Albert Speer

Albert Speer was a German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trial and sentenced to 20 years in prison. An architect by training, Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party, and he became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler commissioned him to design and construct 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 established a task force to increase production of fighter aircraft. It became instrumental in exploiting slave labor for the benefit of the German war effort. After the war, Albert Speer was among the 24 "major war criminals" charged with the crimes of the Nazi regime before the International Military Tribunal. He admitted some responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but denied any direct knowledge or involvement in the Holocaust. He claimed to have been unaware of the systematic extermination of Jews and other persecuted groups in concentration camps and death camps. He also claimed to have opposed Hitler's scorched earth policy that ordered the destruction of German infrastructure and industry before the Allied forces could capture them. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but was spared from execution because of his cooperation with the prosecution and his apparent remorse. He served his sentence at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he wrote his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. He was released in 1966 and lived as a freelance writer until his death in 1981. He died of a stroke in London while on a visit to promote his third book, Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.