THE YOUNG ARCHITECT
ACCORDING TO ALBERT Speer’s own account, his birth, precisely at midday on 19 March 1905 at Prinz-Wilhelm-Straße 19 in Mannheim, was dramatically orchestrated. Amid crashes of thunder the bells of the nearby Christ Church could distinctly be heard. This entry into the world, reminiscent of Babylonian birth omens or the burning of the temple of Diana at Ephesus that coincided with the birth of Alexander the Great, was not quite so dramatic. There was indeed a thunderstorm in Mannheim that day, but it occurred between three and five that afternoon. The bells of Christ Church could not possibly have been heard. Young Albert was already six years old when the church – an unhappy mixture of neo-baroque and art nouveau – was completed.1
Mannheim, situated on the confluence of the rivers Rhine and Neckar, began as a fortress built by the Elector Palatine Friedrich IV in 1606, around which a small town developed. It suffered terribly in the Thirty Years War and was sacked by Louis XIV’s army in 1688. In 1720 the Elector Palatine Carl Philipp moved his capital from Heidelberg to Mannheim where he built a fine palace that now houses the university. The town became a distinguished cultural and artistic centre and enjoyed great prosperity until the Elector Palatine Carl Theodor moved to Munich in 1778 as the Prince Elector and Duke of Bavaria.
There followed a period of rapid decline, but in the course of the nineteenth century it became an important industrial centre. By 1905 it was a prosperous, solidly bourgeois, Protestant town with 150,000 inhabitants. The Speers were an established upper-middle-class family typical of Mannheim’s elite. Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer was named after his paternal grandfather Berthold Speer, a successful architect in Dortmund who made a small fortune by designing run-of-the-mill neo-classical buildings. He died young, but left enough money for his four sons to be given a proper education and for his stern matriarchal widow to live in appropriate style. Speer’s father, Albert Friedrich Speer, established a highly successful architectural firm in Mannheim. At first he built in the neo-renaissance style that was much in favour at the time, but then he became influenced by Ludwig Hoffmann’s neo-classicism.2 Both these styles come under the umbrella heading of ‘historicism’, traces of which can be found in young Speer’s work during the Third Reich. By 1900 Albert senior was in a position to marry the daughter of a taciturn self-made man from Mainz, the owner of a substantial machine-tool company. Luise Hommel was sixteen years younger than her husband. She was an unemotional young woman with social ambitions. She brought more money into the marriage than did her husband: a bonus that Albert Senior was later to claim was the principal reason why he married her.3 Speer’s maternal grandfather was the only one of his relatives who was capable of showing him any love or affection. His maternal grandmother, by contrast, was so stingy that she even locked away her precious hoard of sugar cubes.4 This lack of affection, all too common in similar families, was also characterised in Speer’s own family, where his mother-in-law was his children’s only source of emotional warmth from within the immediate family.
Speer’s father candidly admitted that his sole interest in architecture was that it was an excellent way to make a lot of money.5 He was not ashamed to make a display of his success in this endeavour. The apartment in Mannheim consisted of fourteen rooms comprising one floor of a vast townhouse that Speer’s grandfather had built. In 1905 Speer’s father bought a plot of land in the Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg in Heidelberg. Here he built a large mansion with elaborate wrought-iron gates and a sweeping driveway that ended with a flight of steps leading to an imposing entrance. One of the two Mercedes – an open one for summer use and a saloon for winter – was parked in front of the house. It was attended by a liveried chauffeur. The Speers were the only family in Mannheim that owned two cars.6 The staff included a nanny named Berta, a cook, three uniformed maids and a manservant in violet livery. The gold-plated buttons bore a phoney family crest. The house was lavishly furnished, with heavy Dutch furniture in the hallway and a stove encased in costly Delft tiles. There was a winter garden with exotic Indian furniture that his father had bought at the Paris exhibition in 1900. The dining room was decorated in a neo-gothic style that was already outmoded. The drawing room was panelled in dark woods and massively furnished. Initially the house was designed as a summer retreat, but in the summer of 1918 the Mannheim house was let and the Speers moved to Heidelberg. The house was then enlarged to include a garage and an additional apartment.
Young Albert’s older brother Hermann was their mother’s favourite. His younger brother Ernst was that of his father. But all three were taken largely on sufferance.7 They were forbidden to enter the house by the front door and forced to take the tradesmen’s entrance. Similarly they were obliged to use the back stairs when going to their rooms. The children were brought up in a cold and frequently hostile atmosphere made worse by their parents’ strained relationship. As Albert was to remark many years later: ‘love was not included in the marriage contract’.8 Speer’s misery in this emotionally cold atmosphere was partially relieved by the presence of Mademoiselle Blum, the children’s lovable French governess, of whom he was later to say that she was the principal source of affection during his childhood.9 His childhood was made all the more miserable by his delicate health. He was given to dizzy spells and fainting fits, which a distinguished professor of medicine from Heidelberg imaginatively diagnosed as ‘weakness of the vascular nerves’, but for which he was unable to prescribe a therapy. This led Albert to withdraw even more, adopting a slyly accommodating attitude that was to serve him well later in life when having to deal with people whom he disliked.10 Banned from playing in the park with the children of hoi polloi, young Albert found an agreeable friend in Frieda, the caretaker’s daughter, whose skimpily furnished basement apartment he found more congenial than the theatrical pomposity of his own home upstairs.
Albert’s formal education began in a small private school that catered for the children of Mannheim’s elite. In the summer of 1918 the family moved permanently to their summer estate in Heidelberg. He was then sent to the Hermann von Helmholtz Senior Secondary School, which came as something as a shock to him, because he now came in contact with some rough and ready types lower down the social order.11 He soon made friends with one of them, a boy named Quenzer, who persuaded him to part with some of his pocket money to buy a football. His parents were horrified when they learnt that Albert was showing some enthusiasm for this resolutely plebeian sport. His new friend introduced him to the fun to be had by defying authority: playing pranks and impressing fellow pupils with the number of times their names were entered for misbehaviour in the class register.
All this was mere playfulness. Speer was no teenage rebel. Although Germany underwent considerable and often extremely violent changes in the immediate post-war years, there were no profound changes in the social structure. Traditional values were still widely accepted and customs remained unchallenged. Politically his father moved with the times, leaving little room for outright confrontation. He was a liberal, an enthusiastic reader of the Frankfurter Zeitung, a paper that endorsed the Versailles Treaty, supported Stresemann’s fulfilment policy and – with prominent left-wing contributors such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Bertold Brecht – was anathema to the nationalist right. Albert senior subscribed to the critical weekly Simplicissimus, which featured work by Erich Kästner, Käthe Kollwitz, Kurt Tucholsky and Joachim Ringelnatz. He endorsed Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s idealistic vision of a united Europe and Friedrich Naumann’s programme for social reform, but at home there were no political discussions and the Helmholtz School did not encourage critical thought or political debate.
In one important respect he challenged his parents’ authority and values. One day on his way to school the seventeen-year-old Albert met a young woman named Margarete (Gretel) Weber. She was a year younger than him, the daughter of a highly respected cabinet-maker, who was a member of Heidelberg’s city council and a successful entrepreneur. He soon became a frequent guest at the Webers’ house, where he found something of the warmth and affection that was so sadly lacking at home.12 Albert’s parents were snobbishly horrified by this friendship. At first they tried to comfort themselves by the thought that this was merely a fit of calf love, but gradually they realised that it was indeed to be a lasting relationship. The Webers were also far from thrilled with Gretel’s affection for the poor little rich boy. They packed her off to a boarding school in an attempt to keep her out of harm’s way. Speer’s letters to her make for curious reading. They were stiff, pretentious and affected, without a hint of the spontaneity and rapture characteristic of a love letter, but they had the desired effect. One year after their first meeting she agreed to marry him, once he had finished his studies.
Albert’s health improved greatly during his school years. The everyday walk to school took three-quarters of an hour. At fourteen he joined a rowing club, much to his mother’s dismay. She considered the sport, like football, to be distinctly proletarian. Eventually he became the stroke of the school fours and eights. He enjoyed being part of a team, but he abhorred the social side of the club. He disapproved of the dancing, smoking and drinking in which his fellow oarsmen indulged. He remained throughout his life something of a loner and an outsider, hiding his awkwardness behind a façade of impersonal superiority and detached indifference.
As a young man Speer was a passionate skier, mountaineer and hiker. He also developed a love of music. In Mannheim he went to concerts conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler and Erich Kleiber when both great artists were at the beginning of their distinguished careers. He was particularly moved by the dramatic, romantic and sorrowful, such as Bruckner’s fourth symphony, Isolde’s Liebestod and Mahler’s fifth symphony. Later in life he was moved to tears when his friend Wilhelm Kempff played Chopin’s enigmatic second piano sonata. It would seem that he had an emotional response to music and nature that was lacking in his personal relationships.
Speer excelled at school. He received the highest marks of all in his school-leaving examination, the Abitur.13 His particular strength was in mathematics, so he decided that he would continue to study the subject at university. His father was horrified that he should opt for such an excellent way to starve for a living. After lengthy argument he persuaded his son to follow in the family tradition and study architecture. He began his studies in 1923 amid the horrendous inflation that rendered the German mark worthless. He described a supper at a simple guesthouse for 1.8 million marks as ‘cheap’ and later 400 million for a theatre ticket as perfectly in order.
Speer’s father survived the crisis relatively well by selling his father-in-law’s factory for dollars, but nevertheless certain economies had to be made. Albert was sent to the technical university in nearby Karlsruhe. With the princely monthly allowance of 16 dollars he could easily afford the 20,000 million marks needed to pay for an evening meal.14 In November 1923 Hjalmar Schacht was appointed Currency Commissioner. He waved his magic wand and stopped the inflation by introducing a new currency known as the Rentenmark that knocked twelve noughts off the Papiermark. In December he was appointed head of the Reichsbank. In August 1924 the Reichsmark was introduced at par with the Rentenmark.
With inflation now under control, Speer was able to pursue his studies in Munich in the spring of 1924. Here he could go mountaineering and canoeing, often accompanied by Gretel. He did not join any of the youth clubs that flourished in the Weimar Republic, preferring to savour the wonders of nature in relative isolation, thereby seeking refuge from the frustrating complexity of the everyday world.15 He thus espoused the then fashionable distrust of civilisation and an inchoate revolt against convention. This rebellion had been powerfully articulated by Ludwig Klages in his opening address at the inaugural meeting of the Free German Youth in 1913, in which he delivered an intoxicatingly confusing denunciation of modern technological society.16 Speer claimed, like Klages, that nature was the site of the authentic. His daughter Hilde said that her father never really understood the modern world. His was a Manichean vision, infused with a simplistic social Darwinism.17 He was fascinated with technology, but he was later to claim that he was also its prey. Klages claimed that ‘most people do not live – they merely exist. They are enslaved by their jobs, mere machines exploited by large concerns, serfs of mammon, entrapped in a delirium of shares and flotations. They are enthralled by the distractions of urban life, leaving many with a sense of emptiness and increasing wretchedness.’18 Speer was later to find in such apocalyptic rhapsodies a convenient alibi for his behaviour during the Third Reich, and he who indulged in much of the best that the modern world had to offer was also to claim to have been its victim.
In the autumn of 1925, along with a number of his fellow students, Speer went to Berlin to study at the renowned Technical University Berlin-Charlottenburg. They hoped to study with Hans Poelzig, a distinguished representative of the school of architecture called Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. He had joined the teaching staff in 1923, and was best known for the Grosses Schauspielhaus (Grand Theatre) in Berlin, built in 1919, with its remarkable auditorium featuring clusters of plaster stalactites and its elegant foyer. Max Reinhardt’s production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia for the opening ceremony was one of the major theatrical events of the decade.19 As a teacher Poelzig was resolutely practical. Since he felt that it was impossible to teach art, he concentrated on the practical matter of organising space so as best to meet its purpose. He told his students that ‘there are two very difficult assignments ... a large theatre and a really small house. The small house is the more difficult of the two.’20 He liked to shock his students by saying that he saw nothing wrong with plagiarism, citing Handel, Mozart, Shakespeare and himself as distinguished copycats.
Poelzig encouraged individuality and inventiveness so that each of his students could develop his or her own style. They were set specific tasks, whether a factory, a church, a detached house or an office block. On Thursdays and Fridays preliminary sketches were submitted for his inspection. If they were approved, the student was ordered to complete the project. If rejected, the student had to enter the next competition. Having completed three such projects, the student was ready for the final examination. Such was Poelzig’s fame that competition was fierce among those eager to sit at the feet of ‘The Master’.21 Speer, who lacked imagination and originality and whose drawing technique was inadequate, was refused entry to this select circle.
Speer took this all in his stride. In his second semester Heinrich Tessenow joined the faculty, having previously taught at the Dresden Academy of Art. He was a leading figure in the movement known as Reform Architecture, which laid great emphasis on the simple, the unpretentious and the down-to-earth. He was greatly influenced by Ebenezer Howard and the British Garden City movement, as can been seen in his work for the Hellerau estate in Dresden and the Hopfengarten in Magdeburg. He was almost the polar opposite of Poelzig. He had followed in his father’s footsteps as a cabinet-maker before training as an architect. He always stressed the importance of craft over intellect and imagination. Echoing William Morris, he argued that a craftsman was only at home in a small town. The city was for intellectuals and artists.22 It was a form of anti-modernism that was echoed by the radical Nazis and survives today, often in surprising places.
As a teacher Tessenow insisted that his pupils should be firmly grounded in the basics of the architect’s craft. They should concentrate on the essentials and keep their buildings as simple as possible. In a typically gnomic statement he claimed that: ‘The simple is not always the best, but the best is always simple.’23 Whereas Poelzig’s students were encouraged to go their own way, Tessenow’s classroom was full of aspiring Tessenows. He was a stimulating if eccentric teacher, who either inspired fierce loyalty or met with outright rejection. Speer was passionately among the former. His adulation of his teacher was such that he decorated his apartment in the Nikolassee district of Berlin in his teacher’s style. In a letter to Gretel he wrote: ‘My new professor is the most important and clear-headed man I have ever met.’24
Speer was also greatly impressed by the archaeologist and architectural historian Daniel Krencker, whose work in Baalbek, Palmyra, Aksum, Ankara, Quedlinburg and the Roman baths in Trier was highly regarded. Here Speer found rich material for his historicist eclecticism and inspiration for his ideas about ‘ruin value’ – discussed in the next chapter – that was to make such an impression on Adolf Hitler.
As a student Speer was sloppily dressed and appeared to take a nonchalant attitude towards his studies. Rudolf Wolters, who first met him in Munich, described him as an ‘amiable loafer’, who paid less wealthy pupils to do the architectural drawings for which he showed no great talent. He was generous, often helping out fellow students such as Wolters when they ran short of cash. Once he came under Tessenow’s sway Speer seems to have had a change of heart. He hid his boundless ambition behind an outward display of smoothly elegant indifference. He breezed through his diploma in 1927. Six months later, when he became Tessenow’s assistant, he was the youngest in the entire university. In 1928, underlining his membership of the educated and cultivated middle class, Speer chose Goethe’s birthday, 28 August, to marry Gretel. He sent his parents, who had still not met his bride, a telegram that read: ‘MARRIED TODAY STOP WITH LOVE STOP ALBERT AND GRETEL STOP.’25 Speer’s mother, an inveterate social climber, was outraged when she heard that her worst fears had thus been confirmed. It took seven years for Speer’s parents to overcome their resentment and invite Gretel to their home.26 Three weeks of honeymoon were spent canoeing and camping in the Mecklenburg Lake District.
Tessenow’s pessimistic view of the modern world as an industrialised Moloch, driven by soulless mass production, creating the alienation of big cities and an extravagant display of new wealth, made a great impression on Speer. It was reinforced by the fashionable cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler, as articulated in Prussianism and Socialism (1919), which argued that the evils of both capitalism and Marxism could be overcome by an alliance of workers, soldiers, technocrats and right-wing intellectuals. Together they would smash the ‘dictatorship of money’ and keep the mob under control. Speer was much taken by Tessenow’s remark that ‘perhaps, before handicrafts and small towns can once again flourish, we shall first have to go through fire and brimstone. The next heyday will be that of peoples who have gone through hell.’27 This modishly apocalyptic vision was a component of National Socialism.
Speer made much of his love of the simple life and his acceptance of Tessenow’s adage that the best is always simple. Later, during his years of imprisonment he professed to have come to the conclusion that a room not much larger than a prison cell was all that a normal person needed. This sentimental nonsense is belied by his lifestyle when not a guest of the Allies. He always lived the comfortable life of a successful man. Simplicity is hardly the hallmark of his designs for rebuilding Berlin as ‘Germania’, as he was later to regret. However, it is greatly to his credit that he adapted remarkably well to wartime hardship and imprisonment under exceptionally stringent conditions. He was also capable of considerable courage and fortitude in defending himself against his rivals and in his single-minded pursuit of the main chance. This same strength of mind protected his conscience from any troubling thoughts and enabled him to feel unpolluted by the garishness and iniquity of the regime that he so loyally and effectively served.
The late 1920s were perplexing times for Germany’s youth. The appeal of radical solutions, false prophets and counterfeit messiahs were hard to resist. Defeat in war had been followed by outbursts of revolutionary violence. The Diktat of the Treaty of Versailles laid a heavy burden on the country, both materially and emotionally, that was hard to accept. It was widely felt that the German army had indeed been ‘stabbed in the back’ in 1918 by the democratic parties and their dubious hangers-on. This version of events was after all based on the unquestionable authority of the demi-gods Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. There followed a series of attempted coups, both from the left and the right. In an atmosphere of lawlessness and unbridled violence, political assassinations became commonplace. On top of all this came the shattering experience of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland in 1923, followed by hyperinflation. In the universities there were few that accepted the democratic republic as a legitimate state. With the Great Depression capitalism seemed to be on its last legs and offered no hope for a better future. Some agreed with the American journalist Lincoln Steffens that the Soviet Union had found a future that worked, but others saw Communism as a god that had failed. Many felt that American capitalism was no longer a viable alternative. An increasing number of people felt that Adolf Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) offered a viable answer. A great many, even though they had considerable reservations about the Nazis, came to believe that they were the only alternative to the dictatorship of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or German Communist Party (KPD).
The Technical University of Berlin was a bastion of National Socialism. In 1928 Baldur von Schirach’s Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund or National Socialist German Students’ Association (NSDStB) won 13 per cent of the vote for the Allgemeiner Studenten Ausschuss or student council (AStA). One year later it got 66 per cent. A large number of Tessenow’s students were enthusiastic adherents of ‘The Movement’. Speer, ever anxious to portray himself as an apolitical professional and technocrat, claims that he was ‘unconvinced but still uncertain’ until he went along with some fellow students to hear Hitler address university students in Berlin in December 1930. It was a rally to drum up support for the NSDAP in the forthcoming student council elections.28 There is ample evidence that Speer’s attitude towards National Socialism was far from being lukewarm. One of his students, Peter Koller, who later under Speer was to plan the town of Wolfsburg as a base housing for the Volkswagen works, tells of lengthy discussions at Speer’s apartment about National Socialism, particularly its proposals for creating a corporate state that would set right an economy that was in ruins.29 Speer was later on occasion to let slip his identification with Nazi racial prejudice and with other unattractive aspects of this offensive ideology.30 The NSDStB’s policy statement was unambiguous. It denounced the ‘War Guilt Lie’ and the Young Plan for reparations. It called for professorships in ‘racial science’ and ‘military science’. It demanded a strict limitation of the number of Jewish students and other ‘elements alien to the Germanic race’.31
Tessenow, although not a party member, was sympathetic to the Hitler movement. He was known on occasion to have read Die Tat (The Deed), the only journal on the radical right that was intellectually challenging, with contributors such as Ernst Jünger, Dorothy Thompson and Sefton Delmer which helped to give it an international reputation. A common theme was that modern technology and authoritarian politics were well matched. They believed that Germany could find a sense of community that would avoid both the soulless materialism of the United States and the soulless collectivism of the Soviet Union.
Another theme was that the cultural crisis of modern society was not due to technology itself, as Speer was later to claim, but rather that technology was harnessed to selfish commercial interests. Environmental destruction, the commodification of culture and contempt for spiritual values were all due to enslavement to economic forces rather than to technology. The engineer-artist opposed brutish commercial interests that were blind to the ‘metaphysical foundations’ of technology. Often technology was confused with what was seen as the curse of Americanism. Technology was falsely identified with production and use-value, whereas it should be seen as creative. Parasitic and selfish finance capital was soullessly concerned with circulation and exchange value.32 The young conservatives in the Tat circle argued that a strong state was needed to protect the masses from the rapacious greed of the few. The radical journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky said that: ‘it clearly shows the befuddlement of the liberal bourgeoisie, who in the face of a world-wide economic crisis throw themselves yelling, screaming and ecstatically gesturing into the arms of right-wing radicals’.33 The Tat circle was closely associated with the left-wing Nazis around Otto Strasser, who was a regular contributor to the journal. The British journalist Sefton Delmer, head of the Daily Express Berlin bureau, was a friend of Ernst Röhm, the leader of the brown-shirted radicals in the SA. The Nazi left took many of the ideas expressed in Die Tat on board.34 Tessenow would therefore not have been particularly alarmed when his assistant became involved with the Nazis.
Speer combined such modish cultural pessimism and anti-modernism with a fascination with technology that was so typical of conservative intellectuals in the Weimar Republic. This ‘reactionary modernism’ was to find its radical expression in National Socialism.35 It was a strange mixture. It combined a rhapsodic love of nature, canoeing and hiking in the Alps with a rejection of the degenerate urban world. But it also involved a fascination with technology, fast cars, cinema and Max Reinhardt’s innovative stage productions. As Minister of Armaments Speer cautioned that although technology could solve future problems, there was a danger of mankind becoming its slave.36 After the war technology became Speer’s strongest alibi. An autonomous technology exonerated technocrats from moral responsibility as well as the political consequences of their efforts.
Over 5,000 students crowded into the Neue Welt beer hall in the Berlin district of Neukölln on 4 December 1930 to hear Adolf Hitler speak.37 News that two members of the brown-shirted SA had become ‘the victims of murderous red beasts’ further served to electrify the atmosphere. Hitler made an impassioned appeal for moderation and compromise, calling for an end to the self-destructive struggle between left and right. He appealed for a renewal of the traditional values of honour and heroism, insisting that ‘a heroic idea attracts heroes’ whereas ‘a cowardly idea collects cowards’. The present misery was caused, he claimed, by the fact that the war had destroyed all the best while preserving the inferior, resulting in rule by the mediocre, so that politics had been reduced to mere egotism. It was the task of National Socialism to put the elite back in power – by which he clearly meant his present audience – so that national unity might be restored. He closed by telling the students that they must ‘find a way to integrate themselves into the nation’s life and future’. It was an intoxicating message for the young and ambitious, whose future amidst a shattering depression, rapidly rising unemployment and a political system that was falling apart appeared hopelessly grim.38 It is testament to the hypnotic power possessed by Hitler that such a highly educated group should be carried away by a speech given in far from faultless German, riddled with contradictions, illogical argument and empty promises. It was delivered in a raucous voice with outbursts of screaming and yelling, punctuated by foot-stamping and wild gesticulation.
While his students discussed Hitler’s speech over glasses of beer, Speer drove through the night to a pine forest in the Havelland where he wandered alone deep in thought. Some weeks after this epiphany, he went to hear Goebbels speak. He later claimed to have been revolted by the hectoring, crude and violent tone of his lengthy tirade, but this did not cause him to have any second thoughts about the Nazi Party.39 It was Goebbels who helped ease Speer’s way to the top, and in a speech he gave in the Berlin Sports Palace in 1943 he spoke highly of Berlin’s Gauleiter: ‘During the Time of Struggle I used to sit among you as an unknown party comrade, experiencing the Führer’s unique rallies. The passionate words of our Gauleiter Dr Goebbels renewed my strength to carry on the struggle.’40 In January 1931 Speer applied for membership. On 1 March he became Party Comrade number 474,481.41 In the German original of his memoirs Speer states that his decision to join the party was ‘not dramatic’. In the English version he reassures the reader that had Hitler announced his intention to go to war, burn down the synagogues and kill Jews and political prisoners before 1933 he would have lost most of his followers.42 Hitler’s speech to the students did not include an anti-Semitic rant, nor did it give any hint that he was contemplating going to war, but party literature was full of such presentiments. Speer could not have avoided being aware of National Socialism’s fundamental intents. His political commitment, he assures his English-speaking readers, consisted merely in paying his modest monthly party dues. Speer obviously thought that his German readers would not be quite so gullible. He told them that the Nazi Party offered ‘new ideals, new insights and a new mission’.43 He was more forthright when speaking to the British journalist William Hamsher. He told him that he had joined the party in order to save Germany from Communism.44 Ever the opportunist, Speer presented himself as a dedicated and devout party comrade during the Third Reich. After the war he claimed to have had no interest in politics and had become a party member almost by chance. The truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Like many of the leading figures in the Third Reich, Speer was never an ideologue. Nor was he anything more than an instinctive anti-Semite. He was frequently locked in battle with the Nazi Party. But it was his party connections that made his meteoric rise to power possible. In this too he was typical of the well-educated and skilled middle class that gave the Third Reich its compliant support, despite some reservations and occasional feelings of remorse.
That he was merely an indifferent fellow traveller is pure myth. Soon after becoming a party member Speer joined the ranks of the radical brown-shirted bullyboys in the SA. In 1932 he enlisted in the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps or National Socialist Automobile Corps (NSKK), the SA’s motorised section, in which he played an active role. He also promptly joined the Kampfbund deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure or Action Group of German Architects and Engineers, an organisation founded by Gottfried Feder and Paul Schultze-Naumburg in 1931 as a section of Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur or Action Group for German Culture (KfdK). Speer’s friend Rudolf Wolters, who had serious reservations about Hitler, asked him why on earth he had joined the party. Speer replied: ‘Come on, you’ll see. The man is not that stupid. He’ll be somebody one day.’45
Thanks to Speer’s engagement in Nazi politics, the Western District Party Organiser in Berlin, Karl Hanke – a man who was to rise to great heights in the Third Reich – asked him in 1931 to refurbish his office in a villa he had rented in the exclusive Grünewald neighbourhood. The Nazi Party, having achieved a breakthrough in the elections in September 1930, was attempting to appear more respectable so as to strengthen its support among the middle class. Eagerly seizing this opportunity Speer undertook the task free of charge. Hanke, now Ward Leader in Berlin’s West End – the most exciting part of the city during the ‘Golden Twenties’ – was delighted with the results. With scant regard for party orthodoxy, he selected ‘communist’ wallpaper that came from the ideologically suspect Bauhaus on the grounds that only the best was good enough for the Nazis, regardless of provenance.46
In early 1932 the rigorous austerity programme instituted by the Brüning government resulted in the stipends of university assistants being drastically cut, whereupon Speer decided to try his luck as an independent architect. These were exceedingly difficult times for someone unknown in this field. He had no clients and prospects were grim. Unable to find work in Berlin he returned to Mannheim hoping to land a few assignments through his father’s many contacts. His luck did not turn, so his father gave him a job managing his various properties. Since this was hardly full-time employment he decided to go on a canoeing holiday in the Masurian Lake District, then in East Prussia. On 28 July 1932, just as he was about to set out on this trip, he received a telephone call from Wilhelm Nagel, the head of the NSKK asking him to return to Berlin. It was a call that was to change his life.47 Nagel spoke on behalf of Karl Hanke, who had requested that Speer renovate the Nazi Party’s recently acquired headquarters at Vossstraße 11 in the heart of the governmental district. Speer claims that his return to Berlin was due to pure chance. Had Nagel called a few hours later he would have already left on holiday and would have been out of touch with the outside world.
There is a good reason to doubt this story. In June 1932 Franz von Papen, a man of whom the French ambassador said that ‘he enjoyed the peculiarity of being taken seriously neither by his friends nor by his enemies’ and who had virtually no support in parliament, asked President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag three days after his appointment as chancellor.48 The two months of campaigning that followed were the bloodiest and most violent in the history of the republic. Elections for the Reichstag were held on 31 July. Speer admits in his memoirs that he returned to Berlin ‘to savour the exciting election atmosphere and – wherever possible – to help out’. As he was one of the very few Nazis in Berlin who owned a car, he would have been very much in demand during the election campaign. The results marked the decisive breakthrough of the Nazi Party, which was returned as the largest party, increasing the number of seats from 107 in 1930 to 230. With 13,745,680 votes cast in its favour it had almost twice the number as its closest rival, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or Social Democratic Party (SPD). In such a heady atmosphere, when the fate of the republic hung in the balance and when the SA was in urgent need of his services, it is somewhat unlikely that Speer would have contemplated going on a canoeing holiday just three days before the election.
Whatever the case, Speer’s work in the Gauhaus at Vossstraße 11 was soon completed. All he was asked to do was to undertake a few minor renovations, repaint the interior and select furniture for Goebbels’ office and the conference room. His main problem was that he was still completely under the influence of Tessenow’s doctrine that the best is always simple. This was hard to realise in an ornate building typical of the Wilhelmine style. He hardly ever saw Goebbels, who was frantically preparing for yet another election. The work was completed on time, but well over budget. In the election of 6 November 1932 the Nazi Party lost a significant number of seats. Party membership dropped. The till was empty. The craftsmen had to accept a deferment of payments for several months, by which time Hitler was in power and cash was no longer a problem.49
With no more work to do in Berlin, Speer returned to Mannheim where the situation was as miserable as ever. The only good news was that Speer was told that Hitler was delighted with the work he had done at Vossstraße 11.50 Hitler was appointed chancellor on 30 January 1933. Elections were held on 5 March. One week later Hanke, who had just been appointed adjutant and personal assistant to the Minister of Propaganda, telephoned Speer and asked him to return to Berlin to advise Goebbels on refurbishing his new ministry in the Prince Friedrich Leopold Palace in the Wilhelmplatz. Goebbels told Speer to get on with the job at once. He was far too impatient to wait for an estimate so that Speer, mindful that the Propaganda Ministry as yet had no official budget and true to his training under Tessenow, opted for relatively modest furnishings. Goebbels, considering these to be unworthy of his high office, ordered furniture directly from the United Workshops in Munich, which specialised in Paul Ludwig Troost’s ‘ocean liner style’ much favoured by Hitler.51
For his personal use Goebbels grabbed the official residence of the Minister of Food and Agriculture on the Friedrich-Ebert-Straße, soon to be renamed Hermann-Göring-Straße. Alfred Hugenberg, who was leader of the German National People’s Party and Minister for Economics, Agriculture and Food in Hitler’s first cabinet, was outraged. He put up a strong resistance, but was eventually forced to give way. Speer was commissioned to renovate the interior and to add a substantial living area. Goebbels was once again in a mad rush, but Speer rashly promised to have the job completed within two months. Hitler pronounced this to be an impossibility, but Speer handed over the keys on 30 June 1933, well within the time limit. Goebbels pronounced his new home to be ‘fabulous’, a ‘fairy-tale castle’ set in a ‘magnificent park’. In mid-July Joseph and Magda Goebbels gave a house-warming party in their new home to which Hitler was invited. Hitler spotted some ‘degenerate’ paintings, including watercolours by Emil Nolde that Speer had managed to borrow from the National Gallery and which the Goebbels’s had found delightful. Hitler judged them to be totally unacceptable and Goebbels ordered Speer to return them at once.52 In spite of this gaffe, Hitler was greatly impressed by Speer’s work.53
Hitler decided that 1 May should be celebrated as the ‘Day of National Labour’, thereby wresting May Day out of the hands of Communists, Social Democrats and the trades unions, all of which he denounced as playing critical roles in the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy’. He hoped thereby to win over the working class to National Socialism. As part of the celebrations the Propaganda Ministry was ordered to organise a mass demonstration on the evening of 1 May in the Tempelhof Field in Berlin. The file landed on Hanke’s desk. When shown some initial sketches for the celebration, Speer remarked that they looked like the arrangements for a village fete, whereupon Hanke said that if he could do something better he was welcome to have a try.
Speer set to work that very evening and made the initial sketches. Realising that there would not be sufficient time to make any elaborate preparations, he came up with a brilliant solution. From Max Reinhardt’s detailed stage productions and from his enthusiasm for the cinema he had developed a vivid sense of the theatrical. He proposed to place nine flagpoles behind the speakers’ tribune, each of them 33 metres high, from which hung flags as if they were sails. The effect was dramatic, but it would have been disastrous had there been a high wind. Searchlights, borrowed from the UFA film studios at Babelsberg, were placed around the perimeter pointing directly upwards, creating columns of light. Clusters of flags were placed between the searchlights.54
According to much exaggerated official sources 1.5 million people attended the rally. Goebbels gave the opening address. Hitler promised to put an end to political strife and divisiveness by creating a genuine ‘racial community’ (Volksgemeinschaft). He then unveiled a make-work programme based on building a network of highways. The rally ended with a lavish fireworks display and the singing of the national anthem. The whole event was broadcast, with a commentary from a Zeppelin that circled overhead.55
After the carrot – a holiday with pay on 1 May for which the Social Democrats and Communists had struggled in vain for years – came the stick. On 2 May the SA raided the offices of the trades unions. Their property was seized. On 10 May all workers from the chairman of the board to the unskilled labourers were obliged to join the Deutsche Arbeitsfront or German Work Front (DAF), which thereby became the largest organisation in the world. To add salt to the wound, workers’ wages on the Autobahn were below the welfare level.
Speer proudly took Tessenow on a tour of the Tempelhof site. He was appalled, dismissing it as nothing but empty show that was contrary to all his fundamental ideas. ‘Do you think that you have created anything?’ he asked. ‘All you have done is create an impression.’ Much the same can be said of the bulk of Speer’s subsequent work as an architect. Hanke’s message was more positive. He told Speer that Hitler had been delighted.56 With such praise from on high Speer was given the official position of Director General for the artistic decoration of the Propaganda Ministry’s major rallies. Thereby at the age of twenty-eight he had made a significant step forward on his way to becoming the Third Reich’s principal architect.