At midnight on 1 October 1966, a Mercedes limousine left the main gate of Spandau prison in Berlin: inside the car, blinking as the flash bulbs of the assembled press corps exploded around him, sat a silver-haired man in late middle-age. Albert Speer, principal architect and Munitions minister of Hitler’s Reich, and the Führer’s favourite acolyte, was tasting freedom for the first time in more than 20 years. What would he do with the rest of his life?
Speer spent the decade and a half left to him (before he expired in a London hotel room in 1981, of a stroke possibly brought on by sexual exertions with a still-unidentified young mistress) in erecting a rather different design than the grand edifices that had won him Hitler’s favour and patronage as an architect. He built a carefully constructed pyramid of untruths, half-truths, and downright lies to disguise his true role as one of the most able and important paladins of the Third Reich.
Speer had begun to rehearse his part as the ‘Good Nazi’ during his trial before the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1945-1946 (see MHM 151, April/May 2026). In stark contrast to the other defendants, he expressed generalised guilt and contrition over his role in the appalling crimes of the Nazi regime, while at the same time playing down and obfuscating his personal part in those atrocities. Still young at the time of Hitler’s rise, and undoubtedly handsome and dignified, he presented himself as an intelligent and ambitious man bedazzled and blinded by the ersatz glamour of National Socialism, and bewitched by the extraordinary charisma of the Führer himself into closing his eyes to the essential criminality of the enterprise that he had committed himself to following.
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