The German architect Albert Speer was a favorite of Adolf Hitler, who put him in charge of the Third Reich’s building projects and later made him minister of armaments. Speer was spared the death penalty at Nuremburg, consistently denied he had any knowledge of the extermination of the Jews, and earned himself a reputation as the ex-Nazi with a conscience. A recent biography by Martin Kitchen sets the record straight, as Daniel Johnson writes:
It was [Speer] who evicted and expropriated the Jews of Berlin—an audacious crime that had no basis in law and which made thousands of Jewish families homeless—and he who engineered their deportation—of which he later disclaimed all knowledge. It was he who, working closely with [Heinrich] Himmler’s SS, played a key role in the creation of the Nazi concentration-camp system, initially to provide stone for his building projects, later to make arms. The building of crematoria at Auschwitz was “Professor Speer’s special program.” Not only did Speer know what lay in store for the Jews in the camps: he was one of the key individuals who made the genocide possible.
His own anti-Semitic outbursts may have been less crude than [those of] other leading Nazis, but his empire employed millions of slave laborers, thousands of whom were deliberately worked to death. Speer lied about almost every aspect of his role in the Third Reich. But the biggest lie was that he had tried to prevent its worst excesses. Speer had been closer to Hitler, and had more opportunities to stop him, than anybody else. He never even tried.
Read more on Standpoint: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/6216/full