Modern History
Home > Modern History > Personalities in the Twentieth Century > Albert Speer 1905 - 1981 > Albert Speer
Albert Speer
1905 -1981
Leonora Ritter
Charles Sturt University
Outcomes
A student:
| H1.1 | Describes the role of key features, issues, individuals, groups and events of selected twentieth-century studies |
| H1.2 | Analyses and evaluates the role of key features, issues, individuals, groups and events of selected twentieth-century studies |
Principal Focus: through the study of Albert Speer, you will gain an understanding of the role of this personality in a period of national or international history.
Students learn about:
Background:
- early work for the Nazi party
- family background and education
- introduction to Nazism and his reasons for joining the Nazi party
Rise to prominence:
- early work for the Nazi party
- appointment as ‘First Architect of the Reich’
- the ‘ Germania’ project and the new Reich Chancellory
- work as Armaments Minister
Additional information is included that can be used to learn about the significance of Speers and to evaluate him.
Background
Albert Speer was born on 19 March 1905 in the German city of Mannheim. His father and grandfather were architects. He was the second of three boys. None of his immediate family was caught up in the fighting of the First World War. He was only 13 at the end of the war and too young to fight, but he always remembered the food shortages of 1918.
Speer was educated at a private elementary school and then at a state high school (Oberrealschule). He preferred to study mathematics but his parents wanted him to follow the family tradition of architecture. Speer went to the Technical University at Karlsruhe near Heidelberg and then to a more distinguished Technical University in Munich. In 1925, he moved to Berlin to complete his studies. He formally graduated in February 1928 and took up an academic post.
Speer's role in the Nazi Party
In December 1930 Speer attended a Nazi rally where he heard Hitler speak and shortly thereafter he applied for membership of the Nazi Party. He was accepted on 1 March 1931. This preceded Hitler's rise to the position of Chancellor by almost two years and suggests that he joined through conviction rather than the pragmatism that drove later converts. Speer said he joined because of fear of communism, fascination for Hitler and rejection of the Treaty of Versailles with its imposition of German guilt for the First World War. He joined several Nazi organisations including the NSKK (motoring corps), becoming head of his local sub-branch.
In 1933 Speer did his first architectural job for the Hitler government. He also became their Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Party Rallies and Demonstrations after impressing them with his design for a huge outdoor rally on May Day 1933. The design involved the vertical hanging of striped Nazi flags, ten storeys high, and the use of 150 searchlight beams to form a cathedral of light. From 1933 Speer was a close acquaintance of Hitler and a regular guest at the dictator's table. In 1936 Hitler conferred on Speer the title of Professor as a mark of his personal esteem.
Speer was a workaholic who neglected his family (eventually numbering six children). By 1937 he established himself as the Nazi's leading architect. In 1937 he was appointed Inspector-General of Construction for the Reich Capital (Berlin — to be renamed Germania) and given the rank of the highest German civil service grade. Speer's talent for organisation served him well as a public servant. By 1941 his empire included hundreds of trucks and barges to carry building materials to Berlin and a building staff of thousands who could be quickly mobilised to repair British air raid bomb damage. In December 1941 he offered the services of his vast department to the general war effort.
Speer claimed that he was not anti-Semitic, although this was a major platform of the party to which he belonged and for which he worked. In his role overseeing the construction of Berlin, he was directly responsible for the eviction of Jews from their homes, supposedly to make their flats available for resettling non-Jews whose homes were damaged in air raids. Tens of thousands of flats were cleared by his order. Historians have not resolved whether or not Speer was actually present at the 1943 Posen meeting where Himmler explained that the final solution meant the complete extermination of all Jews, but his biographer, Dan van der Vat, insists he must have known of it and was probably there. On the other hand, Speer ignored the racial or religious characteristics of his own staff as long as they performed efficiently.
In February 1942, after the death in an air crash of Hitler's Minister for Weaponry and Munitions and chief civil engineer, Fritz Todt, Speer was appointed to take over all Todt's offices, which gave him responsibility for the German construction and energy industries. He reorganised munitions production to use resources more efficiently. His ministry gained the power to punish arms manufacturers or construction contractors who made false claims for labour, equipment or resources. His first move under this provision was to send two managers to a concentration camp (without trial) for using conscription-exempt workers as domestic servants.
Within six months Speer had increased the German output of ammunition, cannon and tanks. He stressed flexibility, initiative and improvisation. Hitler's respect for experts in general and personal regard for Speer in particular gave Speer unusual freedom. In May 1942 he was appointed one of two co-dictators of transport (with Milch). The railways became more efficient. Vast labour forces were sent to build roads for the army then invading the Soviet Union. In September 1943 (by which time the war was going very badly for Germany) Speer was promoted to become Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production.
Many of the labourers used in Speer's various activities were slave-workers from concentration camps, workers conscripted from occupied countries or prisoners of war. For the purely practical reason that healthy workers work harder, Speer tried to ensure that his workers at least received an adequate diet.
In January 1944 health problems put Speer into a clinic and long convalescence (until April 1944). During this period of isolation and reflection he apparently became disenchanted with Hitler. By this time the war situation had become so bad for Germany that even Speer's administrative talents and efficiency drives were unable to stem the tide of disasters. In mid-1944, when Hitler ordered his Minister of Armaments to stop producing fighter aircraft in order to increase anti-aircraft gun production, Speer ignored the Führer's orders for the first time. In November 1944 Speer admitted privately to Goebbels that it was unrealistic to believe in a German victory. In January 1945 he publicly admitted that even the secret weapons, the V1 and V2 rocket bombs, would not save Germany.
In February 1945 Speer apparently decided to remove Hitler by gassing him in his bunker. He justified his decision by a passage from Mein Kampf in which Hitler had argued that a leader who betrayed the interests of his own people should be removed. Speer claimed that he gave up on this project because he found the bunker roof heavily guarded by the SS and an inaccessible new three-metre high chimney for the bunker's air vent. Biographer Dan van der Vat is very sceptical about this and raises questions about whether Speer ever seriously intended to go through with it. He points out that the Speer knew the ventilation fitting of the bunker were designed so that any poison gas put in would run out again.
Speer spent the last months of the war trying to save Germany's manufacturing base and trying to resist Hitler's scorched earth policy, which would have had the retreating Germans destroy all industrial plant and resources that they left behind. He probably saved thousands of bridges, canals, communication and power installations, not only in Germany but also in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
After Hitler
When Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, he bequeathed the leadership to Admiral Dönitz. Speer joined the Dönitz government as Minister for Economics and Production. He was therefore a member of the Cabinet that surrendered unconditionally on 7 May. After a strenuous interrogation by the Allies, Speer was placed under armed guard on 21 May. He was one of the defendants at the Nuremburg trial, accused of participating in the Nazi violation of international treaties and of participating in the Nazi crimes against humanity. His charge particularly specified his use of forced labour. His defence argued that his work was concerned with technology and thus not political.
He was found guilty of the charge based on his use of forced labour and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment. He was released in 1966. He died in 1981.
Reference
Van der Vat, D 1997, The Good Nazi, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, London.
|