Albert Speer

Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931 as a trained architect and rose quickly through monumental commissions: the Reich Chancellery, the Nuremberg rally grounds, a vast redesign of Berlin. In that post he ran the department that expelled Jewish tenants from their homes. When he became Minister of Armaments in February 1942, he built his reputation on what he called an armaments miracle - later shown to be exaggerated propaganda, much of it owed to his predecessor's systems. By 1944 he was running a task force that fed slave labor into aircraft production. The tribunal convicted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1946; he served the full twenty years. His autobiographies became bestsellers, and for decades the careful performance held: the apolitical professional, the man who regretted not seeing. The documentary record, released after his death in 1981, showed he knew.