Hitler's Architect

... was the subtitle of a biogaphy of Albert Speer by the British–born Canadian academic Martin Kitchen, published in 2015. I think it may be a bit of exaggeration to say that Speer "was known as Hitler's Architect"; it's not wrong, but the implication that it was a sort of nickname is, I think, a little wide of the mark.

Albert Speer was an architect by profession. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931, aged 26, and the following year he was recommended to Josef Goebbels to help renovate the Party's Berlin headquarters. He was then asked to design the stadium for the 1933 Nuremberg Rally; this brought him into contact with Hitler, who made him "Commissioner for the Artistic and Technical Presentation of Party Rallies and Demonstrations".

Hitler asked Speer to manage the building of his new chancellery, and Speer quickly became a member of Hitler's inner circle, along with the likes of Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and Martin Bormann.

In February 1942, Hitler appointed Speer as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. He was fêted at the time, and long afterwards, for performing an "armaments miracle" by dramatically increasing German war production; by the summer of 1943 however, this "miracle" was brought to a halt by the first sustained Allied bombing (among other factors).

After the war, Speer was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the Nazi regime, principally for the use of forced labour. Despite repeated attempts to gain early release, he served his full sentence, most of it at Spandau Prison in West Berlin. Following his release in 1966, Speer published two bestselling autobiographical works: Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, detailing his close personal relationship with Hitler and providing a unique perspective on the workings of the Nazi regime. He later wrote a third book, Infiltration, about the Schutzstaffel (SS).

Speer died of a stroke in 1981, while on a visit to London.

At the Nuremberg trials, and in his memoirs, Speer accepted moral responsibility for complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime; but he insisted that he hadn't known about the Holocaust. In his 2015 biography, Martin Kitchen (according to Amazon's review) "disputes Speer's lifelong assertions of ignorance and innocence, portraying a far darker figure who was deeply implicated in the appalling crimes committed by the regime he served so well." John Harding, in the Daily Mail (and quoted on Amazon), wrote: "Kitchen's exhaustively researched, detailed book nails, one by one, the lies of the man who provided a thick coat of whitewash to millions of old Nazis. Its fascinating account of how the moral degradation of the chaotic Nazi regime corrupted an entire nation is a timely warning for today."