Speer trained as an architect and joined the Nazi Party in 1931. Hitler commissioned him to design the Reich Chancellery and the party rally grounds at Nuremberg, and in 1937 appointed him General Building Inspector for Berlin, a post in which he was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes in the city. His built work is stripped classicism at a scale calculated for massed ranks: ashlar limestone facing, unmoulded pilaster ranges, axes hundreds of metres long. In February 1942 he became Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Very little of the architecture was ever finished — the Reich Chancellery was demolished after the war and the Berlin plans were never built — so the Nuremberg grandstands, themselves mutilated, are among the few surviving fragments.
