Albert Speer – General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital City (GBI) and Reich Minister of Armaments and Ammunition
Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany, on 19 March 1905. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and completed a further course of studies in Munich. After graduating, he successfully worked at a Berlin architectural firm he founded himself.
Speer joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in 1933. In 1937, he was appointed General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital City (GBI). This newly created office was intended to reshape Berlin in accordance with Nazi ideas into what was called the “Reich Capital City” or “Germania”. In this function, Speer was responsible for the construction of many buildings and complexes in Berlin, including the Zeppelinfeld (Zeppelin Field) and the Olympic Stadium. The planned reshaping of the city involved the tearing down of 50,000 residential flats to make way for the new buildings. Their residents were to be moved to flats formerly belonging to Jewish families. So, from early 1939 onwards, Speer had some 15,000 flats cleared of their Jewish occupants. The lists drawn up by Speer’s staff for this purpose were used from September 1941 onwards as the basis for the deportation of those Jews still living in Berlin to concentration camps and death camps.
The office of the GBI was also responsible for the construction and approval of an estimated 3,000 camps for forced labourers in Berlin, and was centrally involved in setting them up. It ran its own forced labour camps, using foreign forced labourers from as early as 1939. After Siemens and the Reichsbahn, the German state-owned railway company, the GBI was the third-largest operator of forced labour camps in Berlin.
In early 1942, Speer’s role within the regime grew. Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler appointed him Reich Minister of Armaments and Ammunition and Head of Organisation Todt. In this function, he intensified both armaments production for the Luftwaffe (Air Force) and the army over the following months, as well as the construction industry that was vital for armaments production. In the spring of 1943, he also undertook armaments production for the navy in close consultation with Karl Doenitz, the Supreme Commander of the Navy.
Speer was also deeply involved in the system of persecution and genocide. The GBI granted interest-free loans to the SS for the construction of concentration camps, and was at the same time the central office for awarding contracts for building materials. No concentration camp could be built without the support of the GBI and his ministry. Together with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and Hans Kammler, responsible for SS construction sites, Speer was personally involved in the planning the extension of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. He approved and financed the construction of the railway lines, gas chambers and crematoria.
Speer was not, as he later claimed, an apolitical technocrat who was just following orders. He was a Nazi who shared the antisemitic and racist ideology of the “master race”. He approved of and enabled the mass murder of Jews and other persecuted people, especially as his office had a free hand in exploiting persecuted in the service of the armaments industry before they were murdered.
It was already clear to Speer in September 1942 that the war could not be won with the means available. Instead of seeking a political solution, he did all he could to intensify and radicalise the war in the hope of changing the tide. Speer ensured that the German armaments industry ran at full capacity right up until the very last days of the war. Together with SS head Himmler and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, he was a key driving force in the second half of the war and in its final phase.
On 1 October 1946, Albert Speer was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In prison, he managed to paint a picture of himself as an apolitical technocrat, and a misled and deceived idealist. He refused to accept any personal responsibility, claiming that he had no knowledge of many things that had taken place. His responsibility for the building of the concentration camps and the confiscation of the flats of Berlin Jews was not mentioned during the trial. Even in 1966, Speer claimed to have had no knowledge of the genocide of European Jews, Sinti and Roma. At the same time, he was the only defendant before the Major War Criminals Tribunal to accept general responsibility for the crimes committed by Nazi Germany. Yet he also proudly stated that he had been responsible for 14 million workers in the territory of the Reich alone from mid-1944 onwards.
After his release from prison, Speer, with the help of his publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler and the historian Joachim Fest, was able to perpetuate this narrative. He made millions from his memoirs. Speer still had a large number of stolen works of art in his possession, which he gradually sold off anonymously at auctions. Some of these artworks had been in Jewish possession, while others came from museums looted during the war in the occupied territories. Albert Speer died a rich man in London in 1981.
