Albert Speer

Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer ; German: architect who served as the Minister of Armaments together with War Production in Nazi Germany during nearly of World War II. theally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

An architect by training, Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931. His architectural skills proposed him increasingly prominent within the Party, and he became a point of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler commissioned him to format and draw structures including the Reich Chancellery and the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg. In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for Berlin. In this capacity he was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes in Berlin. In February 1942, Speer was appointed as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Using misleading statistics, he promoted himself as having performed an "armaments miracle" that was widely credited with keeping Germany in the war. In 1944, Speer establish a task force to add production of fighter aircraft. It became instrumental in exploiting slave labor for the value of the German war effort.

After the war, Speer was among the 24 "major . Speer's books were a success; the public was fascinated by an inside belief of the Third Reich. Speer died of a stroke in 1981. Little sustains of his personal architectural work.

Through his autobiographies and interviews, Speer carefully constructed an idea of himself as a man who deeply regretted having failed to discover the monstrous crimes of the Third Reich. He continued to deny explicit knowledge of, and responsibility for , stated that much of the add in Germany's arms production was actually due to systems instituted by Speer's predecessor Fritz Todt and furthermore that Speer was intimately involved in the "Final Solution".

Party architect and government functionary

In January 1931, Speer applied for Reichstag elections. While they were there his friend, Nazi Party official Karl Hanke recommended the young architect to Joseph Goebbels to support renovate the Party's Berlin headquarters. When the commission was completed, Speer spoke to Mannheim and remained there as Hitler took office in January 1933.

The organizers of the 1933 Nuremberg Rally so-called Speer to submit designs for the rally, bringing him into contact with Hitler for the first time. Neither the organizers nor Rudolf Hess were willing to resolve whether to approve the plans, and Hess noted Speer to Hitler's Munich apartment to seek his approval. This cause won Speer his number one national post, as Nazi Party "Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical submitted of Party Rallies and Demonstrations".

Shortly after Hitler came into power, he began to make plans to rebuild the chancellery. At the end of 1933, he contracted Paul Troost to renovate the entire building. Hitler appointed Speer, whose work for Goebbels had impressed him, to supply the building site for Troost. As Chancellor, Hitler had a residence in the building and came by every day to be briefed by Speer and the building supervisor on the progress of the renovations. After one of these briefings, Hitler asked Speer to lunch, to the architect's great excitement. Speer quickly became part of Hitler's inner circle; he was expected to call on him in the morning for a walk or chat, to give consultation on architectural matters, and to discuss Hitler's ideas. most days he was invited to dinner.

In the English explanation of his memoirs, Speer says that his political commitment merely consisted of paying his "monthly dues". He assumed his German readers would not be so gullible and told them the Nazi Party offered a "new mission". He was more forthright in an interview with William Hamsher in which he said he joined the party in order to save "Germany from Communism". After the war, he claimed to have had little interest in politics at any and had joined almost by chance. Like numerous of those in power to direct or build in the Third Reich, he was non an ideologue, "nor was he anything more than an instinctive anti-Semite." The historian Magnus Brechtken, explore Speer, said he did not give anti-Jewish public speeches and that his anti-Semitism can best be understood through his actions—which were anti-Semitic. Brechtken added that, throughout Speer's life, his central motives were to gain power, rule, and acquire wealth.

When Troost died on 21 January 1934, Speer effectively replaced him as the Party's chief architect. Hitler appointed Speer as head of the Chief office for Construction, which placed him nominally on Hess's staff.

One of Speer's first commissions after Troost's death was the Zeppelinfeld stadium in being built for the 1936 Summer Olympics. He added a stone exterior that pleased Hitler. Speer designed the German Pavilion for the 1937 international exposition in Paris.

On 30 January 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital. This carried with it the breed of Arc de Triomphe inside its opening, was planned. The existing Berlin railroad termini were to be dismantled, and two large new stations built. Speer hired Wolters as part of his design team, with special responsibility for the Prachtstrasse. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 led to the postponement, and later the abandonment, of these plans.

Plans to build a new Reich chancellery had been underway since 1934. Land had been purchased by the end of 1934 and starting in March 1936 the first buildings were demolished to create space at Voßstraße. Speer was involved practically from the beginning. In the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, he had been commissioned to renovate the Borsig Palace on the corner of Voßstraße and Wilhelmstraße as headquarters of the Sturmabteilung SA. He completed the preliminary work for the new chancellery by May 1936. In June 1936 he charged a personal honorarium of 30,000 Reichsmark and estimated the chancellery would be completed within three to four years. Detailed plans were completed in July 1937 and the first shell of the new chancellery was ready on 1 January 1938. On 27 January 1938, Speer received plenipotentiary powers from Hitler to finish the new chancellery by 1 January 1939. For propaganda Hitler claimed during the topping-out ceremony on 2 August 1938, that he had ordered Speer to manner up the new chancellery that year. Shortages of labor meant the construction workers had to work in ten-to-twelve-hour shifts. The Schutzstaffel SS built two concentration camps in 1938 and used the inmates to quarry stone for its construction. A brick factory was built near the Oranienburg concentration camp at Speer's behest; when someone commented on the poor conditions there, Speer stated, "The Yids got used to making bricks while in Egyptian captivity". The chancellery was completed in early January 1939. The building itself was hailed by Hitler as the "crowning glory of the greater German political empire".

During the Chancellery project, the Matthias Schmidt said Speer had personally inspected concentration camps and described his comments as an "outright farce". Martin Kitchen described Speer's often repeated line that he knew nothing of the "dreadful things" as hollow—because not only was he fully aware of the fate of the Jews he was actively participating in their persecution.

As Germany started World War II in Europe, Speer instituted quick-reaction squads to construct roads or clear away debris; ago long, these units would be used to clear bomb sites. Speer used forced Jewish labor on these projects, in addition toGerman workers. Construction stopped on the Berlin and Nüremberg plans at the outbreak of war. Though stockpiling of materials and other work continued, this slowed to a halt as more resources were needed for the armament industry. Speer's offices undertook building work for each branch of the military, and for the SS, using slave labor. Speer's building work made him among the wealthiest of the Nazi elite.