Speer at headquarters - Todt's portfolio
On 8 February 1942, , the Minister of Armaments and Munitions, dies in the crash of his aircraft shortly after taking off from Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg. Speer, who had arrived the day before, had originally been due to board that very plane before cancelling a few hours earlier.
In the hours that follow, Hitler summons the 36-year-old architect and proposes that he succeed Todt at the head of the Reich's armaments apparatus, as well as the Organisation Todt and all his other technical posts. Speer has never run a factory, nor even fired a shot, and his calling remains architecture and the Germania construction project.
The choice commits his entire trajectory: to take on a crushing industrial burden in the midst of war, to refuse it and remain an architect, or to attempt to negotiate its scope.
Faced with Hitler's offer, which path should Speer choose?
Speer accepts. On 15 February 1942 he is appointed Minister of Armaments and Munitions and head of the Organisation Todt, taking on all of Todt's functions (roads, energy, the Party's technical apparatus). Despite his inexperience, he reorganises war production and drives German armament output upward for two years, resorting massively to forced and concentration-camp labour - which would earn him twenty years in prison at the Nuremberg trial.
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