Trivia

At the Nuremberg Trials Speer claimed that after being given orders to implement "Operation Nero" (a plan to destroy everything of military, industrial or agricultural value in areas of Germany not overrun by the Allies) he attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by introducing poison gas into the Berlin bunker. He said he failed due to both failed nerves and the placement of a strengthened filtering system. However Speer's claims were widely ridiculed by his co-defendants, and are dismissed by historians.

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.

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.

Speer's insistence that he had left before the end of Posen speech, and had therefore known nothing about the Holocaust, probably spared him from execution after the Nuremberg trials. Speer was in fact at the speech, and Himmler even appeared to address him personally at one point.

His books are considered highly unreliable as Speer was often the only living witness to events described.

He was fully aware of the slave-labor conditions in use at the underground V-2 rocket factory at Nordhausen/Dora in the rugged Harz Mountains of Germany that was under his direct control.

During World War II he was required to increase industrial output during the increasingly heavy Allied air raids and to use slave labor in the armaments industries to achieve that increase.

Was interviewed by "Playboy" magazine in 1971.

Was a friend of Leni Riefenstahl.

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).

Father-in-law of Ingmar Zeisberg.

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.

Speer worked in tandem with Heinrich Himmler to build and maintain the extermination camps that promulgated the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" across German-occupied Europe during the latter years of the war.

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.

In his book "Inside the Third Reich" Speer lied about his role in the Holocaust and his involvement in the Final Solution. He also pretended he tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, and claimed he told Hitler he was disobeying the Nero Decree.

Speer was strongly opposed to the July Bomb Plot, but falsely claimed in his memoirs to have been sympathetic to the plotters. In reality he had in fact played a minor role in the Nazi regime's efforts to regain control over Berlin after Hitler survived.

Speer falsely claimed he had realized World War II was lost at an early stage, and thereafter worked to preserve the resources needed for the civilian population's survival. In reality, he had sought to prolong the war until further resistance was impossible, thus contributing to the large number of deaths and the extensive destruction Germany suffered in the conflict's final months.

Speer was photographed with slave laborers at Mauthausen concentration camp during a visit on March 31, 1943; he also visited Gusen concentration camp. Survivor Francisco Boix testified at the Nuremberg trials about Speer's visit.