[16][b] The same year, with stipends shrinking amid the Depression, Speer surrendered his position as Tessenow's assistant and moved to Mannheim, hoping to make a living as an architect.

[29] Speer insisted that as many events as possible be held at night, both to give greater prominence to his lighting effects and to hide the overweight Nazis.

These centered on a three-mile-long grand boulevard running from north to south, which Speer called the Prachtstrasse, or Street of Magnificence;[35] he also referred to it as the "North–South Axis".

[36] At the northern end of the boulevard, Speer planned to build the Volkshalle, a huge domed assembly hall over 210 metres (700 ft) high, with floor space for 180,000 people.

At the southern end of the avenue, a great triumphal arch, almost 120 metres (400 ft) high and able to fit the Arc de Triomphe inside its opening, was planned.

In the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, he had been commissioned to renovate the Borsig Palace on the corner of Voßstraße and Wilhelmstraße as headquarters of the Sturmabteilung (SA).

[50] Martin Kitchen described Speer's often repeated line that he knew nothing of the "dreadful things" as hollow—not only was he fully aware of the fate of the Jews, he actively participated in their persecution.

[57] On 8 February 1942, Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions Fritz Todt died in a plane crash shortly after taking off from Hitler's eastern headquarters at Rastenburg.

[76] In occupied areas of the Soviet Union, that had been subject to partisan action, civilian men and women were rounded up en masse and sent to work forcibly in Germany.

[79] Speer and his hand-picked director of submarine construction Otto Merker [de] believed that the shipbuilding industry was being held back by outdated methods, and revolutionary new approaches imposed by outsiders would dramatically improve output.

[100] Nevertheless, Speer believed that Germany should continue the war for as long as possible with the goal of winning better conditions from the Allies than the unconditional surrender they insisted upon.

[101] During January and February, Speer claimed that his ministry would deliver "decisive weapons" and a large increase in armaments production which would "bring about a dramatic change on the battlefield".

[102] Speer gained control over the railways in February, and asked Heinrich Himmler to supply concentration camp prisoners to work on their repair.

Speer provided Hitler with a memorandum on 15 March, which detailed Germany's dire economic situation and sought approval to cease demolitions of infrastructure.

Three days later, he also proposed to Hitler that Germany's remaining military resources be concentrated along the Rhine and Vistula rivers in an attempt to prolong the fighting.

On 23 May, two weeks after the surrender of German forces, British troops arrested the members of the Flensburg Government and brought Nazi Germany to a formal end.

Speer started his “walk” from Berlin and went eastward across the entirety of Eurasia, crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska and then traveled south down the west coast of North America.

[162] Speer, Siedler and Fest had constructed a masterpiece; the image of the "good Nazi" remained in place for decades, despite historical evidence indicating that it was false.

Trevor-Roper – who calls Speer an administrative genius whose basic instincts were peaceful and constructive – does take Speer to task, however, for his failure to recognize the immorality of Hitler and Nazism, calling him "the real criminal of Nazi Germany":[165] For ten years he sat at the very centre of political power; his keen intelligence diagnosed the nature and observed the mutations of Nazi government and policy; he saw and despised the personalities around him; he heard their outrageous orders and understood their fantastic ambitions; but he did nothing.

[150] Adam Tooze in his book The Wages of Destruction said Speer had manoeuvred himself through the ranks of the regime skillfully and ruthlessly and that the idea he was a technocrat blindly carrying out orders was "absurd".

[172] Speer also falsely claimed that he had realised the war was lost at an early stage, and thereafter worked to preserve the resources needed for the civilian population's survival.

[51] In his final statement at Nuremberg, Speer gave the impression of apologizing, although he did not directly admit any personal guilt and the only victim he mentioned was the German people.

[177] In 2005, The Daily Telegraph reported that documents had surfaced indicating that Speer had approved the allocation of materials for the expansion of Auschwitz concentration camp after two of his assistants inspected the facility on a day when almost a thousand Jews were massacred.

[180] In 2007, The Guardian reported that a letter from Speer dated 23 December 1971, had been found in a collection of his correspondence with Hélène Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance fighter.

During the winter of 1941–42, in the light of Germany's disastrous defeat in the Battle of Moscow, the German leadership including Friedrich Fromm, Georg Thomas and Fritz Todt had come to the conclusion that the war could not be won.

[182] The production of armaments did rise; however, this was due to the normal causes of reorganization before Speer came to office, the relentless mobilization of slave labor and a deliberate reduction in the quality of output to favor quantity.

By July 1943 Speer's armaments propaganda became irrelevant because a catalogue of dramatic defeats on the battlefield meant the prospect of losing the war could no longer be hidden from the German public.

No buildings designed by Speer during the Nazi era are extant in Berlin, other than the four entrance pavilions and underpasses leading to the Victory Column, or Siegessäule,[d] and the Schwerbelastungskörper, a heavy load-bearing body built around 1941.

The concrete cylinder, 14 metres (46 ft) high, was used to measure ground subsidence as part of feasibility studies for a massive triumphal arch and other large structures planned within Hitler's post-war renewal project for the city of Berlin as the world capital Germania.

Unsubstantiated rumors have claimed that the remains were used for other building projects such as the Humboldt University, Mohrenstraße metro station and Soviet war memorials in Berlin.