Albert Speer

Albert Speer
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer; March 19, 1905 – September 1, 1981) was a German architect who was, for most of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany. Speer was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming ministerial office. As "the Nazi who said sorry", he accepted moral responsibility at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs for complicity in crimes of the Nazi regime, while insisting he was ignorant of the Holocaust...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth19 March 1905
CityMannheim, Germany
CountryGermany
All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of your superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected.
I knew that the National Socialist Party was anti-Semitic, and I knew that the Jews were being evacuated from Germany.
I assert that a great number of the foreign workers in our country did their work quite voluntarily once they had come to Germany.
It is clear that a worker who has not enough food cannot achieve a good work output. I already said yesterday that every head of a plant, and I too at the top, was naturally interested in having well-fed and satisfied workers, because badly fed, dissatisfied workers make more mistakes and produce poor results.
I would rather not tell you here things which every German has at heart.
It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us.
One seldom recognizes the devil when he has his hand on your shoulder.
One seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.
He was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games.
Hitler had a great gift for adjusting - consciously or intuitively - to his surroundings. ... With enormous histrionic intuition he could shape his behavior to changing situations.
Hitler's dictatorship was the first of an industrial estate in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, radio, made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where they were executed uncritically
I grow dizzy when I recall that the number of manufactured tanks seems to have been more important to me than the vanished victims of racism.
Temporarily in 1934 I became a department head in the German Labor Front and dealt with the improvement of labor conditions in German factories. Then I was in charge of public works on the staff of Hess. I gave up both these activities in 1941.
At headquarters, where everyone lived under the tremendous pressure of responsibility, probably nothing was more welcome than a dictate from above. That meant being freed of a decision and simultaneously being provided with an excuse for failure.