Sperrverband crash of his predecessor, Dr Fritz Todt Speer proved exceedingly able, as well as ruthless He singularly helped prolong World War II by putting Germany on a full war economy footing and raising armaments production to its highest peaks in 1943 and 1944 Hitler had delayed mobilizing women into the labor force out of short-war expectations and Nazi ideology Speer made extensive use of female labor, alongside forced laborers imported from all over German-occupied Europe and slave laborers from the concentration camps During the final battle for Berlin he secretly countermanded Hitler’s March 19, 1945, “scorched earth” order to destroy all infrastructure in Germany All Speer’s wartime actions but that latter act brought him before the Nuremberg Tribunal as an accused “major war criminal.” He was the only defendant to plead guilty, possibly as a tactic to avoid a capital sentence; he also insisted that he had no knowledge of the Holocaust, a claim that contributed to lenient treatment and encouraged many other Germans to make the same claim He was sentenced to 20 years He served that time alongside his old boss, Hess, in Spandau prison He was released in 1966 Though oblivious to the moral content of his statement, as he was always to the moral emptiness of the “Third Reich,” Speer once admitted that the only time in his adult life he cried was upon hearing of the death of Adolf Hitler Speer published his war diary and other highly profitable books after he left prison They provide a cold, but unique, first-hand account and insight into the daily operations of the inner circle of the Nazi regime They also helped him masquerade as “the good Nazi” who stood with Hitler only as the means to fulfi ll his dreams as a young architect Documents revealed in 2005 instead showed that Speer was aware of and complicit in mass murder of Jews and other major crimes of the regime, including a “Prof Speer special programme” to expand Auschwitz See also Todt Organization Suggested Reading: Dan van der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer (1997); Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (1970) SPERRLE, HUGO (1885–1953) Luftwaffe field marshal He commanded the Kondor Legion during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Luftflotte during FALL GELB and the Battle of Britain in 1940, and in the first Blitz of London and other cities in the fall and winter of 1940–1941 He fell out of favor with several top Nazis during 1941, but remained in Paris to oversee the ongoing battle with the RAF, and later with the USAAF His fighter force was largely destroyed in the months of Allied build-up and bombing prior to the OVERLORD invasion of Normandy in mid-1944, and played almost no role in defending against the assault He was sacked in August 1944 SPERRVERBAND “Special Blocking Detachment.” Specially designated German units, usually based on mobile Panzer formations, used to bolster defenses on weak fronts or at weak points of fronts By the end of the war Adolf Hitler’s penchant for simply designating such units from partial or broken formation and ordering them into desperate or lost battles assumed a merely paper reality 1023