Gumby posted:

I think Speer was a pretty slimy guy who was very good at ingratiating himself into various groups and who knew what people wanted to hear. His defenses included "I didn't know what was going on," "I knew what was going on but tried to keep my head down," "I once tried to kill Hitler, honest," and "I feel really bad about the Holocaust but I didn't know what was going on until you just told me about it." He was a good-looking and charming guy who knew how to use those qualities.
I've read Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction, which is the go-to book for this subject, but it was a few years ago. From what I remember, Hitler drove up production through military spending, fudged numbers to falsely declare full employment, threw unemployed people into labor camps, and overheated the economy to the point that his Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht started to freak out about inflation. Schacht was eventually dismissed, and thrown into Dachau after it was found out that Schacht had become a member of the resistance.

Germany's international economic problem was a lack of foreign currency with which to import goods, which Tooze goes into in some great detail.