Albert Speer

Albert Speer was Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production from February 1942 to May 1945. He commanded the German wartime industrial economy, including its dependence on slave labour drawn from the concentration camps. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty on the slave labour count, and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. He served the full sentence at Spandau Prison and was released in 1966. He spent the rest of his life cultivating the public position that he had been an apolitical technocrat who had not known about the killing programme. He died on 1 September 1981 in London, in a hotel room near the BBC studios where he had been giving an interview. The cultivated position has been progressively destroyed by historians since.

The slave labour

Speer’s ministry depended on slave labour drawn from the concentration camp system. By 1944 around 500,000 prisoners were working in factories under his ministerial authority. The major war production sites at IG Farben Buna-Werke at Auschwitz Monowitz, the underground V-2 production at Mittelbau-Dora, the aircraft factories of the Messerschmitt and Junkers operations, the ammunition production across the Reich, all used prisoner labour at substantial scale. Speer signed the contracts. He met regularly with the SS officials who supplied the prisoners. He visited the major sites.

The Mittelbau-Dora visit

Speer visited the Mittelbau-Dora underground rocket factory in Thuringia on 10 December 1943. The site held around 12,000 prisoners working in tunnels excavated into the Kohnstein mountain. The death rate was around 100 prisoners per day. The conditions were the worst in the camp system and would kill around 20,000 prisoners over the eighteen months of the operation. Speer toured the tunnels. He saw the prisoners. He met with the camp commandant. His own dictated post-visit memorandum, which survived, recorded that the conditions were what he called barbaric and that the prisoner labour was producing satisfactory output. The memorandum is one of the most cited pieces of documentary evidence against Speer’s post-war position that he had not known about the conditions in the slave labour camps. He had visited Mittelbau-Dora at its lethal worst, dictated a memo about the conditions, and continued to use the labour.

The Posen speech

Speer attended the Posen Conference of senior SS and Reich officials on 6 October 1943 at which Himmler delivered the second of his two major speeches openly describing the killing of European Jewry as Reich policy. The recordings of the Posen speeches survived. The transcripts include Himmler’s remarks on the Jewish question and the assembled audience’s applause. Speer was in the room. He claimed at his Nuremberg trial that he had left before the relevant section. The acoustical evidence on the surviving recording, analysed by historians since the 1990s, indicates that he was almost certainly still present. The Posen speech is the closest the documentary record comes to a moment in which Speer cannot plausibly have been unaware of what the regime was doing.

The Nuremberg defence

Speer was the youngest of the senior Nuremberg defendants and the most personally presentable. He chose, alone among the senior defendants, to acknowledge collective responsibility for the regime’s crimes while denying personal knowledge of the killing programme. The defence was a calculated public-relations strategy. It worked partially. He was found guilty on the war crimes and crimes against humanity counts on the basis of the slave labour record and acquitted on the conspiracy and crimes against peace counts. He received twenty years rather than the death sentence that almost all of the other senior defendants got. The judges later said in private that Speer’s composed manner and his apparent acknowledgement of guilt had affected the sentencing.

The Spandau years and the post-war image

Speer served the full twenty-year sentence at Spandau Prison in West Berlin from 1947 to 1966. He used the time to write extensively, smuggling drafts out of prison through sympathetic guards. After his release in 1966 he published Inside the Third Reich (1969) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976). The books became international bestsellers. They presented Speer as the apolitical technical professional who had been seduced by Hitler’s personal magnetism, had not known about the killing programme, and had attempted in the closing months of the war to thwart Hitler’s scorched-earth orders. The version was widely accepted in the 1970s. It made Speer the most respectable of the surviving senior Nazis and gave him a substantial post-war second career as a memoirist and television interviewee.

The destruction of the position

The Speer position has been progressively destroyed by historians since the 1980s. The biographer Gitta Sereny’s 1995 book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is the central modern study, drawing on extensive interviews with Speer himself and on the documentary record that had become available in the meantime. Sereny showed that Speer had personally known about the conditions in the slave labour camps, had visited Mittelbau-Dora at its worst, had attended the Posen speech, and had worked with the SS on the supply of prisoner labour throughout. The Heinrich Schwendemann and Adam Tooze studies of his ministerial work in the 2000s and 2010s extended the case. The Sereny biography is now the standard view: Speer was not the apolitical technocrat of his memoirs. He was a senior Nazi who had used slave labour at scale, knew the conditions in which the labourers were dying, and had spent the rest of his life cultivating a more comfortable version of his career.

What he was

Speer is the case of the technocratic Nazi who survived the war by being more presentable than his colleagues and who used the post-war decades to manage his historical reputation more skilfully than they could. The slave labour record, the Mittelbau-Dora visit, the Posen attendance, all happened. The denial after 1945 is the part that distinguishes him from the men hanged at Nuremberg. He is the case in which a senior perpetrator, by careful management of his post-war public image, achieved a degree of historical rehabilitation that has had to be reversed by subsequent scholarship.

See also

Sources

  • Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Knopf, 1995
  • Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Macmillan, 1970
  • Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane, 2006
  • Speer’s Mittelbau-Dora memorandum, 10 December 1943
  • Posen speech recordings, 4 and 6 October 1943, Bundesarchiv
  • USHMM: Albert Speer