Albert Speer

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1905–1981 ○ Stroke

Hitler’s architect who, as armaments minister from 1942 to 1945, drove war production with forced labour

An architect from Mannheim, he joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and moved from the SA to the SS. Part of Hitler’s inner circle, he designed the new Reich Chancellery and the party rally grounds in Nuremberg, and as General Building Inspector for Berlin from 1937 ran the resettlement office that evicted Jewish tenants. When Fritz Todt died in a plane crash in February 1942 he became armaments minister, claiming an “armaments miracle” with misleading statistics and directing war production to the end; his 1944 fighter-production task force exploited slave labour on a vast scale. Convicted at Nuremberg, chiefly for the use of slave labour, he narrowly escaped death and served twenty years in Spandau prison until 1966. In his memoirs he cultivated the image of a deeply repentant man. He died of a stroke in London in 1981.

Also known as: Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer