1.

A king who enjoins inhuman deeds Will find enough retainers, who for grace and payment Avidly accept half the anathema.

—Goethe, Iphigenia in Taurus

2.

In 1942, Albert Speer drafted a decree that made it a crime, punishable by death, to provide false information about raw materials, labor, machinery or products. Himmler thought it was too harsh.

3.

So contemptuous of bureaucracy and paperwork was Speer that he welcomed the Allied bombing raids on Berlin in November 1943, which partially destroyed his ministry’s offices. In a memo, he wrote:

I believe that thanks to this [raid] the question of the bureaucratic treatment of problems that should best be dealt with in a manner free from administrative restraints, is automatically resolved.

In a speech, he added:

During of the first heavy raids on Berlin we had the good fortune that a large part of the current files was burnt, so that for a time we were rid of unnecessary ballast; but we cannot expect in future that such events will bring this much-needed freshness to our work.

4. As Minister of Armaments, Speer relied extensively on slave laborers from concentration camps to work in the factories. In 1944, he fell ill for an extended period of time. Himmler seized on the opportunity of Speer’s absence to remove those laborers from the factories—at the pace of roughly 40,00 per month—and send them back to the camps. Back at the office several months later, Speer complained about the “kidnapping” of his workers.

5.

After the war, while he was being held in Nuremberg awaiting trial, Speer sought to delegitimize Göring, whom he loathed, by calling him an art thief.

6.

Imprisoned for 20 years in Spandau, Speer often received gifts and packages. After a former comrade sent him a birthday present of caviar, truffles, venison, and wine in 1959, Speer wrote back:

Even though for us experts Beluga comes second to that other outrageously expensive one we tasted together at the Kuban bridgehead [in southern Russia]: remember?

7.

Beginning at Nuremberg, Speer worked hard to clean up his image, casting himself as a repentant naif who got swept up in the mania of Hitler and Nazism, but who never participated in or had any knowledge of the extermination of the Jews. On one issue, however, he remained unrepentant: the legitimacy of the Nazi campaign against the Soviet Union. In his diaries, Speer reminisced about Operation Barbarossa as a “European Crusade” that attracted thousands of volunteers from Belgium to the Balkans (it did). On his release from Spandau in 1966, his closest associate gave him a Westphalian ham from a pig that had been born on the day Stalin died.

8.

After his release from Spandau, Speer became friends with Erich Fromm.

9.

One of the few writers to challenge Speer’s self-presentation after the war was Erich Goldhagen, father of Daniel Goldhagen.

10.

In one of his postwar publications, Speer claimed that Himmler erred by using slave labor in the concentration camps. Had he been a better businessman, Speer argued, Himmler would have contracted out the inmates to local companies.

11.

In 1944, the German exile journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote about Speer in the Observer:

He symbolises indeed a type, which among all the belligerents has become increasingly important: the pure technician, the classless, brilliant man without a background, who knows no other goal than to make his way in the world, purely on the basis of his technical and organisational capabilities….This is his age. We can get rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but not the Speers. Whatever may be the fate of each individual man, they will be with us for a long time.

—All information in this post, including the Goethe epigraph, comes from Martin Kitchen, Speer: Hitler’s Architect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). I wrote two posts on this book over the winter.