Crony: Speer with Hitler in 1938.

Intro: Albert Speer saved himself at the Nuremburg War Trials from hanging by claiming ignorance of the Holocaust – then made a fortune from his memoirs in prison.

ALBERT SPEER cut a lonely figure, pacing the grounds of West Berlin’s Spandau Prison. Obsessed by numbers, the former Nazi minister calculated that during his 20 years incarcerated there, he clocked up a staggering 31,816 km.

He also said he read 5,000 books in that time; a questionable claim given he spent six hours a day gardening and two hours walking. But then, Speer was always liberal with the truth.

He lied to save his life at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, he lied to the German people, he even lied to Hitler. And, as Martin Kitchen’s superb and surely definitive biography of the man who ran Germany’s war economy shows, most of all he lied and deceived himself.

Born in 1905, Speer followed his wealthy architect father into the business. His big break came in 1933 while site manager on the renovation of the Chancellery in Berlin.

Adolf Hitler visited the works daily and was immediately impressed by the young man’s polite manner and precise, direct answers to his questions.

Speer was soon a regular at the daily lunches Hitler gave for his closest cronies, and established the nearest thing to a friendship Hitler ever had.

Significantly perhaps, the self-conscious, aloof, narcissistic, ruthlessly ambitious Speer had no intimate friends himself. He even remained distant from his wife and six children.

In January 1938 Hitler appointed Speer as Berlin’s Inspector General of Building, tasked with rebuilding the city (which was to be renamed Germania) as a ‘world capital’.

Speer lacked creativity and originality as an architect, but he had one great asset: he twigged what Hitler liked in his architecture – a kitsch combination of ornate late 19th-century Viennese and the modern ‘cruise liner’ style seen in the Hollywood movies of the time. Above all, everything had to be big.

Take the new Chancellery that Speer built for Hitler. It was ridiculously grandiose. Visitors had to undergo a long walk through several rooms to reach the Fuhrer, the last a 146m-long hall.

Hitler insisted it had a highly polished stone floor, whose slipperiness would unsettle visitors as they approached the huge double doors of his office, a room 27m long, 14.5m wide and 9.75m high.

Hitler was never photographed in it because its inhuman scale would have dwarfed him into insignificance.

Stone for Speer’s projects was quarried by 10,000 concentration camp slaves in unimaginable conditions. When this was mentioned to Speer, he replied: ‘The Yids got used to making bricks while in captivity in Egypt.’

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WHEN dwellings had to be demolished for his projects, Speer seized 23,000 Jewish apartments to rehouse the displaced inhabitants, which meant 75,000 evicted Jews were ‘resettled’, a euphemism for being sent to death camps.

In 1942, three years into World War II, Hitler appointed Speer as Minister for Armaments, recognising both his talents as a brilliant organiser and his utter loyalty to the Fuhrer.

At first Speer produced what he called ‘a miracle’. Production rose as he reshaped the system, but the task became increasingly difficult.

Hitler constantly meddled in details of tank or aircraft design and frequently changed his mind. He had to be fed encouraging production statistics.

Eventually the only way to do this was to churn out vast numbers of obsolete models on existing production lines – like the Messerschmitt Me109 fighter – at the expense of building new factories to make jet aircraft that might have made a difference to the war.

As the Russians advanced and Allied bombing intensified, Speer lost vital factories, raw materials, and oil supplies.

By 1944, the war obviously lost, he was battling vainly to maintain output.

Now Hitler put his faith in ‘miracle weapons’, chiefly the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. Their factories were moved underground to protect them from bombs.

Slave labourers worked under appalling conditions, living in tunnels with no latrines, surrounded by their own filth, their clothes infested with lice.

Working 72 hours a week on a daily diet of 1,100 calories, 160 slaves dropped dead every day. But after visiting the factory, Speer wrote to congratulate the manager, seemingly unaffected by the workers’ plight.

Not so some members of his staff, who were so traumatised after witnessing this living hell that they had to take sick leave.

Speer could genuinely claim one thing to his credit. When Hitler issued his infamous Nero Decree, ordering the destruction of Germany’s industry and infrastructure, Speer countermanded it, travelling the country to successfully preserve things for the country’s post-war reconstruction, in which he naively believed he would play a part.

He was shocked to find himself put on trial at Nuremburg, but he mounted a brilliant defence – he accepted full responsibility for his actions but claimed ignorance of the mass murder of Jews. His calm, educated demeanour contrasted with the ranting and fanaticism of other leading Nazis and impressed the judges.

He escaped the hangman’s noose and got 20 years in Spandau.

Ever a loner, he wasn’t too unhappy in jail. His wealthy acquaintances smuggled in luxuries. Always sure of his entitlement, Speer complained if the champagne wasn’t up to scratch or the caviar not the best.

After his release in 1966 he published his memoirs. The book was a phenomenal success. Readers lapped up fascinating details of Hitler’s private life. It earned Speer a fortune.

Its portrait of him as the ‘Good Nazi’ absolved a whole generation of Germans of Nazi war guilt. For if, it was argued, this mover and shaker, a member of Hitler’s innermost circle, didn’t know about the Holocaust, how could an ordinary person be expected to?

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SPEER was deceiving the German people and, in his failure to admit his guilt himself.

Since his death in 1981, the evidence against Speer has mounted. His eviction of Jews from Berlin. His brutal use of slave workers. His presence at a speech given by Heinrich Himmler in which the SS leader said it was not only necessary to exterminate the Jews but their children, too, to prevent future revenge.

Kitchen’s exhaustively researched, detailed book nails, one by one, the lies of the man who ‘provided a thick coat of whitewash to millions of old Nazis’. It’s a fascinating account of how the moral degradation of the chaotic Nazi regime corrupted an entire nation as well as being a timely warning for today.

–     Speer: Hitler’s Architect by Martin Kitchen is published by Yale for £14.99