Quick questions on Speer and the Final Solution: HSC Modern History Personality

At the Nuremberg trial (1945 to 1946), Speer accepted general responsibility as a member of the regime but denied specific knowledge of the Final Solution. He claimed in Inside the Third Reich (1969) that he had been "an architect drawn into the war machinery by my Fuhrer" and that the extermination of the Jews had been hidden from him. The defence is the foundation of the "good Nazi" myth.

From 1939 the GBI office under Speer required clearance of around 75,000 dwellings in central Berlin to construct the projected north-south axis of Welthauptstadt Germania. Speer's office could not requisition German "Aryan" property without compensation; it instead targeted Jewish-owned and Jewish-occupied housing.

From 1938 the Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DEST), founded by the SS on 29 April 1938, supplied granite, marble, and brick to Speer's architectural projects from concentration-camp quarries at Mauthausen, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, and Natzweiler-Struthof.

Established 22 April 1942 with Speer as the dominant member. From late 1942 the Board allocated concentration-camp prisoners to private and state armaments plants. The supply chain was managed through the SS WVHA under Oswald Pohl.

The Posen Conference (4 to 6 October 1943) gathered the Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, and senior SS officers at the occupied Polish city. Himmler addressed the conference on 4 October. The speech was recorded on Magnetophon and survives in transcript. Key passages:

Helen "Hettie" Walters, an Australian schoolteacher and a long-standing correspondent of Speer during his Spandau imprisonment, asked Speer directly whether he had known of the camps and the extermination. In a letter dated 23 December 1971, Speer wrote that he had been present at Himmler's Posen speech and had heard the references to extermination. The letter, in Walters' papers, was first cited in print by Adam Tooze in 2007.

Hitler addressed senior officials on the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" several times in 1941 to 1942 in terms Speer almost certainly heard. Goebbels' diary entry of 27 March 1942 records Hitler's instructions on the "extermination of the Jews"; Speer was a regular attendee at Hitler's inner-circle meals at the Wolf's Lair through 1942 and 1943.

Joachim Fest (Speer: The Final Verdict, 1999) treats Speer as morally complicit but ambivalent in his consciousness of the Holocaust.

It is no longer scholarly defensible. Brechtken, Sereny, and Tooze have decisively rejected it.

They precede the war by years and place Speer at the centre of Jewish dispossession in the capital.

It is one of four institutional spheres of complicity; the GBI, DEST, and Central Planning Board records are equally important.

It was written in December 1971 (after Speer's release from Spandau in 1966) and first cited in print by Tooze in 2007.