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ADS in German, signed "Speer," two pages, 8 x 12.5, November 6, 1945. Speer's handwritten application to the Nuremberg tribunal, in part (translated): "I, Albert Speer, hereby request that the court order the production of the following documents for use in my defense: 1) Attachments to the interrogation with Professor Graham concerning 'Self-Responsibility of Industry' (document excerpts); 2) Attachments to the interrogation with Capt. Benson [Economic Warfare, London] concerning 'Questions of Construction'; 3) Document excerpts concerning 'Scorched Earth'; 4) Document excerpts concerning 'The Effects of the Air War and the Land War on Production'; 5) A collection of various transcripts and excerpts, designated 'Collection Folder A.' Camp Dustbin, T.I.A.T. (H.Q. U.S.F.E.T. Main), last known location where these documents are held. Further information for the purpose of locating the documents: the two secretaries, Mrs. Kempf and Miss Magiera (in Camp Dustbin until 25 September 1945), are familiar with the documents."
Camp Dustbin was the Allied interrogation and document-exploitation center at Kransberg Castle, where Speer had already been extensively debriefed by American and British intelligence in the summer of 1945 on the workings of the German war economy. He is asking the tribunal to pull records out of that same interrogation archive, material he knew existed because he had helped generate it himself weeks earlier.
The document then states precisely what each item is meant to establish, and Speer is exact about the legal distinction he is drawing: "Regarding 1 and 2: The official competence, and thereby the responsibility, of the defendant is defined… Regarding 3: The defendant's attitude toward the destruction of industrial installations in Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg, Polish Upper Silesia, Czechoslovakia and other territories, ordered by other agencies, which was prevented as a result. Regarding 4 and 5: Proof that the defendant endeavored, as far as it was possible for him, to prevent hardships in the carrying out of orders issued by Hitler, without regard to his own person or any danger that might result to him from doing so… Regarding 3 to 5: The charges raised in the indictment are (in part) refuted." Backed by lightweight cardstock and in fine condition.
The item numbered 3, the "Scorched Earth" material, points directly to Hitler's Nero Decree of 19 March 1945, which ordered the total destruction of German infrastructure ahead of the advancing Allies. Speer had opposed the order at the time and worked to blunt its execution, and he clearly understood from the outset of his defense that this single episode, more than any other, could be turned into evidence that he had acted against Hitler rather than merely for him. The distinction he draws between "amtliche Kompetenz," official competence, in items 1 and 2, and direct personal risk in items 4 and 5, shows a defendant thinking in the precise categories the tribunal would use to assign guilt, responsibility by position versus responsibility by individual act, before a single witness had been called. It worked. Speer was the only major defendant to accept a measure of responsibility at trial, and the only one convicted primarily on forced-labor charges to escape execution, receiving twenty years instead of the rope.
The scale of what the Nero Decree targeted is worth remembering. Hitler's order called for the destruction of every railway, bridge, canal, power plant, water and gas works, and industrial facility on German soil, the entire infrastructure a defeated population would need to survive the winter and rebuild. Had it been carried out in full, the devastation would have fallen not on the war machine but on the civilians left behind, with consequences that would have shaped the region for a generation. Speer's decision to quietly work against it, and his effort here to document that work for the tribunal, points to one of the more consequential acts of defiance to come out of the regime's final months.
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