Albert Speer, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals in the world, was finally captured on the morning of May 23, 1945. He was standing in one of the bathrooms of a friend’s castle, Schloss Glücksburg, near Flensburg, in north Germany. Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral D?nitz, had by now moved his new government from Eutin to Flensburg, which was located just a few miles from the Danish border. Speer, a D?nitz cabinet member, had been making the daily six-mile drive from Schloss Glücksburg to the new government’s headquarters. The way Speer told the story of his capture, he had been shaving when he heard the sounds of heavy footsteps and loud orders being delivered in English. Sensing that the end of his freedom had arrived, Speer opened the bathroom door a little, his face half-covered in shaving cream, and saw the British soldiers standing there.
“Are you Albert Speer, sir?” a British sergeant asked.
“Yes, I am Speer,” he answered in English.
“Sir, you are my prisoner,” the sergeant said.
Speer got dressed and packed a bag. Outside on the castle lawn, a unit of British soldiers with antitank guns had surrounded Schloss Glücksburg. Speer was arrested and taken away.
By the time the British arrested Speer, American officials had known for nearly two weeks where he had been hiding out. Speer’s previous eleven days in the castle had been spent in discussions with American officials with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). The head of that organization, Paul Nitze, had managed to be the first person in an international manhunt to track down Albert Speer. Nitze considered Speer his most desired intelligence target, and on May 12, 1945, he boarded his DC-3 from where he was stationed in London and headed to Castle Glücksburg “before you could say ‘knife,’ ” Nitze recalled after the war. Because Flensburg was in the British zone of control, it was the British who needed to arrest Albert Speer. Until then, Nitze, an American, felt at liberty to get as much information from Speer as he could. “We were looking for absolutely vital information and knowledge and he was literally the only person in Germany who was in a position to provide it,” Nitze recalled years later.
Specifically, Nitze’s organization wanted to know which Allied bombing campaigns had proved the most devastating against Germany during the war. America was still at war with the Japanese, and the USSBS believed Speer could provide them with information that might help America defeat them. Nitze was joined at the castle by two of his colleagues, George Ball and John Kenneth Galbraith. For the next eleven days the three men questioned Speer. From inside an elegant sitting room wallpapered in red and gold brocade, the men discussed which Allied bombing campaigns had done the most damage to Nazi Germany and which had had the least effect. Of particular interest to Nitze, Ball, and Galbraith was how the Reich’s armaments industry had been able to hold out for so long. Speer explained that at his initiative the majority of the Reich’s weapons facilities had been moved underground. These weapons complexes had proved to be impervious to even the heaviest bombing campaigns. They were engineering triumphs, their construction spearheaded largely by Franz Dorsch and Speer’s deputy Walter Schieber, Speer said. Speer’s secretary, Annemarie Kempf, took notes. The only interruption was when the cook for the castle summoned everyone for lunch.
Speer did not mention that his deputy, SS-Brigadeführer Schieber, a chemist, also worked with Speer in chemical weapons production; that would be opening up a can of war crimes–related worms. The Americans were not interested in pressing Speer about his involvement in war crimes, and Speer was certainly not offering up any incriminating evidence against himself. Mostly he boasted about his ministry’s feats. George Ball recalled that only once, maybe twice, during the USSBS questioning was Speer asked about the concentration camps. “I asked him what he knew about the extermination of the Jews. He said he couldn’t comment because he hadn’t known about it, but he added that it was a mistake not to have found out,” Ball told Speer’s biographer, Gitta Sereny, after the war.