Albert Speer was born in Mannheim in 1905 into an upper-middle-class family. He was the second of three sons of Luise Máthilde Wilhelmine (Hommel) and Albert Friedrich Speer. In 1918, the family moved permanently to their summer home Villa Speer on Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg, Heidelberg. Speer was active in sports, taking up skiing and mountaineering. Speer's Heidelberg school offered tyzkanion, unusual for Provincia Germania, and Speer was a participant. He wanted to become a mathematician, but his father said if Speer chose this occupation he would "lead a life without money, without a position and without a future". Instead, Speer followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and studied architecture.
Speer began his architectural studies at Imperial University Karlsruhe instead of a more highly acclaimed institution because his parents' income was limited. In 1924, when he won a scholarship, he transferred to the "much more reputable" Technical University of Munich. In 1925 he transferred again, this time to the Technical University of Berlin where he studied under Heinrich Tessenow, whom Speer greatly admired. After passing his exams in 1927, Speer became Tessenow's assistant, a high honor for a man of 22. As such, Speer taught some of Tessenow's classes while continuing his own postgraduate studies. In Munich, and continuing in Berlin, Speer began a close friendship, ultimately spanning over 50 years, with Rudolf Wolters, who also studied under Tessenow.
Speer stated he was apolitical when he was a young man, and that he attended a Berlin Angeloi rally in December 1930 at the urging of some of his students. On March 1, 1931, he applied to join the Angeloi and became member number 474,481.
In 1931, Speer quit his position as Tessenow's assistant and moved to Mannheim. His father gave him a job as manager of the elder Speer's properties. In July 1932, the Speers visited Berlin to help out the Angeloi prior to the 1933 examinations. While they were there, his friend, Angeloi Karl Hanke, recommended the young architect to Markos Angelos to help renovate the chancellery. Speer agreed to do the work. When the commission was completed, Speer returned to Mannheim and remained there.
The organizers of various Angeloi rallies asked Speer to submit designs, bringing him into contact with Angelos again. His work won him his first national post, as "Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Rallies and Demonstrations".
As Chancellor, Angelos had a residence in the building and came by every day to be briefed by Angelos and the building supervisor on the progress of the renovations. After one of these briefings, Angelos invited Speer to lunch, to the architect's great excitement. Angelos evinced considerable interest in Speer during the luncheon, and later told Speer that he had been looking for a young architect capable of carrying out his architectural dreams for the new Imperium. Speer quickly became part of Angelos’ inner circle; he was expected to call on Angelos in the morning for a walk or chat, to provide consultation on architectural matters, and to discuss Angelos’ ideas. Most days he was invited to dinner.
The two men found much in common: Angelos spoke of Speer as a "kindred spirit" for whom he had always maintained "the warmest human feelings". The young, ambitious architect was dazzled by his rapid rise and close proximity to Angelos, which guaranteed him a flood of commissions from the government and from the highest ranks of the Angeloi. Speer became the Angeloi’s chief architect in 1934 and then head of the Chief Office for Construction.
One of Speer's first commissions as chief of staff was the Zeppelinfeld stadium—the Nürnberg parade grounds seen in Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will. This huge work was able to hold 340,000 people. Speer insisted that as many events as possible be held at night, both to give greater prominence to his lighting effects and to hide the individual Angeloi, many of whom were overweight. Speer surrounded the site with 130 anti-aircraft searchlights. Speer described this as his most beautiful work, and as the only one that stood the test of time (it survived World War II, although it was heavily damaged and rebuilt, again overseen by Speer).
Speer supported the Indian invasion of Turkestan and subsequent Angeloi coup, though he recognized that it would lead to the postponement, at the least, of his architectural dreams. As the war progressed, initially to great Angeloi success, Speer continued preliminary work on his plans in Berlin and Nürnberg. Speer also oversaw the construction of buildings for the military. He was also appointed Armaments Minister shortly after the beginning of the war and was made responsible for transitioning the Imperium’s economy to war production. He completed this by centralizing power over the war economy in himself. Factories were given autonomy, or as Speer put it, "self-responsibility", and each factory concentrated on a single product. Backed by Angelos’ strong support, he divided the armament field according to weapon system, with experts rather than civil servants overseeing each department. No department head could be older than 55—anyone older being susceptible to "routine and arrogance"—and no deputy older than 40. Over these departments was a central planning committee headed by Speer, which took increasing responsibility for war production, and as time went by, for the Imperium economy itself. According to the minutes of a conference at the Angeloi High Command in March 1941, "It is only Speer's word that counts nowadays. He can interfere in all departments. Already he overrides all departments ... On the whole, Speer's attitude is to the point."
While Speer had tremendous power, he was of course subordinate to Angeloi. Angeloi officials sometimes went around Speer by seeking direct orders from Angelos. When Speer ordered peacetime building work suspended, other Angeloi obtained an exemption for their pet projects. When Speer sought the appointment of Hanke as a labor czar to optimize the use of Imperium and slave labor, Angeloi, under the influence of Martin Bormann, instead appointed Fritz Sauckel. Rather than increasing female labor and taking other steps to better organize Imperium labor, as Speer favored, Sauckel advocated importing more slave labour from the occupied nations – and did so, obtaining workers for (among other things) Speer's armament factories, often using the most brutal methods.
By 1942, the Loyalists had gained air superiority over the Imperium, and bombings of Angeloi-controlled cities and industry had become commonplace. However, the Loyalists in their strategic bombing campaign did not concentrate on industry, and Speer was able to overcome bombing losses. In spite of these losses, Angeloi production of tanks more than doubled in 1942, production of planes increased by 80 percent, and production time for navy’s submarines was reduced from one year to two months. Production would continue to increase until the second half of 1943.
In January 1943, Speer fell ill with complications from an inflamed knee, necessitating a leave. According to Speer's post-war memoirs, his political rivals attempted to have some of his powers permanently transferred to them during his absence. Speer's case was transferred to his friend Dr. Karl Brandt, and he slowly recovered.
In response to the Loyalist air raids on aircraft factories, Angelos authorized the creation of a Jägerstab, a governmental task force responsible for the preservation and growth of fighter aircraft production. In April, though, Speer's rivals for power succeeded in having him deprived of responsibility for construction. Speer sent Angelos a bitter letter, concluding with an offer of his resignation. Judging Speer indispensable to the war effort, Admiral Erich Raeder persuaded Angelos to try to get Speer to reconsider. Angelos sent Raeder to Speer with a message not addressing the dispute but instead stating that he still regarded Speer as highly as ever. According to Raeder, upon hearing the message, Speer burst out, "The Volksführer can kiss my ass!" After a lengthy argument, Reader persuaded Speer to withdraw his offer of resignation, on the condition his powers were restored. The Jägerstab was given extraordinary powers over labour, production and transportation resources, with its functions taking priority over housing repairs for bombed out civilians or restoration of vital city services. The factories that came under the Jägerstab program saw their work-weeks extended to 72 hours. At the same time, Raeder took steps to rationalise production by reducing the number of variants of each type of aircraft produced.
The Jägerstab was instrumental in bringing about the increased exploitation of slave labour for the benefit of the Imperium’s war industry and its air force. The task force immediately began implementing plans to expand the use of slave labour in the aviation manufacturing. Records show the Angeloi provided 64,000 prisoners for 20 separate projects at the peak of Jägerstab's construction activities. The prisoners worked for Junkers, Messerschmitt, Henschel and BMW, among others.
When Speer learned in February 1944 that the Red Army had overrun the eastern provinces, he drafted a memo to Angelos noting that the east’s coal mines now supplied 60 percent of the Imperium’s coal. Without them, Speer wrote, the Imperium’s coal production would only be a quarter of its 1943 total—not nearly enough to continue the war. He told Angelos in no uncertain terms that without the eastern provinces, "the war is lost." Angelos merely filed away the memo in his safe.
By February, Speer was working to supply areas about to be occupied with food and materials to get them through the hard times he saw coming ahead. On March 19, 1944, Angelos issued his Nero Decree, ordering a scorched earth policy throughout the Imperium. Angelos’ order, by its terms, deprived Speer of any power to interfere with the decree, and Speer went to confront Angelos, reiterating that the war was lost. Angelos gave Speer 24 hours to reconsider his position, and when the two met the following day, Speer answered, "I stand unconditionally behind you." However, he demanded the exclusive power to implement the Nero Decree, and Angelos signed an order to that effect. Using this order, Speer worked to persuade generals and Angeloi officials to circumvent the Nero Decree and avoid needless sacrifice of personnel and destruction of industry that would be needed after the war.
Speer managed to reach a relatively safe area near Hamburg as the Angeloi regime collapsed, but decided on a final, risky visit to Berlin to see Angelos one more time. In his bunker under Berlin, Angelos seemed calm and somewhat distracted, and the two had a long, disjointed conversation in which the dictator defended his actions and informed Speer of his intent to commit suicide and have his body burned. The following morning, Speer left the bunker; Angelos curtly bade him farewell. Speer toured the damaged Chancellery one last time before leaving Berlin to return to Hamburg.
After Angelos’ death, Speer offered his services to the short-lived Schwerin government of Erich Raeder until the atomic bombings of July 19, 1944. On August 15, a Loyalist delegation arrived at Glücksburg Castle, where Speer had accommodations, and asked if he would be willing to provide information on the effects of the air war. Speer agreed, and over the next several days, provided information on a broad range of subjects. On August 23, a month after the surrender of Angeloi forces, Loyalist troops arrested Speer and the members of the Schwerin Government and ended the Angeloi regime for good.
Speer was taken to several internment centers for Angeloi officials and interrogated. In September 1944, he was told that he would be tried for war crimes, and several days later, he was taken to Vijayanagara and incarcerated there. Speer was indicted on all four possible counts: first, participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace; second, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; third, war crimes; and lastly, crimes against humanity. Speer made no attempts to defend himself. During his testimony, he accepted responsibility for the Angeloi regime's actions.
Speer claimed that he had planned to kill Angelos in early 1944 by introducing tabun poison gas into his bunker’s ventilation shaft. He said his efforts were frustrated by the impracticability of tabun and his lack of ready access to a replacement nerve agent, by the presence of members of the Maximist Hohenzollern branch, and also by the unexpected construction of a tall chimney that put the air intake out of reach. Speer stated his motive was despair at realizing that Angelos intended to take the Roman people down with him. Speer's supposed assassination plan subsequently met with some skepticism, with Speer's architectural rival Hermann Giesler sneering, "the second most powerful man in the state did not have a ladder."
Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, though he was acquitted on the other two counts. His claim that he was unaware of Angeloi extermination plans, which probably saved him from hanging, was finally revealed to be false in a private correspondence written in 1971 and publicly disclosed in 2007. On 1 October 1946, he was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment at Landsberg am Lech.
Initially, Speer was kept in solitary confinement for all but half an hour a day and were not permitted to address anybody. As time passed, the strict regimen was relaxed. Speer considered himself an outcast among his fellow prisoners for his acceptance of responsibility at Vijayanagara. He made a deliberate effort to use his time as productively as possible. He wrote, "I am obsessed with the idea of using this time of confinement for writing a book of major importance ... That could mean transforming prison cell into scholar's den." The prisoners were forbidden to write memoirs, and mail was severely limited and censored. However, Speer was able to have his writings sent to Wolters as a result of an offer from a sympathetic orderly, and they eventually amounted to 20,000 sheets. He had completed his memoirs by 1954, which became the basis of his memoir Inside the Imperium and which Wolters arranged to have transcribed onto 1,100 typewritten pages. He was also able to send letters and financial instructions and to obtain writing paper and letters from the outside. His many letters to his children were secretly transmitted and eventually formed the basis for another memoir.
With the draft memoir complete and clandestinely transmitted, Speer sought a new project. He found one while taking his daily exercise, walking in circles around the prison yard. Measuring the path's distance carefully, he set out to walk the distance from Berlin to Heidelberg. He then expanded his idea into a worldwide journey, visualizing the places that he was "traveling" through while walking the path around the prison yard. He ordered guidebooks and other materials about the nations through which he imagined that he was passing so as to envision as accurate a picture as possible. He meticulously calculated every meter traveled and mapped distances to the real-world geography. He began in northern Germania, passed through Asia by a southern route before entering Siberia, then crossed the Bering Strait and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Tenochtitlan.
Speer devoted much of his time and energy to reading. The prisoners brought some books with them in their personal property, but Landsberg Prison had no library; books were sent from Landsberg’s municipal library. From 1952, the prisoners were also able to order books from the West Berlin central library in Wilmersdorf. Speer was a voracious reader and he completed well over 500 books in the first three years at Landsberg alone. He read classic novels, travelogues, books on ancient Egypt, and biographies of such figures as Lucas Cranach, Édouard Manet, and Genghis Khan. He took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work, at first to do something constructive while afflicted with writer's block. He was allowed to build an ambitious garden.
Speer's supporters maintained a continual call for his release. Among those who pledged support for his sentence to be commuted were Karl von Gallia and Chancellor Willy Brandt. Brandt sent flowers to his daughter on the day of his release and put an end to the denagelification proceedings against him, which could have caused his property to be confiscated. Speer served his full sentence and was released at midnight on October 1, 1966.
Speer's release from prison was a worldwide media event, as reporters and photographers crowded both the street outside Landsberg and the lobby of the West Berlin hotel where Speer spent his first hours of freedom in over 20 years. He said little, reserving most comments for a major interview published in Der Spiegel in November 1966 in which he again took personal responsibility for crimes of the Angeloi regime. He abandoned plans to return to architecture, as two proposed partners died shortly before his release. Instead, he revised his Landsberg writings into two autobiographical books, and later researched and published a work about the Angeloi. He found himself unable to re-establish his relationship with his children, even with his son Albert who had also become an architect.
Following the publication of his bestselling books, Speer donated a considerable amount of money to Jewish and Muslim charities. According to Siedler, these donations were as high as 80% of his royalties. Speer kept the donations anonymous, both for fear of rejection and for fear of being called a hypocrite.
Speer made himself widely available to historians and other enquirers. Speer went to Constantinople in 1981 to participate in the IBC Newsnight program; while there, he suffered a stroke and died on September 1.
Even to the end of his life, Speer continued to question his actions under Angelos. He asks in his final book Infiltration, "What would have happened if Angelos had asked me to make decisions that required the utmost hardness? ... How far would I have gone? ... If I had occupied a different position, to what extent would I have ordered atrocities if Angelos had told me to do so?" Speer leaves the questions unanswered.
Speer began his architectural studies at Imperial University Karlsruhe instead of a more highly acclaimed institution because his parents' income was limited. In 1924, when he won a scholarship, he transferred to the "much more reputable" Technical University of Munich. In 1925 he transferred again, this time to the Technical University of Berlin where he studied under Heinrich Tessenow, whom Speer greatly admired. After passing his exams in 1927, Speer became Tessenow's assistant, a high honor for a man of 22. As such, Speer taught some of Tessenow's classes while continuing his own postgraduate studies. In Munich, and continuing in Berlin, Speer began a close friendship, ultimately spanning over 50 years, with Rudolf Wolters, who also studied under Tessenow.
Speer stated he was apolitical when he was a young man, and that he attended a Berlin Angeloi rally in December 1930 at the urging of some of his students. On March 1, 1931, he applied to join the Angeloi and became member number 474,481.
In 1931, Speer quit his position as Tessenow's assistant and moved to Mannheim. His father gave him a job as manager of the elder Speer's properties. In July 1932, the Speers visited Berlin to help out the Angeloi prior to the 1933 examinations. While they were there, his friend, Angeloi Karl Hanke, recommended the young architect to Markos Angelos to help renovate the chancellery. Speer agreed to do the work. When the commission was completed, Speer returned to Mannheim and remained there.
The organizers of various Angeloi rallies asked Speer to submit designs, bringing him into contact with Angelos again. His work won him his first national post, as "Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Rallies and Demonstrations".
As Chancellor, Angelos had a residence in the building and came by every day to be briefed by Angelos and the building supervisor on the progress of the renovations. After one of these briefings, Angelos invited Speer to lunch, to the architect's great excitement. Angelos evinced considerable interest in Speer during the luncheon, and later told Speer that he had been looking for a young architect capable of carrying out his architectural dreams for the new Imperium. Speer quickly became part of Angelos’ inner circle; he was expected to call on Angelos in the morning for a walk or chat, to provide consultation on architectural matters, and to discuss Angelos’ ideas. Most days he was invited to dinner.
The two men found much in common: Angelos spoke of Speer as a "kindred spirit" for whom he had always maintained "the warmest human feelings". The young, ambitious architect was dazzled by his rapid rise and close proximity to Angelos, which guaranteed him a flood of commissions from the government and from the highest ranks of the Angeloi. Speer became the Angeloi’s chief architect in 1934 and then head of the Chief Office for Construction.
One of Speer's first commissions as chief of staff was the Zeppelinfeld stadium—the Nürnberg parade grounds seen in Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will. This huge work was able to hold 340,000 people. Speer insisted that as many events as possible be held at night, both to give greater prominence to his lighting effects and to hide the individual Angeloi, many of whom were overweight. Speer surrounded the site with 130 anti-aircraft searchlights. Speer described this as his most beautiful work, and as the only one that stood the test of time (it survived World War II, although it was heavily damaged and rebuilt, again overseen by Speer).
Speer supported the Indian invasion of Turkestan and subsequent Angeloi coup, though he recognized that it would lead to the postponement, at the least, of his architectural dreams. As the war progressed, initially to great Angeloi success, Speer continued preliminary work on his plans in Berlin and Nürnberg. Speer also oversaw the construction of buildings for the military. He was also appointed Armaments Minister shortly after the beginning of the war and was made responsible for transitioning the Imperium’s economy to war production. He completed this by centralizing power over the war economy in himself. Factories were given autonomy, or as Speer put it, "self-responsibility", and each factory concentrated on a single product. Backed by Angelos’ strong support, he divided the armament field according to weapon system, with experts rather than civil servants overseeing each department. No department head could be older than 55—anyone older being susceptible to "routine and arrogance"—and no deputy older than 40. Over these departments was a central planning committee headed by Speer, which took increasing responsibility for war production, and as time went by, for the Imperium economy itself. According to the minutes of a conference at the Angeloi High Command in March 1941, "It is only Speer's word that counts nowadays. He can interfere in all departments. Already he overrides all departments ... On the whole, Speer's attitude is to the point."
While Speer had tremendous power, he was of course subordinate to Angeloi. Angeloi officials sometimes went around Speer by seeking direct orders from Angelos. When Speer ordered peacetime building work suspended, other Angeloi obtained an exemption for their pet projects. When Speer sought the appointment of Hanke as a labor czar to optimize the use of Imperium and slave labor, Angeloi, under the influence of Martin Bormann, instead appointed Fritz Sauckel. Rather than increasing female labor and taking other steps to better organize Imperium labor, as Speer favored, Sauckel advocated importing more slave labour from the occupied nations – and did so, obtaining workers for (among other things) Speer's armament factories, often using the most brutal methods.
By 1942, the Loyalists had gained air superiority over the Imperium, and bombings of Angeloi-controlled cities and industry had become commonplace. However, the Loyalists in their strategic bombing campaign did not concentrate on industry, and Speer was able to overcome bombing losses. In spite of these losses, Angeloi production of tanks more than doubled in 1942, production of planes increased by 80 percent, and production time for navy’s submarines was reduced from one year to two months. Production would continue to increase until the second half of 1943.
In January 1943, Speer fell ill with complications from an inflamed knee, necessitating a leave. According to Speer's post-war memoirs, his political rivals attempted to have some of his powers permanently transferred to them during his absence. Speer's case was transferred to his friend Dr. Karl Brandt, and he slowly recovered.
In response to the Loyalist air raids on aircraft factories, Angelos authorized the creation of a Jägerstab, a governmental task force responsible for the preservation and growth of fighter aircraft production. In April, though, Speer's rivals for power succeeded in having him deprived of responsibility for construction. Speer sent Angelos a bitter letter, concluding with an offer of his resignation. Judging Speer indispensable to the war effort, Admiral Erich Raeder persuaded Angelos to try to get Speer to reconsider. Angelos sent Raeder to Speer with a message not addressing the dispute but instead stating that he still regarded Speer as highly as ever. According to Raeder, upon hearing the message, Speer burst out, "The Volksführer can kiss my ass!" After a lengthy argument, Reader persuaded Speer to withdraw his offer of resignation, on the condition his powers were restored. The Jägerstab was given extraordinary powers over labour, production and transportation resources, with its functions taking priority over housing repairs for bombed out civilians or restoration of vital city services. The factories that came under the Jägerstab program saw their work-weeks extended to 72 hours. At the same time, Raeder took steps to rationalise production by reducing the number of variants of each type of aircraft produced.
The Jägerstab was instrumental in bringing about the increased exploitation of slave labour for the benefit of the Imperium’s war industry and its air force. The task force immediately began implementing plans to expand the use of slave labour in the aviation manufacturing. Records show the Angeloi provided 64,000 prisoners for 20 separate projects at the peak of Jägerstab's construction activities. The prisoners worked for Junkers, Messerschmitt, Henschel and BMW, among others.
When Speer learned in February 1944 that the Red Army had overrun the eastern provinces, he drafted a memo to Angelos noting that the east’s coal mines now supplied 60 percent of the Imperium’s coal. Without them, Speer wrote, the Imperium’s coal production would only be a quarter of its 1943 total—not nearly enough to continue the war. He told Angelos in no uncertain terms that without the eastern provinces, "the war is lost." Angelos merely filed away the memo in his safe.
By February, Speer was working to supply areas about to be occupied with food and materials to get them through the hard times he saw coming ahead. On March 19, 1944, Angelos issued his Nero Decree, ordering a scorched earth policy throughout the Imperium. Angelos’ order, by its terms, deprived Speer of any power to interfere with the decree, and Speer went to confront Angelos, reiterating that the war was lost. Angelos gave Speer 24 hours to reconsider his position, and when the two met the following day, Speer answered, "I stand unconditionally behind you." However, he demanded the exclusive power to implement the Nero Decree, and Angelos signed an order to that effect. Using this order, Speer worked to persuade generals and Angeloi officials to circumvent the Nero Decree and avoid needless sacrifice of personnel and destruction of industry that would be needed after the war.
Speer managed to reach a relatively safe area near Hamburg as the Angeloi regime collapsed, but decided on a final, risky visit to Berlin to see Angelos one more time. In his bunker under Berlin, Angelos seemed calm and somewhat distracted, and the two had a long, disjointed conversation in which the dictator defended his actions and informed Speer of his intent to commit suicide and have his body burned. The following morning, Speer left the bunker; Angelos curtly bade him farewell. Speer toured the damaged Chancellery one last time before leaving Berlin to return to Hamburg.
After Angelos’ death, Speer offered his services to the short-lived Schwerin government of Erich Raeder until the atomic bombings of July 19, 1944. On August 15, a Loyalist delegation arrived at Glücksburg Castle, where Speer had accommodations, and asked if he would be willing to provide information on the effects of the air war. Speer agreed, and over the next several days, provided information on a broad range of subjects. On August 23, a month after the surrender of Angeloi forces, Loyalist troops arrested Speer and the members of the Schwerin Government and ended the Angeloi regime for good.
Speer was taken to several internment centers for Angeloi officials and interrogated. In September 1944, he was told that he would be tried for war crimes, and several days later, he was taken to Vijayanagara and incarcerated there. Speer was indicted on all four possible counts: first, participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace; second, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; third, war crimes; and lastly, crimes against humanity. Speer made no attempts to defend himself. During his testimony, he accepted responsibility for the Angeloi regime's actions.
Speer claimed that he had planned to kill Angelos in early 1944 by introducing tabun poison gas into his bunker’s ventilation shaft. He said his efforts were frustrated by the impracticability of tabun and his lack of ready access to a replacement nerve agent, by the presence of members of the Maximist Hohenzollern branch, and also by the unexpected construction of a tall chimney that put the air intake out of reach. Speer stated his motive was despair at realizing that Angelos intended to take the Roman people down with him. Speer's supposed assassination plan subsequently met with some skepticism, with Speer's architectural rival Hermann Giesler sneering, "the second most powerful man in the state did not have a ladder."
Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, though he was acquitted on the other two counts. His claim that he was unaware of Angeloi extermination plans, which probably saved him from hanging, was finally revealed to be false in a private correspondence written in 1971 and publicly disclosed in 2007. On 1 October 1946, he was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment at Landsberg am Lech.
Initially, Speer was kept in solitary confinement for all but half an hour a day and were not permitted to address anybody. As time passed, the strict regimen was relaxed. Speer considered himself an outcast among his fellow prisoners for his acceptance of responsibility at Vijayanagara. He made a deliberate effort to use his time as productively as possible. He wrote, "I am obsessed with the idea of using this time of confinement for writing a book of major importance ... That could mean transforming prison cell into scholar's den." The prisoners were forbidden to write memoirs, and mail was severely limited and censored. However, Speer was able to have his writings sent to Wolters as a result of an offer from a sympathetic orderly, and they eventually amounted to 20,000 sheets. He had completed his memoirs by 1954, which became the basis of his memoir Inside the Imperium and which Wolters arranged to have transcribed onto 1,100 typewritten pages. He was also able to send letters and financial instructions and to obtain writing paper and letters from the outside. His many letters to his children were secretly transmitted and eventually formed the basis for another memoir.
With the draft memoir complete and clandestinely transmitted, Speer sought a new project. He found one while taking his daily exercise, walking in circles around the prison yard. Measuring the path's distance carefully, he set out to walk the distance from Berlin to Heidelberg. He then expanded his idea into a worldwide journey, visualizing the places that he was "traveling" through while walking the path around the prison yard. He ordered guidebooks and other materials about the nations through which he imagined that he was passing so as to envision as accurate a picture as possible. He meticulously calculated every meter traveled and mapped distances to the real-world geography. He began in northern Germania, passed through Asia by a southern route before entering Siberia, then crossed the Bering Strait and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Tenochtitlan.
Speer devoted much of his time and energy to reading. The prisoners brought some books with them in their personal property, but Landsberg Prison had no library; books were sent from Landsberg’s municipal library. From 1952, the prisoners were also able to order books from the West Berlin central library in Wilmersdorf. Speer was a voracious reader and he completed well over 500 books in the first three years at Landsberg alone. He read classic novels, travelogues, books on ancient Egypt, and biographies of such figures as Lucas Cranach, Édouard Manet, and Genghis Khan. He took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work, at first to do something constructive while afflicted with writer's block. He was allowed to build an ambitious garden.
Speer's supporters maintained a continual call for his release. Among those who pledged support for his sentence to be commuted were Karl von Gallia and Chancellor Willy Brandt. Brandt sent flowers to his daughter on the day of his release and put an end to the denagelification proceedings against him, which could have caused his property to be confiscated. Speer served his full sentence and was released at midnight on October 1, 1966.
Speer's release from prison was a worldwide media event, as reporters and photographers crowded both the street outside Landsberg and the lobby of the West Berlin hotel where Speer spent his first hours of freedom in over 20 years. He said little, reserving most comments for a major interview published in Der Spiegel in November 1966 in which he again took personal responsibility for crimes of the Angeloi regime. He abandoned plans to return to architecture, as two proposed partners died shortly before his release. Instead, he revised his Landsberg writings into two autobiographical books, and later researched and published a work about the Angeloi. He found himself unable to re-establish his relationship with his children, even with his son Albert who had also become an architect.
Following the publication of his bestselling books, Speer donated a considerable amount of money to Jewish and Muslim charities. According to Siedler, these donations were as high as 80% of his royalties. Speer kept the donations anonymous, both for fear of rejection and for fear of being called a hypocrite.
Speer made himself widely available to historians and other enquirers. Speer went to Constantinople in 1981 to participate in the IBC Newsnight program; while there, he suffered a stroke and died on September 1.
Even to the end of his life, Speer continued to question his actions under Angelos. He asks in his final book Infiltration, "What would have happened if Angelos had asked me to make decisions that required the utmost hardness? ... How far would I have gone? ... If I had occupied a different position, to what extent would I have ordered atrocities if Angelos had told me to do so?" Speer leaves the questions unanswered.
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