Smooth talking Albert Speer was Hitler’s favourite architect
Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer argued for decades that he knew nothing of the Holocaust, but a recently discovered letter tells another story.
Fritz Todt was unlucky. On February 8, 1942, as he readied to leave Adolf Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia to return to Berlin, after a meeting with the Fuhrer the previous evening, he was surprised to find that fellow Third Reich insider Albert Speer, who was to travel with him, had decided to sleep in.
Speer was lucky. A rising star among Hitler’s henchmen, he had apparently disagreed with the pessimistic Todt the night before when the older man told an incandescent Hitler the prospects of defeating Russia were grim.
Todt’s Heinkel He-111 set off for the 700km flight home, but at the end of the airfield, and at just 30m altitude, the remodelled one-time bomber blew up, killing all on board.
Germany had invaded Russia eight months earlier, and Todt told his boss that he had taken on too much. A construction engineer who built his country’s famed autobahn system and the legendary Siegfried Line, 630km of fixed fortifications to protect Germany from attack, Todt was in charge of all armaments manufacturing.
He knew better than anyone that production could not keep up with demand but, in any case, he had recently radically streamlined management of the deadly business to help matters.
In a shock appointment, within hours of the crash, Hitler gave Speer all Todt’s responsibilities. His rise from favoured Nazi architect to the second-most powerful man in the country had been extraordinary. His predecessor’s death remains a mystery.
And Speer’s lucky streak – he died 40 years ago this week – held for the rest of his life, most notably at the post-war Nuremberg trials where he was one of the few Nazi leaders to escape the death penalty.
He was jailed for 20 years, released in 1966, wrote books about his version of the inside story of the Third Reich and died in London on September 1, 1981, where he had flown to appear on the BBC program Newsnight, once again to be interviewed as “the good Nazi”.
As an architect, the handsome, well-spoken, personable Speer made his name first with modest projects for the Nazi Party – overcome by Hitler’s oratory at a 1930 address he had signed up to the party the following morning.
He was destined to design buildings, even if it is not that for which he is remembered. He preferred maths, but his father insisted he fall into the family line – Speer’s grandfather had been a noted architect, as was his father. (Speer’s son, Albert Jr, has designed the stadiums for next year’s World Cup in Qatar. “I love my Germans,” said Qatar’s sheik Mohammed after outmanoeuvring Australia to win the controversial bid.)
Speer was born in Mannheim, a university city in southern Germany, closer to Paris than Berlin. His parents were upper middle class but seriously financially damaged by the hyperinflation of 1923 as the Weimar Republic sought to pay the debts it had incurred during World War I – a period of such frenzied inflation the central bank issued a note with a face value of 100 trillion Reichsmarks. Two years earlier, a dozen eggs had cost three Reichsmarks.
He studied at lesser universities, before attending the Technical University of Berlin where he was taught by esteemed town planner Heinrich Tessenow.
Educated and cultivated, Speer stood out among Hitler’s close allies in the early days and must have made an impression. Soon after Hitler became chancellor, he recruited Speer to start work on his plans to rebuild Berlin.
Renamed Germania, it would have a victory arch 50 times the size of Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe and, had it been built, its Volkshalle (people’s hall) would today still be the biggest building in the world. Almost 200,000 would have assembled in this cavernous space.
An outdoor stadium would accommodate 400,000 people and a highway would run beneath it all. Many tonnes of Bohus granite, from the west coast of Sweden, was imported for the towering projects. Of course, it was in the Fuhrer’s favourite colour – brown.
By now, Speer was very close to his boss and must have read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s lightweight biography and manifesto that sold more than one million copies in Germany in 1933 alone.
Mein Kampf clearly set out his hatred for all Jews: “Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? If you carefully punctured this abscess with a knife, like a maggot in a rotten body who was blinded by the sudden influx of light, you would discover a Jew.”
While so little of Germania was ever built – indeed, it seems Berlin’s marshy land could not have sustained the weight of such massive structures – many homes were demolished or acquired for the project, more often than not Jewish neighbourhoods.
Speer knew this, as he would also have known these people ended up homeless or in ghettos and, later, concentration camps. He was the sole senior Nazi to plead guilty at Nuremberg, but he did so cleverly, accepting collective responsibility for the atrocities carried out in the name of Nazism while proclaiming ignorance of most of them.
But this is where the second hole in Speer’s “defence” appears. His innovation, capacity for work and organisational skills were legendary. After replacing Todt as the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, his achievements in the otherwise floundering nation were remarkable. Indeed, after the war the Americans estimate his successes extended it by more than 18 months.
But one of the secrets of his dramatic increases in production was the use of slave labour by the German manufacturers who, obligingly, kept excellent records that were used against them and Speer at Nuremberg. One of the prosecutors there was Benjamin Ferencz, who wrote the book Less Than Slaves, in 1979, which described the cruel mechanics of the practice. (Ferencz, aged 101, lives in New York and spent decades campaigning for what we know as the International Criminal Court, in The Hague.) He told the Nuremberg judges: “Well over half a million inmates were leased out by the SS to hundreds of German firms by the end of 1944. The workers included … Communists, Socialists, other political opponents of the Nazi regime, priests, Seventh Day Adventists, as well as homosexuals, ‘asocials’, and common criminals … As a class, there can be no doubt that the Jews suffered most of all, but in focusing on their claims, I have not wished to minimise the suffering of all the others … Jews were regarded as contagious vermin by their Nazi oppressors, and were treated accordingly. They were given the most strenuous and most dangerous work. Jews who could not work were either dead or about to die.”
Speer owed his life to his civilised, cooperative demeanour towards his jailers, his offer to help the Allies with his knowledge of armaments, an unlikely claim that he had devised a plan to assassinate Hitler in his bunker by piping in poison gas, and the lies he maintained about his ignorance of the Holocaust.
He insisted then, and for decades after, that he had not been present when its architect, Heinrich Himmler, gave his infamous Posen speech in 1943: “I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people … The Jewish people is being exterminated … a small matter.”
Speer made many excuses for allegedly not knowing. He told dozens of interviewers over the years that he was only a technician and devoted himself so rigorously to this work that he didn’t see what was happening around him.
He went as far as to say he “could have” known, had he wished to, and perhaps “should have” known. And we now know that he did. Helene Jeanty was a member of the Belgian resistance with her first husband, who was shot by the Nazis. Later, she married Charles Raven, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, and joined in his pacifist causes, corresponding with Speer for the last decade of his life.
In a letter to Jeanty dated December 23, 1971, and which was discovered in 2007, Speer wrote: “There is no doubt – I was present as Himmler announced on October 6, 1943, that all Jews would be killed … Who would believe me that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?”
In the late 1970s, American TV producer Mel London interviewed Speer in his Heidelberg home, in southern Germany. By then, Speer’s bestsellers Inside the Third Reich and Spandau Diaries had made him wealthy. As the prelude to a question, London said to him: “You were the only person at Nuremberg to admit his guilt”. Speer pulled him up: “I did not admit guilt – I said I was responsible.’’
For too long history had treated Speer too kindly, the repentant Nazi who said sorry. But as Winston Churchill famously pointed out, history treats kindly those who write it.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout