Original subtitles

There is still this fascination with evil

to this very day,

and there is this fascination with people who knew Hitler.

There was a craving for hearing more.

Albert Speer comes out of prison in 1966.

He was close to Hitler,

and the public wanted to know everything about him.

Speer became what we would call a media celeb,

and he came over a civilised European man

who had seen the error of his ways,

but it was an extended exercise

in obfuscating his true role.

An ambitious young architect eager

to make his mark,

Albert Speer rose quickly through the Nazi ranks.

Architecture and the war were seen as complimentary

and integrated goals.

Hitler found in Speer the person

that realised his visions in architecture.

Driven to succeed no matter the cost,

Speer would transcend the role of architect

for the regime's benefit and his own.

There's this view of Albert Speer

that he was the good Nazi.

Those two words should not be put

in the same sentence together.

He treated people like commodities to be used

and then tossed aside to their deaths.

But while many of his cohorts paid

with their lives,

somehow Speer bought himself a second chance.

He was very successful in shaping these fairytales,

so to speak.

The most intriguing question is why he was successful.

Engineers with a beating heart

of the Third Reich,

forging advanced weapons,

feeding the Nazi war machine,

and motivating the masses.

They executed history's greatest horrors

and yet for some,

their true role would remain hidden for decades.

Six months after the end of the World War II in Europe,

here inside Nuremberg Palace of Justice,

the trial of the century began.

One by one, former high ranking Nazis filed through.

Defendants were not entitled

to make a statement,

you must plead guilty or not guilty.

Among the 21 defendants present

was Albert Speer, and like all of those on trial here,

he entered the same plea.

Not guilty.

But this was where the similarities ended,

and where Speer launched a lifelong campaign

to rewrite his story.

Speer starts very early in 45 to create his own myth

that he is this artistic person

who just somehow got into trouble,

and didn't really mean to.

The Americans, they capture him, they interview him,

and he is very helpful, and they start to like him.

I mean, there's this educated middle class guy

and he's doing his best to help.

So yeah, he charms them.

When the trial starts in 1945,

people particularly from Britain

and the United States have a certain image of Speer.

He's regarded as this technical nerd.

He's not that ideological guy.

One of the great lies

that Speer himself promoted

at The Nuremberg Tribunals and after

was that he was really just captivated by Hitler,

and he was just following orders in many ways.

On trial, Speer's life was hanging

in the balance,

but he was an experienced tactician

when it came to getting what he wanted.

Speer, at every stage of his career,

he knows how to please Hitler,

how to strategize the relationship.

His strategy works again.

I mean, it worked with Hitler,

and unfortunately, it worked at Nuremberg again.

Three miles from the courtroom lie the remains

of the structure that truly launched Speer's career

within the Nazi party and first brought him close to Hitler.

This is The Zeppelin Tribune, a most famous building

because it was the backdrop for Hitler's speeches.

Hitler knows exactly that architecture

is a important message to show not only his leadership,

but that this new German is the strong state.

Following election victory in 1933,

Hitler began consolidating power

on his path towards dictatorship.

But to build an empire, he needed a solid base,

a loyal and devoted following.

The first rallies in the '20s presented the Nazi party

as a new German political movement,

but it was a thing about the party only.

After 1933, it was a official event party rally

of the whole Reich.

So if you have not such place to come together,

there is something missing.

Speer created a powerful cultic site

for the Nazis that helped raise Hitler to the level

of a worshipped leader.

We stand here on the place

where Hitler hold his speeches.

Behind him, it was a place for the special guests,

and under him, they're standing the uniform masses.

All in the whole world,

this Tribune was presented as a symbol

of the new strong Germany.

This commission was the starting point

for Speer's meteoric rise,

but he was by no means the first choice for the job.

Born into a wealthy family,

Speer followed in his father's footsteps

to become an architect.

While studying in Berlin, he witnessed Hitler speak.

He'd later claim it was this event, not the ideology

that first drew him to the Nazis.

What he's telling us in his memoirs

that there was this kind of awakening experience

in December, 1930.

This is fake.

This is an invention.

When this event took place,

there had already been a member

of the National Socialist Automobile Club in the area

where he lived, and he was even the chairman of this.

When you look at his life, you always have to take it

with a pinch of salt because even on minor issues,

he's not telling the truth.

In Berlin, Speer caught the attention

of high ranking Nazi Joseph Goebbels,

and quickly proved a talented designer

and creative event manager.

They saw there is someone,

if you give him something to do,

he will organise it more or less perfectly

and with great ambition, and he gets things done.

In 1934, Hitler's attention

was drawn to Nuremberg,

but after the sudden deaths of his favourite architects,

Speer sensed opportunity to step out of Goebbels' shadow.

Speer, who has been done organisational things,

but he's just one among others.

In using his elbows in being very ambitious,

he brings himself, so to speak,

step by step into the forefront.

With Nuremberg, he is able to achieve

the kind of architectural success

that no one in his family could have ever dreamed of.

Speer was 30 in 1935, 30, 3-0.

It is a very, very young age for someone

to have that kind of architectural responsibility,

and the ear of the leader of the dictatorship.

Construction of Nuremberg's national site

of pilgrimage would continue into the war years.

But Speer's initial focus was the Zeppelin field.

This arena has four sides,

and the longest is the main stand,

where Hitler would be alongside his officials

and other high ranking Nazis.

And you've got these tall columns along the length of it,

these huge long swastika flags draping down them.

The other three sides

of the arena are filled with spectators,

but the real spectacle was down below in the centre,

that's got enough space for around 200,000 parading,

marching, saluting, Nazis.

It was here, an atmosphere of celebration.

It was not a normal place.

It was a place where you can see lights, flags, the masses.

The way that people would enter the stadium,

the way that they would walk towards Hitler,

pled their allegiance to him

is this idea that we are all here as the people

as the Volksgemeinschaft,

but there's one person who is leading us,

and everything at Nuremberg

is geared towards perpetuating the idea.

Each year, Speer's sight was transformed

into a theatre showcasing the country's unity,

its new ideology and the power at its core.

Speer has this great idea of these cathedral of lights.

The lights turn on the moment Hitler enters the stadium,

so it's like Messiah is coming and then the lights go on.

I mean, this effect is brilliant.

This event was something that a normal man,

a normal woman, would never forget.

This is a plan of the Nazi propaganda.

This works without words.

It works with the atmosphere,

and that is what Speer here created.

The various events

of the week long rallies were used to announce new laws,

bolster public support, and display Germany's new image

to the world.

Speer was placed in charge of overseeing the creation

of a larger permanent site for this.

A 40 metre wide by two kilometre long road

would stretch through the centre,

while grand structures were intended to line each side.

It's really the engineering side of Speer

that makes his career, his ability to organise the scale

of Nuremberg as it quickly expands from one building project

to a much larger scale complex.

This is when you see a kind of tipping point,

which the blur between Speer's architect

and Speer's engineer is in full force.

Today, where a lake now sits

once stood the foundations

of the most ambitious structure of all,

an enormous venue designed to host war games.

In this place, the German stadiums,

the biggest stadium of the world should be built.

400,000 people could go in there.

The architecture was very important

because Hitler said sometimes architecture

is a word of stone.

The message of this building, the biggest in the world

is that nobody worldwide can fight against this Germany.

The ceremony held here

in 1937 signalled both the direction Europe was heading in

and the importance of architecture to the regime.

Success of Speer was also the success of Hitler.

Every year, you see, okay, another step is done

so the people really think, "Okay, this is reality.

We are successful.

It's not a nonsense what's Hitler talking about."

What happens quite quickly is that Hitler and Speer

become closer and closer.

They're bonding over architectural drawings and plans.

They become friends.

No one else had that kind of relationship.

He wanted to be part of that state.

He wanted to be in the inner circle.

I can only speculate that that ambition,

which is clearly marked in his character and in his actions,

also gave him the kind of sense of fulfilment

that drove him further and further

into meeting the goals of Hitler.

His desire to gain Hitler's approval, however,

led him to a decision that would later define his legacy.

The German stadium, this project is the beginning

of the direct connection

between Speer and the system of the concentration camps.

Speer's authority was expanding,

his workforce was growing,

and his projects now reached beyond Nuremberg,

but the scale of his designs meant demand

for building materials far outweighed supply.

A deal with Heinrich Himmler

and the SS provided a solution.

In early '38, there was a meeting between Speer, Himmler,

and Hitler in which the formation of the SS company,

the German Earth and Stoneworks was discussed,

and the really, these plans were finalised.

And Himmler had the concentration camps,

Albert Speer had the money,

so they collaborated to build up quarries

and brick factories.

It's still surprising for us

to think about the reorganisation

of the concentration camp system after 1936,

and to realise that some of those camps were chosen

in very obscure locations like Flossenburg and Mauthausen.

These locations were chosen

because of the stone that was available.

The use of forced labour

to produce building materials

would grow steadily over the years,

and it marked the beginning

of a profitable, but deadly partnership.

This is the deal, the pact

that Speer is making with the devil frankly.

Speer crossed a line truly with this project.

He wanted to be Hitler's architect,

and he wanted to create his projects,

and the costs for others are nothing what he thinks about.

Speer had helped Hitler set the foundations

of the Third Reich in Nuremberg,

but he was already working on something far larger,

a project on an unprecedented scale.

In the southwest of Berlin stands a structure

that offers a glimpse into Speer's plans for the city.

This building is made to prove the stability

of the ground.

So to put a pressure on the ground to see

how the soil reacts to a heavy white building like this one,

which is, I dunno, 12,000 tonnes or so.

The funny fact is this was a building

that shouldn't stand here very long,

not longer than 20 weeks,

but it is the only surviving fragment of this plannings.

Instruments recorded any structural movement.

Due to concerns,

the ground was too soft to support the construction

of a great triumphal arch,

one feature of a far larger project.

You all know the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, don't you?

So, and this Triomphe Arc would be four times as big.

Four times as big.

He wanted to show that Germany is power number one

in the world, and this should be represented in the capital.

Hitler never really liked Berlin.

Berlin for him was full of the kind of industrial capital

and Jewish population

that he really was antagonistic against,

and he brought Albert Speer in very early on

to redesign the city.

They were going to rebuild it

so that it would become a German city, a Nazi city.

At the Berliner Unterwelten Museum

is a recreation

of a model showing a key section of this new Berlin,

now referred to as Germania.

What we see here is how Berlin would've looked like

if an artist had won the war.

Only a few parts would've been remained as a kind of museum

of all part of Germany history.

Probably, the Reichstag here, and the Brandenburg Gate.

But especially here,

this part would have destroyed almost two thirds of Berlin.

Based upon Hitler's own sketches, in the South,

stood the vast triumphal arch.

A processional avenue, then led four kilometres

to the Great Hall that would've stood three times as tall

as New York's statue of Liberty.

The Great Hall would have been the most ambitious project

of the whole axis of up to 300 metres in height,

for a capacity of up to 180,000 people.

It would have been used for party rallies

of the big speeches of Hitler, or his fellows.

The people that would have come to Berlin

should have the feeling, you as an individual,

you are an ant.

But being part of an end stage, you're big,

so you're part of a mass and the mass is everything,

and you are nothing.

In the late 1930's,

despite an impending war,

for Hitler, this project remained vitally important.

I think it's a false assumption

to think about architecture and political goals as opposite.

These were cultural ambitions that had to be built.

They were not merely

about building a massive party structure out of stone.

All that was important too,

but that was part of a much bigger ambition

to literally rebuild Germany,

and rebuilding there is specifically about construction.

So to me, the war was also about building,

that was the goal of the war.

Hitler always thought big in architecture.

He thought, "How will these buildings look in hundreds

or thousands of years time

when they've been reduced to ruins?"

He wanted to see these grandiose buildings

that people would look on them and think,

"This was a great civilization surpassing Egypt,

Greece and Rome."

Hitler, of course, planned a 1,000 year old Reich,

and it would last forever,

and Speer would've become the creator of this.

To realise Hitler's dream

would've made him the greatest architect of all times

in his mind.

For years, Germania was viewed

as a largely unfulfilled fantasy,

the repositioned victory column and the widened street

of its east West Axis being the most visible relics.

But in the late 1930's, many people were being torn

from their homes to make way for Speer's Project.

This map shows the city of Berlin

and within the city of Berlin,

the construction that was planned through Speer's agency.

All these new buildings, all of this went through quarters

where people lived in.

Work began in 1938

with up to 130,000 apartments chalked up for demolition.

But Berlin was already suffering from a lack of housing.

Dr. Willems' research suggests Speer took it upon himself

to find a solution.

Speer decided to overcome this

through channelling the entire violence,

which is inherent to urban planning

in terms of pushing people out of one quarter into another.

It was channelled against the Jewish population of Berlin.

He proposed to make Jews leave their homes

to make place for tenants

who had to clear these areas of reconstruction.

This is something which Speer suggests

without anyone giving him this idea.

It's his idea.

Speer's institution sets up, so to speak,

a register with all these Berlin Jews, where they live,

where they are moved.

Speer's powers were growing

and his actions showed he was in step

with the sentiment of time.

This was two months before Kristallnacht,

the nationwide pogrom against Jews.

He's been given a blank check essentially

to be able to create the city of the Nazi dreams, really.

And so with that comes the removal of people

that they don't want in that city.

It's gonna be a city to celebrate the Aryan race,

and Albert Speer is intrinsically aware of that.

By the time Speer's office

cease their evictions in November, 1942,

they had commissioned some 23,000 Jewish occupied flats

to be emptied.

Mass deportations followed.

The misery Jews were forced in through Speer's agency

wasn't seen in the city of Berlin.

It was mass deported with the people into ghettos

and concentration camps and extermination camps in the end.

By the time of the Nuremberg trials in 1945,

Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels had each committed suicide.

The aim here was to hold to account

those who could still answer for their crimes.

But with limited time to prepare,

this proved a serious challenge.

Many of the people who are either judges or researchers

at this stage do not really understand the whole

of the Third Reich.

They don't have sufficient documents

and they don't know

where to look for what these people have actually as a role.

Can you repeat after me.

I swear-

And so there's a lack of knowledge

about what actually Speer had done prior to 1945,

and he of course doesn't say anything about this.

They never talked about how he conspired to organise,

how he worked with the SS,

to set up the punishment of people,

how he and his staff in Berlin were responsible

for instigating a plan to deprive German Jews

of housing rights.

These were the kind of elements

that he conveniently left out of his record at Nuremberg.

Instead, Speer focused on distancing himself

from the true horrors.

It was an approach he'd replicate years later

in his memoirs.

He realised that he was not going to get off,

and that he could limit the damage as it were

by using the stereotype that culture was innocent,

that culture was even good.

Culture was something that was a sideshow,

something that was merely propaganda.

It really didn't have much to do

with the running of the Nazi state.

But in the later years of the war,

by building upon his profitable relationship with the SS,

Speer left a lasting mark on history.

Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler were partners in crime,

so to speak.

They were organising this together.

They did so in 1938, 1939, pre-war,

and they expanded this during the war.

As the World War II gripped Europe,

Nazi Germany's early succession

of rapid victories was soon followed

by long, arduous battles.

Speer's architectural plans were put on hold

and his influence began to wane.

But an opportunity soon presented itself

in February, 1942,

when armaments minister Fritz Todt died unexpectedly.

From Hitler's point of view,

Speer has already been in charge

of management of infrastructure,

management of buildings, management of logistics,

management of a huge workforce,

which is exactly what Fritz Todt has done.

Speer, he was a perfectly okay architect,

but he's not regarded as being a special architect.

But what he did do is get the job done.

So although Speer doesn't have any military experience

or anything like that,

suddenly he's put into this position

as Minister of Armaments.

His new role as an armament minister is a turning point

in his life

because he was with Hitler with Himmler,

a similar a centre person in the leadership office

of the Third Reich.

He later on portrays it, of course, completely differently

that Hitler talks him into it.

But no, he was eager, he wanted to take over again.

The moment he becomes a Minister of Armaments,

he becomes the war criminal.

Now, he really commits crimes.

A site that helps reveal the impact Speer

had on the war is Birkenau concentration camp,

a part of the larger Auschwitz complex,

and a site of approximately one million murders.

We are in the middle of the central parts

of the main camp at Birkenau that was composed

of two major construction sectors.

This one called B2

with several sections for the barracks.

And on the other side of the roads,

there is planned an almost identical compound called B3.

Each pair of chimneys visible there

represented one residential block for prisoners.

Both these sectors were designed

to accommodate about 60,000 prisoners.

Speer authorised an expansion

that included B3 in 1942.

While never fully realised, this project aligned

with his approach to solving a pressing issue,

how to increase the output of the armaments industry.

Speer was interested, of course,

not only in sole expansion of Auschwitz,

accommodating more and more prisoners,

but rather he used to treat them

as potential source of labour for his armament industry.

Speer oversaw a new direction

in the use of the camp network.

Select major camps became distribution sites,

sending out workers to sub camps established close

to privately owned in industrial facilities.

The war was starting to go badly for Germany

and more and more radical measures would've been needed

to provide essentially the manpower

to produce conventional armaments, the tanks, the planes,

and so on.

Birkenau became the focal point

for this system in Auschwitz.

But with the camp also being designated

as an extermination centre,

the plans for its expansion

included other structures beyond barracks.

With the arrival of the first

for large transports of Jews,

it became clear that the camp was not large enough

to accommodate them all.

There was not such a need to keep them, the children,

the elderly people here, and therefore the solution

of the crowding of the camp at Birkenau was found

in the form of the gas chambers and large crematories.

Speer always denied having knowledge

of the Holocaust,

but after cross-referencing reports with a plan

of the camp from the time, Dr. Willems has no doubt

about how this expansion transformed the site.

Now, these areas in the plan redlined show

what Speer allowed the SS to build in terms of allowance

for construction material.

And what is part as well are two crematoria

with adjacent gas chambers,

and two with underground gas chambers.

This was a project to turn Birkenau permanently

into a camp where those not fit for work were exterminated

on the spot in the gas chambers.

And those who were deemed fit, they were selected

to become camp inmates.

Exactly what Speer knew

of the details has never been proven.

But in May, 1943, he sent a team to inspect the progress

and report back.

When they were there,

transport of roughly 1,000 Polish Jews came.

Most of them were killed at the very day.

And the next day, they reported in Berlin to Speer

that everything was going

according to what Speer was expecting

in effectiveness in Auschwitz.

The use of slave labour

from the camps expanded rapidly in the final stages

of the war and played a vital part

in helping sustain the German war effort.

And we must remember that it was very successful.

In the middle of 1944,

the production of fighter aeroplanes , for instance,

was many times higher than it was

at the beginning of the war.

We can argue till the cows come home about how long,

but I think it's undeniably true

that he did extend the war certainly by months,

if not by a year or so,

because German industry was able to function

to an astonishing degree.

All these things were done when Germany was under siege,

when the citizens of Germany were being grounded

to rubble and dust.

And they were done under the supervision,

and under the orders,

and under the management of Albert Speer.

Despite the increase in armament production,

by April, 1945, allied forces were closing in on Berlin.

But first, they reached Nuremberg,

and Speer's Nazi party Rally Grounds.

Nuremberg was well known to an international audience

through photographs, through newsreel, et cetera.

And so when they get there in '45,

it was an incredibly important moment for them

to kind of symbolise we've got here,

this regime is no longer functioning,

and we are gonna blow swastika up

as a representation of the fact

that whilst this may have been a place

of absolute Nazi ideology in the '30s,

that is no longer the case now in 1945.

With the war over, when it came to his time

on the stand, Speer did something the others dared not.

Speer is the only one

who takes some sort of general responsibility, not guilt.

He always refuses to admit that he's somehow guilty.

But he says, "Well, I was close to Hitler.

Well, I was part of the leadership as an Armament Minister,

and therefore, I'm overall some sort of responsible

for what happened."

The records showed Speer

had overseen the mass exploitation of forced labour.

But questions remained.

How aware was he of the conditions of the camps?

How much did he really know

of the true horrors taking place?

Speer would claim he didn't know

what was going on at the camps.

And furthermore, that what he did know,

the conditions were acceptable.

Yet, this is nonsense.

He visited the camps.

He had had reports from his team about other camps,

even including Auschwitz, Birkenau.

Speer knows the depths of depravity, he knows the evil.

He's a part of it.

To aid his defence,

Speer hoped to deflect blame.

One of the other people on trial was Fritz Sauckel,

who was responsible for getting all these slave labourers

from all of Europe into Speer's factories,

and so he was a subordinate, so to speak.

Speer described that, actually, Sauckel was responsible

for this while Speer had had the real responsibility.

On the 1st of October, 1946,

after more than 200 days in court, the verdicts were read.

18 of the 21 defendants present were found guilty.

11 of those were sentenced to death,

but Albert Speer was not among them.

The four judges had narrowly spared his life.

That decision was split.

So all those efforts on Speer's part

of creating his image of himself as someone

who didn't know what was happening, it paid off.

Eventually, that vote goes in his favour

because one judge relented,

and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Instead, his rather stupid deputy, Sauckel,

he hanged for it.

I think there's a strong case to be made

that they hanged the wrong man.

If the judges had known what we know,

it is as simple as with Hermann Goering,

or Heinrich Himmler, or Joseph Goebbels,

or Adolf Hitler himself.

He would have certainly been executed, absolutely certain.

In Berlin, where Speer's Great Hall

was meant to stand,

today is the modern government district,

a site purposefully designed in opposition

to those earlier Nazi visions.

But in 1966, as Speer's released state neared, this area,

like the rest of the city still bore the scars

of the fallout from the war.

Berlin was a divided city,

and Berlin wasn't the capital

of the federal German republic.

And right behind the Reichstag building,

the Berlin Wall ran through the city.

So everything was really different

than Speer and Hitler had planned.

The world had moved on,

but Speer recognised there could be a place

for him within it.

When Speer was in prison,

he and his wife received a lot of letters from journalists

and publishers from all over the world.

So he already knew that there was interest in his person

and his story.

Speer realised that he could create his own truth

if you like, his own narrative,

he could write his own story.

So at midnight on October 1st in 1966,

Speer was released from Spandau Prison.

As you can see in the pictures,

the attention for Speer is huge.

There were journalists from all over the world.

Speer obviously enjoys the attention,

and so Speer become an author and published several books.

His memoir, which was published all over the world,

became a worldwide bestseller in 1969,

"Inside The Third Reich".

This is a man who's telling us what it was really like

and how he was misled,

and led down the garden path by Hitler.

Not to put too finer points on it

or to beat round the push, Speer was a very successful liar.

Speer was skillful and he was opportunistic.

But for his second career, I think it was more important

that there was a society who wanted to believe him

When Speer came out of prison and said,

"As someone who was close to Hitler,

I didn't know about the Holocaust,"

the ordinary German could say the same,

so he was something like an alibi for the German society.

Speer was always in demand.

He was publishing books,

there were magazine and newspaper interviews with him.

He was on TV a lot.

He was even interviewed by "Playboy" of all magazines.

So he becomes a celebrity if you like.

Speer died in 1981,

leaving behind a web of lies that took decades to unravel.

I think the legend lasted

as long as people wanted to believe in Speer's version

of the history.

In the '90s, the whole picture of Nazi perpetrator changed,

so it wasn't only the sadistic SS man

who has been a Nazi,

there could be a bourgeois figure like Albert Speer.

While great strides have been made

to overturn Speer's accounts,

through their repetition over years,

many parts of the myth remain clouding the true history.

Without the efforts by Speer,

Himmler, Goebbels and Hitler,

and by being responsible for this lasting warfare,

he's responsible for more than several million people

who died through this process.

In the last year of the war,

roughly 16,000 people died per day.

So Albert Speer is one of the most important war criminals

of the World War II.

Speer's job may have been

to try and build 1,000 year Reich

and all the buildings associated with that.

That of course never really happened.

The war put an end to that.

But actually, Speer's greatest creation, if you like,

was his own mythology.

He was never really made to account for his sins.

Speer fooled the world.