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.
