Albert Speer was the second most important figure in Nazi Germany during World War II. He was the spearhead of Hitler. Unlike the rest of the fanatical bunch, Speer was a rational and as a result a more significant figure. He gave the Nazis a semblance of sanity, moderation and practical logic.
Speer was an architect, who joined the Nazi party in 1930, after hearing Hitler speak at a mass rally. After successfully performing a number of professional tasks in Rudolf Hess's offices, he was appointed Chief Architect of the Nazi Party in 1934.
Hitler's political mission and passion for architecture were inseparable. This combination was reflected in him as early as 1925, when he designed, as an amateur painter, two megalomanial structures: the Dome of Victory and the Victory Gate in Berlin. This was at a time when his political career was at a low ebb.
At the beginning of the Nazi regime Speer, as the official architect, became a close friend of Hitler and formulated with him the aesthetic conception of the Nazis. In parallel with the Nazi physicians in the life sciences and Karl Haushofer in the social sciences, Speer designed the unique design style that allowed the Nazis cultural visibility. The visual style is familiar to all, to a large extent, through Lenny Riefenstahl's documentaries. This is a modern version, in bold lines, of neoclassicism.
Speer was the one who, through his education and skills as an architect, would streamline Hitler's initial images of the Nazi model of action, in the reality of modern society. Inspired by them, he created a megalomanial setting for the crowd. Early in his career he designed the mass marches and demonstrations. He later designed the buildings, boulevards and cities, which were the focus of Hitler's interest.
Hitler valued the closeness of artists most of all. He saw Albert Speer as his closest friend, who provided his abstract ideas with a perfect practical expression, design, planning and organization alike. Without him, his vision would not have come true. He thanked him at every opportunity. Speer received a private residence in the Oberselzberg compound in the Alps. It was an expression of appreciation and a sign of closeness, apart from him only Goering, Himmler and Martin Borman received.
According to Speer, before the outbreak of the war Hitler was swept away by a building fever, which swept away all the heads of the Nazi regime and upset their mental balance. He describes how all the district chiefs were busy erecting magnificent public buildings, usually in a grandiose neoclassical style, which was the hallmark of the Nazis. They came to Berlin with detailed plans and construction specifications that required expensive raw materials, such as marble and steel. The war plots were concocted, in his opinion, for the purpose of financing public construction in Germany.
During the war, Speer was appointed Minister of Armed Forces. His talents in the field of organization led to the extension of the war by two years. They directly affected all areas of life in Germany and included the use of forced labor. Speer thus became the de facto ruler of Germany.
In February 1942, Speer redesigned the structure of the arms industry. He created a spiral scheme, according to which each component of production was given a separate place in the ascending rank. In the traditional German industry each product was made, with all its components, in one factory, by professionals who were experts in separate fields. The transition was to an industry where each factory specializes in one of the components and the complete product is obtained only at the assembly stage. This was the beginning of the modern industry that is known today. The reorganization was very successful and led to an dramatic increase output of weapons.
Speer elaborate the bearings industry in this context. When he took office, each weapons factory was responsible for creating all the components it needed and was producing the bearings. For example, car bearings were manufactured in car factories, aircraft bearings were manufactured in aircraft factories and so on. Speer united the production of bearings in a single factory, which was located in one city, Nuremberg. This plant created all the bearings required in the various industries. Other examples of specialty manufacturing were indicators and monitors factories. This was done for each of the many components required for the manufacture of modern technological weapons. The many different components were sent to the original factory, where the weapon was designed, for the purpose of assembling the final product.
The weakness of the method was that paralysis of one of the important production links was able to paralyze the whole of German industry. Speer claims that if the Allies had focused their aerial bombardment on the bearings plant in Nuremberg, they would have been able to bring the war to an end within a few weeks. But the Allies did not know that this was a weak link. They carried out thousands of bombing raids, with hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, on many factories that were known to them as producing finished products, instead of focusing on the weak link. Speer adds that they had to systematically bomb the same factory every few weeks, without paying attention to the results of each separate raid, in order not to allow it to recover.
When the Allied air forces of Britain and the United States began bombing from the air, it greatly affected the Nazi industrial poroduction. Beyond the direct damage to industry and morale, it forced the Nazis to allocate enormous resources to air defense and damage repair. These massive bombings continued until the end of the war and forced Speer to devote the best of his energy to them. The Air Defense Force was greatly intensified and was equipped with thousands of large and sophisticated cannons against aircraft, which were deployed throughout Germany and consumed enormous resources. Restoration of damage to ground structures was carried out very quickly, efficiently and cheaply. Speer has organized a stockpile of raw materials for construction, such as steel, stones and cement, near vital bridges and other important structures. In this way, after a bomb had hit, all the required stock of raw materials for rapid restoration was available attached to the site.
Albert Speer was sentenced at the Nuremberg trials to ten years in prison. After his release, he set up, together with his sons, a prestigious and prosperous architecture firm. Speer wrote, while in prison, the most comprehensive confessional document on the Third Reich, written by a man from the Nazi elite. His book, "Inside the Third Reich", was published in the late 1960s and is the cornerstone for documenting the period.
The book is built around the gap between internal and external. The inside was his personal closeness to Hitler and the close artistic collaboration between them, described in many chapters. Speer fed Hitler's artistic soul with the constant fire of classical architecture. Their close personal relationships found expression in the book in detailed descriptions of Hitler's daily life.
On an almost symmetrical scale the outside is depicted. This was Speer's activity as Minister of Armed Forces, which focused on responsibility for all the technical and organizational issues involved in German armaments. This, too, in close contact with Hitler, who outlined and approved every move. These issues included: organizing the German infrastructure for a war economy, managing the industrial-military production, responsibility for developing modern weapons including ballistic missiles, dealing with Allied air bombs and advising on strategic military moves. A large part of his duties were taken from Herman Goering, after his failures.
The preoccupation with two different areas created a dramatic psychological gap, which Speer was unable to bridge. The gap creatred for him a constant legitimacy for the perception of distance and detachment from guilt. Speer, in all his descriptions, is like someone who watches from a distance what is happening, indifferent and objective, uninvolved, cool-headed even when it comes to the main thing. Such a psychological gap, common in a technocratic society, existed in most of the people close to Hitler.
Speer claimed that he did not know about the Holocaust, as a result of the sophisticated means of communication available to Hitler, which led to direct orders from the Supreme Command to the level of execution, in all government bodies. According to him, an extreme compartmentalization was created, in which only the topmost leadership knew everything that was happening, while all those subordinate to them and he among them, knew only what was ordered to be done.
But the Nazis never hid the racist vision that was their real goal. On the contrary, they have announced it publicly countless times and implemented it in constitutional, administrative and practical steps. It was impossible not to understand what their ultimate goal was.
