In 1937, Speer hired him as a department head, and Wolters soon took major responsibility for Hitler's plan for the large scale reconstruction of Berlin.

Wolters was born into a Catholic family in Coesfeld, Germany on 3 August 1903,[citation needed] the son of an architect who had married the daughter of a master carpenter in the shipbuilding trade.

In his privately published memoirs, Segments of a Life, Wolters described his father as "a serious, conscientious and diligent man, always concerned about the future".

[1] Wolters regarded his mother as "a highly practical woman, full of zest for life, who in hard times thought nothing of serving a delicious roast without letting on it was horsemeat".

The centerpiece of the scheme was a grand boulevard, 4.8 kilometres (3.0 mi) long, dubbed by Speer as the Prachtstrasse (Street of Magnificence) or "North–South Axis", for which the main design responsibility was delegated to Wolters.

[13] Among other matters, the Chronik detailed the GBI's responsibility for administering a 1939 amendment to the Nuremberg Laws which allowed Aryan landlords to evict Jewish tenants with virtually no notice.

He rejected the notion that Nazi architecture was an imitation of classical models:[17] "Those who speak of neo-classicism have not understood the spirit of our buildings.

The group sought solutions which would use the existing street system, rather than the grand ceremonial boulevards common in Nazi city planning.

In addition, the Arbeitsstab issued extensive guidelines, ranging from the width of avenues that carried streetcar lines to the ratio of theatre seats to inhabitants.

He later recorded, Of course, from these few experiences, I cannot judge Hitler's personality, but having shared with Speer his virtually daily contacts with him, and being familiar with Hitler's ideas, for example, on town planning, I think that commentators are making it easy for themselves now when, as they frequently do, they resort in their descriptions to simplistic epitaphs such as "buck private", "wall painter", "petit-bourgeois philistine", or "history's greatest criminal".

"[23] In February 1945, as the Nazi regime collapsed, Speer instructed Wolters to take other high-ranking officials in his department, including Heinrich Lübke, and set up architectural offices in the north of Germany to work on large-scale prefabricated housing.

In 1959, Lübke became President of the Federal Republic of Germany, a position in which he served almost ten years before he resigned over questions about what he may have known about forced labor while working in Speer's department.

The versatility he showed in the rebuilding of Coesfeld led to other commissions from German cities, including Rheine, Borken and Anholt.

[34] His son, Fritz Wolters, also an architect, described him as a man who fought uncompromisingly for what he saw as the "whole" in urban planning, and once ended a discussion with a local committee with the remark that they had "rented his head, not his pencil".

"[37] On 10 August, as the trial approached its conclusion, Speer, anticipating the likelihood of a death sentence, wrote to Wolters asking him to "collect my work together for later ages and to recount much of my life.

[36] In January 1953, Speer began work on his draft memoirs, and over the next year lengthy missives, sometimes written on tobacco wrappings or candy wrappers but most often on toilet paper, made their way to Wolters' office in Coesfeld.

[43] Wolters had come to believe that reports of Nazi genocide were exaggerated by a factor of at least ten, that Hitler had not been given credit for the things he did right and that Germany had been harshly treated by the Allies.

He engaged Düsseldorf attorney, and later state minister, Werner Schütz to lobby high German officials to get them to advocate Speer's release.

And this is the point to which the defense should direct itself ..."[49] In 1964, Speer mentioned to Wolters in a letter that he would need the Chronik as a reference in revising his memoirs upon his release.

Wolter's response was to have Riesser retype the entire Chronik, leaving out any mention of the GBI's involvement in the persecution of the Jews, without telling Speer what he was doing.

Wolters later wrote that he did this to correct mistakes, to leave out extraneous matters, and "above all to delete certain parts on the basis of which Speer and one or another of his colleagues could still have been prosecuted.

... Will you come to me mainly to take receipt of the promised gift I have held for you in our cellar—that long cured Westphalian ham, and those patiently waiting bottles of your favorite nectar: Johannisberger 1937?

[55] The visit was quickly marred by Speer's insistence on inviting industrialist Ernst Wolf Mommsen to Wolters' home instead of allowing a one-on-one reunion.

Speer's initial draft of the book, written while in Spandau, does mention his "old university friend, Dr. Rudolf Wolters, to whom was assigned the most essential task, the Prachtstrasse" in connection with the Berlin project.

[60] After the German edition of Inside the Third Reich was published in late 1969, Speer proposed a visit to the embittered Wolters in Coesfeld.

"[63] With research concluded upon Inside the Third Reich, Speer had donated the edited Chronik to the German Federal Archives in Koblenz in July 1969.

What is the matter with you that, that even after the unending admissions of guilt in [Inside the Third Reich] you cannot stop representing yourself ever more radically as a criminal for whom twenty years in prison was "too little"? ...

For the former would lead one to expect a Speer in sackcloth and ashes; I, however, know you as a merry fellow who undertakes one lovely journey after another and who happily regales his old chums with tales of his literary and financial successes ... [Y]our accusations against your former colleagues (Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, etc.)

Wolters responded sarcastically in a letter which he signed, "Duke of Coburg," "I forgive you for not 'localizing' me in the diaries after your modest restraint in [Inside the Third Reich].

[71] However, in late 1979, Speer was approached by Matthias Schmidt, a doctoral student, who sought answers to a number of questions for use in preparing his thesis.