When he was 28, he recalled, he met Hitler at an early Nazi rally in Berlin and was enthralled by the party leader's plans, particularly for rebuilding Berlin. Speer was born on March 19, 1905, in Mannheim and was trained to be an architect. Speer was one of the few people in postwar Germany to be able to discuss the Hitler period from first-hand experience in the ruling group. In his role as one of the survivors of the Nazi leadership - the only one now living is Rudolf Hess, the 87-year-old former Deputy Fuhrer, still a prisoner at Spandau - Mr. ''Whether I knew or did not know, or how much or how little I knew, is totally unimportant when I consider what horrors I ought to have known about and what conclusions would have been the natural ones to draw from the little I did know,'' he wrote. Speer also dealt with the excuse that he knew little or nothing about the death camps. What is more, by my abilities and energies, I prolonged that war by many months.'' I had participated in a war which, as we of the intimate circle should never have doubted, was aimed at world dominion. ''My moral failure is not a matter of this item or that,'' he wrote in ''Inside the Third Reich.'' ''It resides in my active association with the whole course of events. Most critics praised his candor in writing about the responsibility he bore for the Nazi excesses. A third book, ''Infiltration: The SS and German Armament,'' was published in the United States in July. His first two books - ''Inside the Third Reich'' (1970) and ''Spandau: The Secret Diaries'' (1976) - sold several million copies and made him a rich man.
Speer was released from West Berlin's Spandau prison in 1966 after having completed his 20-year sentence, he made a career of writing his memoirs. There were those who thought he spent the rest of his life trying to expiate the horrors of the concentration camps and slave factories, and others who found his memoirs self-serving, showing the pure technician unmove d by human misery. Speer (the name is pronounced shpair) was the only Nazi leader at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials in 1945-46 to admit his guilt. He was also Hitler's chosen architect and stage designer, who devised plans for grandiose monuments and mass rallies. MONTGOMERYįrom the time he joined the National Socialist Party in 1931, Albert Speer was an important power in Hitler's movement, a dedicated administrator who kept the war machine running with forced labor and incessant planning. Speer was believed to have died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Speer had been taken to the hospital from a London hotel, where he was preparing for a television interview. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, who became Minister of Armaments and War Production in World War II, died today at St.
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