peas

A rerun from 2008:

Of all defendants, only Albert Speer [1905-1981] admitted guilt at the Nuremberg Trials. 

On how he knew the Reich was losing: "The glorious victories of the Fatherland were coming ever closer to Berlin."

Speer received a 20-year jail sentence for war crimes; for a while he slept most of the day to cut his awake time substantially until the prison authorities became aware of what he was up to.

He filled a coat pocket with peas and would transfer one to an empty pocket to keep track of each lap around the path in the modest prison garden he tended. Through prison atlases and other books, Speer imagined that he was covering interesting foreign landscapes and calculated that he had walked around the earth at least once.

A source for some of this information is Albert Speer's own Spandau: The Secret Diaries, which was written in scraps and secretly smuggled out by guards and published ten years after his release in 1976.

Junior

"Largely in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing is building six new subway lines, a 43-kilometer light-rail system, a new airport terminal [the world's largest of course], 25 million square kilometers of property, a 125-kilometer 'green belt,' and a 12-square-kilometer Olympic Park. When looking at the models of a new Beijing, one inevitably thinks of Albert Speer's grandiose plans for postwar Berlin, drawn up in the 1940s; in fact, Albert Speer Jr., the son, also an architect, designed the 8-kilometer boulevard that will run from the Forbidden Palace to the Olympic Park. He sees no real comparison between the transformation of Bejing and his father's designs for Hitler. This is 'bigger,' he says. 'Much bigger.'"

- Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World, p.90

An earlier reference to Speer here.

Hitler's Architect

Of all defendants, only Albert Speer [1905-1981] admitted guilt at the Nuremberg Trials.

On how he knew the Reich was losing: "The glorious victories of the Fatherland were coming ever closer to Berlin." 

Speer received a 20-year jail sentence for war crimes; for a while he slept most of the day to cut his awake time substantially until the prison authorities became aware of what he was up to. 

He filled a coat pocket with peas and would transfer one to an empty pocket to keep track of each lap around the path in the modest prison garden he tended. Through prison atlases and other books, Speer imagined that he was covering interesting foreign landscapes and calculated that he had walked around the earth at least once. 

A source for some of this information is Albert Speer's own Spandau: The Secret Diaries, which was written in scraps and secretly smuggled out by guards and published ten years after his release in 1976.