What were Albert Speer's specialties, and how did he apply them when he led Organisation Todt?
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Speer was fortunate in that the gains in the early months of his administration were mostly due to decisions that had been taken under the previous minister. That gave him some time to simplify and streamline the processes of his ministry, and to get the industries he was in charge of better organised.
His training had been as an architect, which had given him a background in running complicated building projects. This was applicable, to some extent, to running much larger organisations. He was pretty intelligent, not so beholden to vested interests as many Nazi politicians, and he had Hitler's backing. Basically, he was better at running a large centralised organisation.
Sources: Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, and Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-45.
Addendum: the German Official History, Germany and the Second World War, volume V / IIA has a lot more on Speer's methods, successes and limitations. That's part IIA (which is a large book in itself) of "volume" V of the overall history.
Upvote:2
Speer wrote a couple of books. Also Gitta Sereny wrote a biography of Speer. In neither of those books Speer explains in detail what he did.
Basically he explains that he centralized the requirements of human labor and raw materials that each industry demanded. So they distributed according to the importance of each industry. Therefore, they didn't change the way the companies worked, it was only logistics intervention.
Upvote:3
Albert Speer had an eclectic background. He was an architect, but took his degree at a technical school, which is to say that he had a better engineering background than most.
As an architect, he designed several "political" buildings including the Chancellary, which won him the personal favor of Hitler. As a result, his next major assignment was an inspector in the city of Berlin, which gave him wide exposure to the industrial process. Shortly afterward, he conducted time and labor specialization studies that bore some resemblance to those of America's Frederick Taylor.
When Hitler asked Speer to take over the German armaments program, he had the benefit of this "industrial engineering" training, as well as Hitler's trust, which meant that Hitler interfered far less with Speer's decisions than with others. Speer reorganized the arms industry along quasi-American lines, and came up with a pale version of America's mass production machine.
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