Original Items: Only One Lot of 2 Available. This is a very interesting pair of items! The first is an interrogation of Albert Speer from July 13, 1945 and the other item being a signed envelope from 1938! This is truly a spectacular pair of items, so act fast because they will not last long!

Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer was a German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in NSDAP Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf H, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The “interview” has a header for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and is 6 doubled sided pages in the “question and answer” style between Colonel Struble and Speer. The front page has the following information:

Interview No. 65
Subject: Albert Speer
Date of Interview: 13 July 1945
Published: 16 July 1945
Interrogated by: Col. H.S. Struble

The main topics in the interview are Computing And Programming Of Military Requirements, Adequacy of Supply and Distribution.

Distribution (Examples)
Q. Why didn't the Army ever leave a larger supply on hand that equal to about 6 months production?

A. Exclusively because of the retreats.

Q. An investigation made at your direction disclosed that on the average it took two months to distribute equipment from factory to the front. Does this average time apply to all types of equipment or only to certain specific items? Does this figure mean that at all times you had two months supply of equipment in transit?

A. That goes only for some items. We wanted to simplify the distribution. For instance, guns and tanks were not completed at the factories. They came without optics and other equipment to the “Feldzeugamt”, there they were completed and went on to the proving grounds, which the plants had anyway as well, and only after that into the supply line of the army. I wanted to fully equip them at the factory under army supervision and cut the necessary 2 months by 2 or 3 weeks.

Q. From this process you have described during the interview, we can assume that the total amount in the supply pipe-line consisted of only 2 months supply of “in transit” equipment?

A. Yes, but was too much for our conditions, because the distance from the Ruhr to the front was some 100 kilometers. One shouldn't need 8 weeks for that.

This is how the interview is written throughout the packet. Q (Question) is asked by Struble and A (Answer) is answered by Speer. They go back and forth talking about numbers, structures, who was in charge of what and where and so on. There is a lot of information contained in these pages and the ink is still dark making everything legible.

The 6 ½” x 4 ¾” envelope features a crisp Nurnberg stamp and is dated 1938. The stamp in the upper right corner is also dated 1938 and features a right facing face of AH. Just below the Reichspost stamp, in blue ink, is the signature of Albert Speer.

Both items are in superb condition with minor age toning and fading.

Comes ready to read and display!

An architect by training, Speer joined the NSDAP Party in 1931. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party, and he became a member of AH’s inner circle. AH commissioned him to design and construct structures including the Reich Chancellery and the NSDAP party rally grounds in Nuremberg. In 1937, AH appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for Berlin. In this capacity he was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes in Berlin. In February 1942, Speer was appointed as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Using misleading statistics, he promoted himself as having performed an "armaments miracle" that was widely credited with keeping Germany in the war. In 1944, Speer established a task force to increase production of fighter aircraft. It became instrumental in exploiting slave labor for the benefit of the German war effort.

After the war, Speer was among the 24 "major war criminals" arrested and charged with the crimes of the NSDAP regime at the Nuremberg trials. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for the use of slave labor, narrowly avoiding a death sentence. Having served his full term, Speer was released in 1966. He used his writings from the time of imprisonment as the basis for two autobiographical books, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Speer's books were a success; the public was fascinated by an inside view of the Third Reich. Speer died of a stroke in 1981. Little remains of his personal architectural work.

Through his autobiographies and interviews, Speer carefully constructed an image of himself as a man who deeply regretted having failed to discover the monstrous crimes of the Third Reich. He continued to deny explicit knowledge of, and responsibility for the extermination. This image dominated his historiography in the decades following the war, giving rise to the "Speer Myth": the perception of him as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionizing the German war machine. The myth began to fall apart in the 1980s, when the armaments miracle was attributed to NSDAP propaganda. Adam Tooze wrote in The Wages of Destruction that the idea that Speer was an apolitical technocrat was "absurd". Martin Kitchen, writing in Speer: AH’s Architect, stated that much of the increase in Germany's arms production was actually due to systems instituted by Speer's predecessor (Fritz Todt) and furthermore that Speer was intimately involved in the "Final Solution".