Albert Speer

Albert Speer was born on March 19, 1905 in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany as Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer.

Speer was photographed with slave laborers at Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942. A biographer wrote that had the photograph been available at the Nuremberg trials Speer would have been hanged.

He became Adolf Hitler's Minister for Armaments after being his favorite architect and designing many famous Reich buildings. At the 1945-1946 war-crimes trial of Nazi leaders in Nuremberg, Speer was sentenced to 20 years in Berlin's Spandau prison for his complicity in Hitler's atrocities, and for his use of slave labor. Unlike his co-defendants, Speer readily accepted responsibility for crimes committed by a government in which he played a leading role, although he always denied knowing about the Holocaust even though he attended a speech on the subject by Heinrich Himmler in 1943.

A letter he wrote in December 1971 confirmed he had known about the Holocaust during World War II. The letter was not discovered until after his death.

Is portrayed by Rutger Hauer in Inside the Third Reich (1982), Herbert Knaup in Nuremberg (2000), Heino Ferch in Downfall (2004) and Sebastian Koch in Speer und er (2005).

He was released from Spandau Prison in 1966, leaving Rudolf Hess as the only remaining inmate. He remained a prisoner there for another nineteen years, until he committed suicide on August 17, 1987 at the age of 93.

In 2007, the British singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry revealed that he was a big fan of his buildings, along with Leni Riefenstahl's movies, during an interview by a German newspaper. He subsequently apologized for any offense caused by his comments after criticism from the Labour peer Lord Greville Janner.

He is known for his work on Wie aus der Ferne (2013), The Memory of Justice (1976) and Inside the Third Reich (1982). He was married to Margarethe Weber.