for the future of the German people and partly, no doubt, by an attempt
to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of Germanys conquerors (Noakes, 1998, p. 659).
Speer devoted himself in the final months of the war to preserving as much as possible of
Germanys industrial base. He flew into the blockaded Ruhr and persuaded the Wehrmacht not to
destroy the bridges, railways and other installations or encourage the enemy to destroy them by
using them as defensive positions. He organised stockpiles of food and other essentials in Berlin and
elsewhere, persuading many individual commanders to refrain from an orgy of destruction, not only in
Germany but also in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Speer devoted all his efforts to saving
everything he could. But for him, thousands of bridges, waterways, telegraphic and power facilities
would have been blown up.
Speers refusal to carry out Hitlers scorched-earth policy completed the break with the Fhrer. In
Hitlers last testament, written just before his suicide, Speer was replaced as minister for armaments.
Speer in Spandau
For a time, Speer and his fellow prisonersRaeder, Doenitz, Funk, Neurath, von Schirach and Hess
were held at Nuremberg until their transfer to Spandau prison, Berlin, on 18 July 1947.
Speers account of these years appeared in 1975 in Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Despite a prohibition
on the keeping of diaries, Speer managed to smuggle out more than 20 000 pages of notes, some by
way of letters, others on cardboard and even sheets of toilet paper. In this enterprise he was assisted
over the years by friendly prison workers. The opportunity first arose on 14 October 1947 when a young
Dutch prison employee Toni Proost (referred to as Anton Vlaer in the diaries) offered to smuggle letters
for Speer. Proost had been a wartime labour conscript in Berlin. When he became ill he had been taken
to a hospital for construction workers, which Speer had established, and been well treated. Now he
wished to repay Speer.
The smuggled writings found their way to Rudolf Wolters, an old friend and architectural colleague
of Speer, who had them typed into a manuscript ready for Speers eventual release. Wolters was
determined to help his friend in other ways. He later smuggled a small camera into Spandau for
Speers use, but his major contribution came with the setting up of a school fee account, designed
to support Speers family during his imprisonment. Many contemporaries of Speer had risen to
important positions in government and industry in post-war Germany and were willing to contribute
to the fund.
Speer had to devise ways to keep his diary writings secret, as discovery would mean confiscation of
the notes, and punishment for him. One method he used in his cell was to keep the top button of his
trousers undone so that he could shove his writing paper into his underpants if disturbed. This was also
After Spandau
Prior to his release, Speer had entertained hopes of reviving his architectural skills in a new business,
but the death of two former colleagues who had offered him work ended that possibility. He found
relations with his family difficult and even fell out with his old friend Wolters. With the publication of his
books Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries he became a much sought after interviewee
for press articles and film documentaries on Hitlers Germany.
At the end of August 1981, he was in London for an interview with the BBC. Suffering a stroke in his
hotel, he died on the evening of 1 September.
In his book Inside the Third Reich, Speer describes his decision to join the party as frivolous:
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On this point, it is difficult to judge Speer. He joined the Nazis, but so did many others at the time
of the Depression. Dan van der Vat suggests that it is only the committed who join a party long before
it is elected to office, as opposed to the bandwagon effect the Nazis experienced after January 1933.
Speer as architect
Speer frequently claimed that he was first and foremost
an architect and was therefore immune from and ignorant
of the developing evils of the Nazi regime going on
around him. It is with the beginnings of his work on
Germania that a question mark appears over Speers
record of his own history. Speer was formally appointed as
inspector-general of construction for the Reich capital (GBI)
in January 1937.
Germania, the new capital for the anticipated thousandyear Reich was to be built on the site of Berlin. It was to be
filled with grandiose buildings, statues and fountains in the
classical style. Though the war intervened to ensure that
Germania was never completed (only some ornate streetlights
survived as a testimony to Speers grand designs), the work
was begun and one of the first tasks was the creation of a
wide avenue in central Berlin.
They spent hours poring over designs together, sharing the same pencil, as one report has it, to
correct and amend their joint formulations. In the later years of the Reich, Speer is usually credited with
being the second most powerful man after Hitler. Only Speer, Bormann and Goering were allowed to
have a house inside the three-kilometre inner security fence at the Berghof.
It is known that Hitler liked to keep his subordinates guessing, and issued no written orders about the
Holocaust, but is it likely that a man so close to Hitler would be as unaware of the anti-Semitic agenda
as he claimed to be? Historians such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen have suggested that the German
population as a whole knew a lot more about the anti-Semitic policies and deeds of the Nazis than has
previously been credited. How then, in Speers case, can one so important have remained so ignorant?
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And what was Speers reaction to this piece of news?
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It is for this deliberate blindness that Speer condemns himself at Nuremberg and assumes a share of
the responsibility for the worst actions of the Nazi government. It is as if he is saying You cannot blame
me for being involved, because I did not know. I blame myself for not seeking to know.
What did Speer know about the concentration camps? Only one visit by Speer to a concentration
camp is recordedto Mauthausen in Austria in March 1943. In a letter to Himmler written shortly
afterwards (April 1943), he complained about the luxurious constructions he found there (he was
referring to the prisoners barracks) and urged that the SS switch to more primitive construction
methods involving minimal material and labour. Mauthausen, bad as it was, was not one of the
extermination camps that were at the centre of the Final Solution. So did he really have no idea of the
Polish camps until he talked with Hanke?
His claim to have known nothing about the Final Solution is questionable. At a meeting in Posen,
Poland, on 6 October 1943, Speer and Himmler addressed assembled Gauleiters. In the morning,
Speer warned them not to obstruct his attempts to reduce the output of consumer goods. After
lunch Himmler divulged the secret of the Final Solution. Speer later claimed that he had left the
meeting before Himmler spoke and remained unaware of the details of Himmlers speech. Details of
this meeting emerged into public knowledge long after the Nuremberg trials had concluded. Even
if Speers excuse is accepted at face value, are we expected to believe that none of Speers friends or
colleagues who had heard Himmler saw fit to mention the speech in Speers presence in the weeks
and months that followed, until he had his talk with Hanke some nine months later?
In 1977 Speer engaged in correspondence with a South African Jewish organisation. In a long letter
he wrote: To this day I still consider my main guilt to be my tacit acceptance of the persecution and
the murder of millions of Jews (Fest 2002, p. 333). Surely tacit acceptance implies knowledge of, if not
necessarily involvement in, the Final Solution?
In an interview in 1979, Speer, referring to Himmlers speech, said indeed he said that it was a secret
which we had to take with us to the grave; we dared not say anything about it to anyone. Dan van der
Vat suggests that the use of we in this context is significant, a verbal slip which implies that Speer had
been present (van der Vat 1997, p. 169).
In 1940, Wolters suggested to Speer that he should compile a chronicle (or history) of the work of
the GBI. Speer agreed and gave orders to his department heads to cooperate in its formulation. It is in
the Chronicle that Wolters wrote the details of the clearance of the Jew flats.
Had the Chronicle been known about at the time of Nuremberg, containing as it did the details of
the anti-Jewish actions ordered by Speer, there seems little doubt that Speer would have been hanged.
Wolters kept what he presumed was the only copy of the Chronicle with him. In 1964 he decided
to revise it, principally to remove certain parts that would incriminate Speer and one or two of his
colleagues. The Chronicle was retyped and a copy of the edited version sent to Speer. Wolters kept the
original. In 1966 the British historian David Irving made reference to the Chronicle in one of his books.
His source, Wolters thought, was probably notes made by a colleague in the GBI, a Dr Groener.
2 List the different positions that Speer held in the Nazi leadership and the dates when he was
appointed to those positions.
3 Outline Speers achievements in his wartime ministerial roles.
4 What factors hindered Speer in his wartime work?
5. Using the evidence provided, assess Speers relationship with Hitler.
4 What are the contentious issues that concern Speer in his wartime role?
6 From what you have read, how do you assess Speers role in Hitlers Reich? Was the Nuremberg
verdict fair?