Albert Einstein – Person of the Century
In the halls that once housed the printing presses for the Metro and Evening Standard, has created a soundproofed warehouse, custom-made for clubbing. Das Kulturprogramm für Berlin: Events, Feste, Festivals und Ausstellungen, Museen, Tickets und. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
Wer nicht einverstanden ist, kann vor dem Betreten der Veranstaltung bereits erworbene Tickets an der Kasse kostenlos zurückgeben. Annalen der Physik Berlin in German.
Albert Einstein – Person of the Century - He abandoned plans to return to architecture, as two proposed partners died shortly before his release.
This article is about the German architect and Nazi minister. For other uses, see. Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer ; German: ; March 19, 1905 — September 1, 1981 was a German architect who was, for most of , Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production for. Speer was 's chief architect before assuming ministerial office. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party and he became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler instructed him to design and construct structures including the and the stadium in where Party were held. Speer also made plans to on a grand scale, with huge buildings, wide boulevards, and a reorganized transportation system. In February 1942, Hitler appointed him as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. After the war, he was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the Nazi regime, principally for the use of. Despite repeated attempts to gain early release, he served his full sentence, most of it at in. Following his release in 1966, Speer published two bestselling autobiographical works, and , detailing his close personal relationship with Hitler, and providing readers and historians with a unique perspective on the workings of the Nazi regime. He wrote a third book, Infiltration, about the. Speer died of a in 1981 while on a visit to London. Speer was born in , into an upper-middle-class family. He was the second of three sons of Luise Máthilde Wilhelmine Hommel and. In 1918, the family moved permanently to their summer home Villa Speer on Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg,. Speer's Heidelberg school offered , unusual for Germany, and Speer was a participant. Instead, Speer followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and studied architecture. Speer began his architectural studies at the instead of a more highly acclaimed institution because the crisis of 1923 limited his parents' income. In 1925 he transferred again, this time to the where he studied under , whom Speer greatly admired. After passing his exams in 1927, Speer became Tessenow's assistant, a high honor for a man of 22. As such, Speer taught some of Tessenow's classes while continuing his own postgraduate studies. In Munich, and continuing in Berlin, Speer began a close friendship, ultimately spanning over 50 years, with , who also studied under Tessenow. In mid-1922, Speer began courting Margarete Margret Weber 1905—1987 , the daughter of a successful craftsman who employed 50 workers. The relationship was frowned upon by Speer's class-conscious mother, who felt that the Webers were socially inferior. Despite this opposition, the two married in Berlin on August 28, 1928; seven years elapsed before Margarete Speer was invited to stay at her in-laws' home. Albert Speer shows a project to Hitler at Speer stated he was apolitical when he was a young man, and that he attended a Berlin Nazi rally in December 1930 at the urging of some of his students. On March 1, 1931, he applied to join the Nazi Party and became member number 474,481. In 1931, Speer surrendered his position as Tessenow's assistant and moved to Mannheim. His father gave him a job as manager of the elder Speer's properties. In July 1932, the Speers visited Berlin to help out the Party prior to the. While they were there, his friend, Nazi Party official , recommended the young architect to to help renovate the Party's Berlin headquarters. Speer agreed to do the work. When the commission was completed, Speer returned to Mannheim and remained there as Hitler in January 1933. The organizers of the 1933 asked Speer to submit designs for the rally, bringing him into contact with Hitler for the first time. Neither the organizers nor were willing to decide whether to approve the plans, and Hess sent Speer to Hitler's Munich apartment to seek his approval. Shortly after Hitler had come into power, he had started to make plans to rebuild the chancellery. At the end of 1933 he contracted to renovate the entire building. Hitler appointed Speer, whose work for Goebbels had impressed him, to manage the building site for Troost. As Chancellor, Hitler had a residence in the building and came by every day to be briefed by Speer and the building supervisor on the progress of the renovations. After one of these briefings, Hitler invited Speer to lunch, to the architect's great excitement. Hitler evinced considerable interest in Speer during the luncheon, and later told Speer that he had been looking for a young architect capable of carrying out his architectural dreams for the new Germany. Speer quickly became part of Hitler's inner circle; he was expected to call on Hitler in the morning for a walk or chat, to provide consultation on architectural matters, and to discuss Hitler's ideas. Most days he was invited to dinner. The young, ambitious architect was dazzled by his rapid rise and close proximity to Hitler, which guaranteed him a flood of commissions from the government and from the highest ranks of the Party. If Hitler had had any friends at all, I certainly would have been one of his close friends. Hitler appointed Speer as head of the Chief Office for Construction, which placed him nominally on Hess's staff. One of Speer's first commissions after Troost's death was the Zeppelinfeld stadium—the seen in 's propaganda masterpiece. This huge work was able to hold 340,000 people. Speer insisted that as many events as possible be held at night, both to give greater prominence to his lighting effects and to hide the individual Nazis, many of whom were overweight. Speer surrounded the site with 130. Speer described this as his most beautiful work, and as the only one that stood the test of time. Nürnberg was to be the site of many more official Nazi buildings, most of which were never built; for example, the would have accommodated 400,000 spectators, while an even larger rally ground would have held half a million people. Such ruins would be a testament to the greatness of Nazi Germany, just as or ruins were symbols of the greatness of those civilizations. Adolf Hitler looks over the designs for When Hitler deprecated 's design for the for the as too , Speer modified the plans by adding a stone exterior. Speer designed the German Pavilion for the. The German and pavilion sites were opposite each other. On learning through a clandestine look at the Soviet plans that the Soviet design included seemingly about to overrun the German site, Speer modified his design to include a cubic mass which would check their advance, with a huge eagle on top looking down on the Soviet figures. Speer received, from leader and later fellow Spandau prisoner , the Golden Hitler Youth Honor Badge with oak leaves. In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as with the rank of undersecretary of state in the Reich government. The position carried with it extraordinary powers over the Berlin city government and made Speer answerable to Hitler alone. It also made Speer a member of the Reichstag, though the body by then. Hitler ordered Speer to develop plans to. At the northern end of the boulevard, Speer planned to build the , a huge assembly hall with a dome which would have been over 700 feet 210 m high, with floor space for 180,000 people. At the southern end of the avenue a great triumphal arch would rise; it would be almost 400 feet 120 m high, and able to fit the inside its opening. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 led to the postponement, and later the abandonment, of these plans. Part of the land for the boulevard was to be obtained by consolidating Berlin's railway system. Speer hired Wolters as part of his design team, with special responsibility for the Prachtstrasse. Land had been purchased by the end of 1934 and starting in March 1936 the first buildings were demolished to create space at. Speer was involved virtually from the beginning. He had been commissioned to renovate the on the corner of Voßstraße and as a headquarter for the , who were about to be relocated from Munich to Berlin in the aftermath of the. In June 1936 he charged a personal honorarium of 30,000 Reichsmark and estimated that the chancellery would be completed within three to four years. Detailed plans were completed in July 1937 and the first shell of the new chancellery was complete on 1 January 1938. On 27 January 1938 Speer received plenipotentiary powers from Hitler to finish the new chancellery by 1 January 1939. Yet for propagandistic reasons, to prove the vigor and organizational skills of National Socialism, Hitler claimed during the topping-out ceremony on 2 August 1938 that he had ordered Speer to build the new chancellery just that year. Speer reiterated this claim in his memoirs to show that he had been up to that supposed challenge, and some of his biographers, most notably Joachim Fest, have followed that account. Because of shortages of labor, the construction workers had to work in two ten- to twelve-hour shifts to have the chancellery completed by early January 1939. During the war the chancellery was destroyed, except for the exterior walls, by air raids and in the in 1945. It was eventually dismantled by the Soviets. Rumor has it that the remains have been used for other building projects like the , or Soviet war memorials in Berlin, but none of these are true. During the Chancellery project, the of took place. Speer made no mention of it in the first draft of Inside the Third Reich, and it was only on the urgent advice of his publisher that he added a mention of seeing the ruins of the Central Synagogue in Berlin from his car. Speer was under significant psychological pressure during this period of his life. He later remembered: Soon after Hitler had given me the first large architectural commissions, I began to suffer from anxiety in long tunnels, in airplanes, or in small rooms. My heart would begin to race, I would become breathless, the diaphragm would seem to grow heavy, and I would get the impression that my blood pressure was rising tremendously... Anxiety amidst all my freedom and power! Wartime architect 1939—1942 Hitler visits Paris in 1940 with Speer left and sculptor. Speer supported the and , though he recognized that it would lead to the postponement, at the least, of his architectural dreams. That was the whole point of my buildings. They would have looked grotesque if Hitler had sat still in Germany. All I wanted was for this great man to dominate the globe. When Hitler remonstrated, and said it was not for Speer to decide how his workers should be used, Speer simply ignored him. Among Speer's innovations were quick-reaction squads to construct roads or clear away debris; before long, these units would be used to clear bomb sites. As the war progressed, initially to great German success, Speer continued preliminary work on the Berlin and Nürnberg plans. Speer also oversaw the construction of buildings for the Wehrmacht and. In 1940, proposed that Speer pay a visit to Moscow. When in 1941, Speer came to doubt, despite Hitler's reassurances, that his projects for Berlin would ever be completed. Speer inspects a , 1944. On February 8, 1942, Minister of Armaments died in a plane crash shortly after taking off from Hitler's at. Speer, who had arrived in Rastenburg the previous evening, had accepted Todt's offer to fly with him to Berlin, but had cancelled some hours before takeoff Speer stated in his memoirs that the cancellation was because of exhaustion from travel and a late-night meeting with Hitler. Later that day, Hitler appointed Speer as Todt's successor to all of his posts. In Inside the Third Reich, Speer recounts his meeting with Hitler and his reluctance to take ministerial office, saying that he only did so because Hitler commanded it. Speer also states that raced to Hitler's headquarters on hearing of Todt's death, hoping to claim Todt's powers. Hitler instead presented Göring with the of Speer's appointment. At the time of Speer's accession to the office, the German economy, unlike the British one, was not fully geared for war production. Consumer goods were still being produced at nearly as high a level as during peacetime. Few women were employed in the factories, which were running only one shift. One evening soon after his appointment, Speer went to visit a Berlin armament factory; he found no one on the premises. Speer overcame these difficulties by centralizing power over the war economy in himself. Over these departments was a central planning committee headed by Speer, which took increasing responsibility for war production, and as time went by, for the German economy itself. He can interfere in all departments. Already he overrides all departments... On the whole, Speer's attitude is to the point. He is truly a genius with organization. Speer right, with armband looks on with Field Marshal left during weapons testing. While Speer had tremendous power, he was of course subordinate to Hitler. Nazi officials sometimes went around Speer by seeking direct orders from the dictator. When Speer ordered peacetime building work suspended, the Nazi Party district leaders obtained an exemption for their pet projects. When Speer sought the appointment of Hanke as a labor czar to optimize the use of German and slave labor, Hitler, under the influence of , instead appointed. Rather than increasing female labor and taking other steps to better organize German labor, as Speer favored, Sauckel advocated importing more slave labour from the occupied nations — and did so, obtaining workers for among other things Speer's armament factories, often using the most brutal methods. On December 10, 1943, Speer visited the underground factory that used labor. Speer claimed after the war that he had been shocked by the conditions there 5. By 1943, the had gained air superiority over Germany, and bombings of German cities and industry had become commonplace. However, the Allies in their did not concentrate on industry, and Speer was able to overcome bombing losses. In spite of these losses, German production of more than doubled in 1943, production of planes increased by 80 percent, and production time for 's was reduced from one year to two months. Production would continue to increase until the second half of 1944. Consolidation of arms production Main articles: and In January 1944, Speer fell ill with complications from an inflamed knee, necessitating a leave. According to Speer's post-war memoirs, his political rivals mainly Göring and , attempted to have some of his powers permanently transferred to them during his absence. Speer's case was transferred to his friend Dr. Internal view of the planned underground factory, , one of Jägerstab's projects, as found by the in 1945. In response to the Allied air raids on aircraft factories, authorised the creation of a , a governmental task force composed of , Armaments Ministry and personnel. Its aim was to ensure the preservation and growth of fighter aircraft production. The task force was established by the 1 March 1944 order of Speer, with support from of the Reich Aviation Ministry. Speer and Milch played a key role in directing the activities of the agency, while the day-to-day operations were handled by Chief of Staff , the head of the Technical Office in the Armaments Ministry. Production continued to improve until late 1944, with allied bombing destroying just 9% of German production. Production of German fighter aircraft was more than doubled from 1943 to 1944. In April, Speer's rivals for power succeeded in having him deprived of responsibility for construction. Speer sent Hitler a bitter letter, concluding with an offer of his resignation. Judging Speer indispensable to the war effort, Field Marshal persuaded Hitler to try to get his minister to reconsider. Hitler sent Milch to Speer with a message not addressing the dispute but instead stating that he still regarded Speer as highly as ever. The Jägerstab was given extraordinary powers over labour, production and transportation resources, with its functions taking priority over housing repairs for bombed out civilians or restoration of vital city services. The factories that came under the Jägerstab program saw their work-weeks extended to 72 hours. At the same time, Milch took steps to rationalise production by reducing the number of variants of each type of aircraft produced. The last remaining arch of , one of seven that were completed out of a planned twelve. The Jägerstab was instrumental in bringing about the increased exploitation of for the benefit of Germany's war industry and its air force, the. The task force immediately began implementing plans to expand the use of slave labour in the aviation manufacturing. Records show that SS provided 64,000 prisoners for 20 separate projects at the peak of Jägerstab's construction activities. They belonged to the various sub-camps of , , and other camps. The prisoners worked for , , and , among others. The cooperation between the Reich Ministry of Aviation, the Ministry of Armaments and the SS proved especially productive. Although intended to function for only six months, already in late May Speer and Milch discussed with Goring the possibility of centralising all of Germany's arms manufacturing under a similar task force. On 1 August 1944, Speer reorganised the Jägerstab into the Armament Staff to apply the same model of operation to all top-priority armament programs. The formation of the Rüstungsstab allowed Speer, for the first time, to consolidate key arms manufacturing projects for the three branches of the under the authority of his ministry, further marginalising the. Several departments, including the once powerful Technical Office, were disbanded or transferred to the new task force. The Rüstungsstab assumed responsibilities for the underground transfer projects of the Jägerstab. In November 1944, 1. But by this time German production was beginning to collapse. Post-war, Speer sought to downplay his involvement with these projects and claimed that only 300,000 square meters had been completed. According to Buggeln, the Rüstungsstab played a key role in maintaining and increasing production of fighter aircraft and. Defeat of Nazi Germany Reichsminister Speer Speer's name was included on the list of members of a post-Hitler government drawn up by the conspirators behind the to kill Hitler. When Speer learned in February 1945 that the Red Army had overrun the industrial region, he drafted a memo to Hitler noting that Silesia's coal mines now supplied 60 percent of the Reich's coal. Without them, Speer wrote, Germany's coal production would only be a quarter of its 1944 total—not nearly enough to continue the war. By February 1945, Speer was working to supply areas about to be occupied with food and materials to get them through the hard times ahead. On March 19, 1945, Hitler issued his , ordering a policy in both Germany and the occupied territories. Hitler's order, by its terms, deprived Speer of any power to interfere with the decree, and Speer went to confront Hitler, reiterating that the war was lost. Using this order, Speer worked to persuade generals and Gauleiters to circumvent the Nero Decree and avoid needless sacrifice of personnel and destruction of industry that would be needed after the war. Speer managed to reach a relatively safe area near as the Nazi regime finally collapsed, but decided on a final, risky visit to Berlin to see Hitler one more time. Hitler seemed calm and somewhat distracted, and the two had a long, disjointed conversation in which the dictator defended his actions and informed Speer of his intent to commit suicide and have his body burned. In the published edition of Inside the Third Reich, Speer relates that he confessed to Hitler that he had defied the Nero Decree, but then assured Hitler of his personal loyalty, bringing tears to the dictator's eyes. But the fact is that none of it happened; our witness to this is Speer himself. The following morning, Speer left the Führerbunker; Hitler curtly bade him farewell. Speer toured the damaged Chancellery one last time before leaving Berlin to return to Hamburg. On April 29, the day before committing suicide, Hitler dictated a which dropped Speer from the successor government. Speer was to be replaced by his own subordinate,. Members of the after their arrest. Speer left , center and right. After Hitler's death, Speer offered his services to the so-called , headed by Hitler's successor, , and took a significant role in that short-lived regime as Minister of Industry and Production. On May 15, an Allied delegation arrived at , where Speer had accommodations, and asked if he would be willing to provide information on the effects of the air war. Speer agreed, and over the next several days, provided information on a broad range of subjects. On May 23, two weeks after the surrender of German forces, British troops arrested the members of the Flensburg Government and brought Nazi Germany to a formal end. Speer was taken to several internment centres for Nazi officials and interrogated. In September 1945, he was told that he would be tried for , and several days later, he was taken to and incarcerated there. Speer was indicted on all four possible counts: first, participating in a common plan or for the accomplishment of ; second, planning, initiating and waging and other crimes against peace; third, war crimes; and lastly,. The defendants listen to the proceedings Speer, top seated row, fifth from right. Hans Flächsner, presented Speer as an artist thrust into political life, who had always remained a non-ideologue and who had been promised by Hitler that he could return to architecture after the war. During his testimony, Speer accepted responsibility for the Nazi regime's actions. Speer claimed that he had planned to kill Hitler in early 1945 by introducing poison gas into the ventilation shaft. He said his efforts were frustrated by the impracticability of tabun and his lack of ready access to a replacement nerve agent, and also by the unexpected construction of a tall chimney that put the air intake out of reach. Speer stated his motive was despair at realising that Hitler intended to take the German people down with him. His claim that he was unaware of Nazi extermination plans, which probably saved him from hanging, was finally revealed to be false in a private correspondence written in 1971 and publicly disclosed in 2007. On 1 October 1946, he was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment. The court's judgment stated that:... He carried out his opposition to Hitler's scorched earth programme... Imprisonment Speer spent most of his sentence at. On July 18, 1947, Speer and his six fellow prisoners, all former high officials of the Nazi regime, were flown from Nuremberg to Berlin under heavy guard. They were taken to Spandau Prison in the British Sector of what became where they were designated by number, with Speer given Number Five. Initially, the prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for all but half an hour a day and were not permitted to address each other or their guards. As time passed, the strict regimen was relaxed, especially during the three months out of four that the three Western powers were in control; the took overall control on a monthly rotation. Speer considered himself an outcast among his fellow prisoners for his acceptance of responsibility at Nuremberg. He made a deliberate effort to use his time as productively as possible. That could mean transforming prison cell into scholar's den. However, Speer was able to have his writings sent to Wolters as a result of an offer from a sympathetic orderly, and they eventually amounted to 20,000 sheets. He had completed his memoirs by 1954, which became the basis of Inside the Third Reich and which Wolters arranged to have transcribed onto 1,100 typewritten pages. He was also able to send letters and financial instructions and to obtain writing paper and letters from the outside. His many letters to his children were secretly transmitted and eventually formed the basis for Spandau: The Secret Diaries. With the draft memoir complete and clandestinely transmitted, Speer sought a new project. He found one while taking his daily exercise, walking in circles around the prison yard. Measuring the path's distance carefully, he set out to walk the distance from Berlin to Heidelberg. He ordered guidebooks and other materials about the nations through which he imagined that he was passing so as to envision as accurate a picture as possible. He meticulously calculated every meter traveled and mapped distances to the real-world geography. He began in northern Germany, passed through Asia by a southern route before entering Siberia, then crossed the and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence 35 kilometres 22 mi south of , Mexico. Speer devoted much of his time and energy to reading. The prisoners brought some books with them in their personal property, but Spandau Prison had no library; books were sent from Spandau's municipal library. From 1952, the prisoners were also able to order books from the Berlin central library in. Speer was a voracious reader and he completed well over 500 books in the first three years at Spandau alone. He read classic novels, travelogues, books on , and biographies of such figures as , , and. He took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work, at first to do something constructive while afflicted with writer's block. Speer's supporters maintained a continual call for his release. Among those who pledged support for his sentence to be commuted were , U. High Commissioner , and former Nuremberg prosecutor. A reduced sentence required the consent of all four of the occupying powers, and the Soviets adamantly opposed any such proposal. Speer served his full sentence and was released at midnight on October 1, 1966. Release and later life Speer's grave in Speer's release from prison was a worldwide media event, as reporters and photographers crowded both the street outside Spandau and the lobby of the Berlin hotel where Speer spent his first hours of freedom in over 20 years. He said little, reserving most comments for a major interview published in in November 1966 in which he again took personal responsibility for crimes of the Nazi regime. He abandoned plans to return to architecture, as two proposed partners died shortly before his release. Instead, he revised his Spandau writings into two autobiographical books, and later researched and published a work about Himmler and the SS. His books provide a unique and personal look into the personalities of the Nazi era, most notably Inside the Third Reich in German, Erinnerungen, or Reminiscences and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, and they have become much valued by historians. Speer was aided in shaping the works by and from the publishing house Ullstein. He found himself unable to re-establish his relationship with his children, even with his son who had also become an architect. There was no communication. According to Siedler, these donations were as high as 80 percent of his royalties. Speer kept the donations anonymous, both for fear of rejection and for fear of being called a hypocrite. This came to pass following the publication of Inside the Third Reich, as close friends distanced themselves from him, such as Wolters and sculptor. Speer made himself widely available to historians and other enquirers. Upon arrival, he was detained for almost eight hours at when British immigration authorities discovered his true identity. In the same year, he appeared on the television programme. Speer returned to London in 1981 to participate in the BBC program; while there, he suffered a stroke and died on September 1. He had formed a relationship with an Englishwoman of German origin and was with her at the time of his death. Even to the end of his life, Speer continued to question his actions under Hitler. How far would I have gone? If I had occupied a different position, to what extent would I have ordered atrocities if Hitler had told me to do so? In his 2006 book, , Tooze, following Gitta Sereny, argues that Speer's ideological commitment to the Nazi cause was greater than he claimed. Architectural legacy The built by Speer 1941—1942 Little remains of Speer's personal architectural works, other than the plans and photographs. No buildings designed by Speer during the Nazi era are extant in Berlin, other than the heavy load bearing body , built around 1941. The 46-foot 14 m high concrete cylinder was used to measure ground as part of feasibility studies for a massive and other large structures proposed as part of , Hitler's planned postwar renewal project for the city. The cylinder is now a protected landmark and is open to the public. Along the , a double row of lampposts designed by Speer still stands. The tribune of the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg, though partly demolished, can also be seen. More of Speer's own personal work can be found in London, where he redesigned the interior of the to the United Kingdom, then located at 7—9. Since 1967, it has served as the offices of the. His work there, stripped of its Nazi fixtures and partially covered by carpets, survives in part. Another legacy was the Arbeitsstab Wiederaufbau zerstörter Städte Working group on Reconstruction of destroyed cities , authorised by Speer in 1943 to rebuild bombed German cities to make them more livable in the age of the automobile. Headed by Wolters, the working group took a possible military defeat into their calculations. The Arbeitsstab's recommendations served as the basis of the postwar redevelopment plans in many cities, and Arbeitsstab members became prominent in the rebuilding. Actions regarding the Jews As General Building Inspector, Speer was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement. From 1939 onward, the Department used the to evict Jewish tenants of non-Jewish landlords in Berlin, to make way for non-Jewish tenants displaced by redevelopment or bombing. Eventually, 75,000 Jews were displaced by these measures. Speer was aware of these activities, and inquired as to their progress. At least one original memo from Speer so inquiring still exists, as does the Chronicle of the Department's activities, kept by Wolters. Following his release from Spandau, Speer presented to the an edited version of the Chronicle, stripped by Wolters of any mention of the Jews. Wolters did not destroy the Chronicle, and, as his friendship with Speer deteriorated, allowed access to the original Chronicle to doctoral student who, after obtaining his doctorate, developed his thesis into a book, Albert Speer: The End of a Myth. The original Chronicle reached the Archives in 1983, after both Speer and Wolters had died. Knowledge of the Holocaust in 1945 Speer maintained at Nuremberg and in his memoirs that he had no knowledge of the Holocaust. For from that moment on I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes... Because I failed at that time, I still feel, to this day, responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense. When questioned, Speer denied any knowledge of this correspondence although it had gone out under his signature. Speer later insisted that he had tried to save some Jews from camps by using them in the armaments industry. Much of the controversy over Speer's knowledge of the Holocaust has centered on his presence at the on October 6, 1943, at which Himmler detailing the ongoing Holocaust to Nazi leaders. In the lands we occupy, the Jewish question will be dealt with by the end of the year. In Inside the Third Reich, Speer mentions his own address to the officials which took place earlier in the day but does not mention Himmler's speech. In October 1971, American historian Erich Goldhagen published an article arguing that Speer was present for Himmler's speech. In response, after considerable research in the German Federal Archives in , Speer said he had left Posen around noon long before Himmler's speech to journey to Hitler's headquarters at. In Inside the Third Reich, published before the Goldhagen article, Speer recalled that on the evening after the conference, many Nazi officials were so drunk that they needed help boarding the special train which was to take them to a meeting with Hitler. One of his biographers, , suggests this necessarily implies he must have still been present at Posen then and must have heard Himmler's speech. In response to Goldhagen's article, Speer had alleged that in writing Inside the Third Reich, he erred in reporting an incident that happened at another conference at Posen a year later, as happening in 1943. In 2007, reported that a letter from Speer dated December 23, 1971, had been found in Britain in a collection of his correspondence to Hélène Jeanty, widow of a Belgian resistance fighter. In the letter, Speer states that he had been present for Himmler's presentation in Posen. The documents bore annotations in Speer's own handwriting. Speer biographer stated that, due to his workload, Speer would not have been personally aware of such activities. The debate over Speer's knowledge of, or complicity in, the Holocaust made him a symbol for people who were involved with the Nazi regime yet did not have or claimed not to have had an active part in the regime's atrocities. Just look at the Führer 's friend, he didn't know about it either. Diary entry made on Nov, 20, 1949. Too many historians have been far too uncritical in the acceptance of Speer's rhetoric of rationalization, efficiency and productivism. And this critique is more than mere nit-picking. It goes to the very heart of Speer's ideological vision of the war economy, as a limitless flow of output released by energetic leadership and technological genius. Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps. War and Economy in the Third Reich. Albert Speer: Architekt — Günstling Hitlers — Rüstungsminister — Hauptkriegsverbrecher Thesis. Arming the Luftwaffe: The German Aviation Industry in World War II. Retrieved May 7, 2017. Archived from on February 20, 2003. Archived from on March 23, 2005.
© An lauen Sommernächten unter dem Sternenhimmel tanzen, dies ist in einigen Clubs in Berlin möglich. Met 19 October 2014. Einstein evaluated for a variety of devices including a gravel sorter and an electromechanical typewriter. He abandoned plans to return to architecture, as two proposed partners died shortly before his release. Well-programmed nights of house, electro and dirty beats plus the ever-tempting ring of a 24 license attract a wild polysexual alberts berlin single party. Fireworks could be bought from the 27th, which means that every single person in the city has an arsenal larger than Guy Fawkes'. One of Speer's first commissions after Troost's death was the Zeppelinfeld stadium—the seen in 's propaganda between. However, she is more famous for representing South Africa as a swimmer in the 2000 Olympics. The music policy covers the full spectrum of London's underground, with a focus on hip-hop, breakbeat and world music, and there are live tunes followed by top DJs most con. Speer flew into Berlin to see Hitler one last time in the April 23. Hitler carefully tailored his speeches to the audiences. Speer was expecying to be arrested and shot.