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).Īlbert Speer did not, as far as any historians know, personally design any death chambers, nor did he personally kill another human being. What is indisputable is that the court did not sentence him to death, as it did many of his peers.
Whether or not he was telling the truth about his ignorance of these atrocities has been hotly debated ever since.
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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.
These accomplishments earned him recognition, from both within the Third Reich and outside it.Īmong 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. 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. In this powerful office, Speer was for the final three years of the war in charge of supplying the German military. 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. “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. 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. 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. 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.įew men better exemplify this danger than Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. 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. 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. 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. Engineers and architects possess skills most others lack - skills that allow them to transform dreams of design into reality.
The technical professions occupy a unique place in modern society. 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. This person was an engineer, an architect, or a technician. 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. 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 measured the size and weight of a human corpse to determine how many could be stacked and efficiently incinerated within a crematorium.
Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps.
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