The legacy of Albert Speer (1905–1981) remains deeply controversial. A top official in the Nazi government, he was instrumental in the German war effort and was the closest personal friend of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). After the war, Speer was convicted of using slave labor and sentenced to twenty years in prison—narrowly avoiding the death penalty.
But Speer—uniquely among former Nazi leaders—pleaded guilty at his Nuremberg trial, expressed remorse, and tried to atone for his crimes. He claimed that he was unaware of the Holocaust until after the war. When his book Inside the Third Reich (1969) was published, he donated much of the proceeds to Jewish charities.
To many of his countrymen, Speer gradually became a symbol of the “good German,” a fundamentally decent person who had been swept up by an evil system. On the other hand, critics viewed his remorse as self-serving and insincere. Either way, his case vividly highlighted the difficulty of assigning individual guilt for the collective crimes of the Nazis.
Speer was trained as an architect, and he met Hitler at a Nazi Party rally in 1930. He joined the party the next year, at age twenty-six. With Hitler’s backing, Speer became the top architect in Germany in the 1930s. One of his most famous designs was a palatial parade ground in Nuremberg for the Nazi Party rally of 1933. (The design would be the inspiration for the set in the final scene in Star Wars.)
After the outbreak of World War II, Speer was named minister of armaments in 1942, a job that effectively put him in charge of the German economy. He proved to have a genius for organization and was able to keep Germany’s factories running despite the heavy Allied bombing.
Whether Speer knew of the Holocaust remains a source of debate. He may have attended a meeting in 1943 at which the genocide of European Jews was discussed. Speer always claimed that though he made Germany’s trains run on time, he had no idea they were carrying millions of prisoners to their deaths.
After serving his twenty-year sentence for war crimes, Speer published two books about the Nazi years. He even visited London, the city he had spent his political career building weapons to destroy. He died at age seventy-six at a London hotel, where he was having an affair with a younger woman.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Almost all of Speer’s architecture was destroyed during or after the war.
- Speer’s son—also named Albert Speer (1934–)—is a German architect and urban planner based in Frankfurt. He designed the main boulevard for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
- In the late twentieth century, evidence surfaced that Speer had personally signed off on a plan to deport 75,000 Jews from Berlin. The document contradicted Speer’s oft-stated denials that he knew about the widespread execution of European Jews.
