Albert Speer (1905–1981)

Tome of a memoir, an exquisite historical document, and a profound literary achievement. The character sketches provided by Speer are illuminating in terms of insights into human psychology, moral dilemmas that wars bring about, and self-images that all human beings want to leave as their legacy. There are innumerable lines, anecdotes and passages that can keep one intellectually engaged for hours and move to explore further.

But most importantly, it leaves me wondering if it were not for show more those grandeur human tragedies, which are otherwise called by pretty euphemisms such as wars for national glory, liberation through peoples' revolutions or divinely sanctioned religious and racial domination, would we still still have literary masterpieces of such scale? show less

This book is definitely essential reading if you have any kind of interest at all in either WWII, or the agency which individual people can have within a totalitarian system. Inside the Third Reich is a lengthy - in my edition, seven hundred pages, not including notes, bibliography or index - memoir written by Albert Speer, focusing on the years between 1933 and 1945 when he was Hitler's architect, his Minister of Arms and Munitions, and probably one of the closest things Hitler had to a show more friend.

At many points it's not an easy book to read - not because Speer goes into any detail about the mass killings or the conditions in the concentration camps, but because of the detail which he goes into about the construction and requisition projects which formed so much of his work at the time, the repetitive ways in which he documents tea-time with Hitler. In some ways I think this is one of the most important features of the book. You get to see the sheer banality of the regime, the statistics and demographics which make up such a large chunk of the book showing off the bureaucracy of the Third Reich which was not so very different from many other western countries at the time, or since.

His observations on Hitler's personality, his initial hero-worship for him, and his gradual later disillusionment, are truly fascinating to read about. Hitler is shown, not as a madman or as an evil mastermind, but as an actual person; the descent into delusion and denial in later life is made all the more dramatic by how almost-normal he seemed in the earlier part of the book.

Speer does express regret in the book for the crimes which the Nazi regime committed, and for his part in them. This is not something which he came to realise over the course of writing his memoirs - from the Nuremberg trials, we do have footage of him striking his breast and saying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Something, perhaps, of a realisation of the wrongs of the regime had already occurred to him from 1944 on, as shown by his attempts to block some or all of the scorched earth policy which Hitler tried to adopt in the last few desperate months of the war.

However, I find it really and truly hard to believe that Speer was ever truly as naive and unaware as he was presented as being in the book, or that he was devoted to all the aims of Nazism with the exception of its racist ideologies. He certainly wasn't involved directly in any of the mass murder, but he did make use of slave labour in his construction projects and in the munition factories which he ran. He may have been described by others as the 'respectable Nazi'; but respectable or not, he was still a Nazi, who either found the racial policies of the regime acceptable, or capable of being ignored. Perhaps he didn't know; perhaps he didn't want to know, consciously or unconsciously. With an auto-biographical memoir of this nature and on this topic, it is hard to be certain. I think the only thing one can do is to read the book oneself, and make up one's own mind. show less

Did Speer really tell the truth about his past? That question has haunted readers of his memoir Inside the Third Reich. Central to that question is the issue of what he knew about the murder of the Jews and when he knew it. Speer claimed to have learned about the Final Solution only after the war was over--and to have understood its full significance only during the final speech by Britain's chief prosecutor at Nuremberg. That speech, which included graphic descriptions of the show more exterminations, had a devastating effect on Speer. He acknowledged that he felt "personal guilt" for what had happened, and he accepted responsibility for it because he had been part of the Nazi regime. Indeed, he concluded that the Russians were right to demand the death sentence for him. As he put it some 30 years later, "How could we--just we--be allowed to remain alive after that?"

But Speer was allowed to live. His sentence, which surprised many and has been severely criticised, was determined only after significant debate among the judges. At least one of the reasons for his comparatively light sentence was the judgment that Speer had not directly participated in the extermination of the Jews. This seemed implausible at the time because Speer was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime. How could he not have known? But there was no hard evidence linking Speer to the actual extermination policies, and Hitler had always been careful to tell his deputies only what they needed or wanted to know.

Questions about the extent of Speer's knowledge have persisted. Speer spent much of his time in Spandau writing his memoirs. Inside the Third Reich is a second, condensed version of the original 1,500-page Spandau draft. These memoirs have impressed readers with their frankness and honesty, their insightful characterisations of Hitler's inner circle, and their clarity about Speer's repentance. Yet readers have also wondered whether Speer had been fully honest. After comparing the original Spandau draft with the published version, Sereny concludes that Speer adopted an all-too-characteristic strategy of acknowledging some truths while evading others. show less

On the whole this is a surprisingly dull memoir by Speer, Hitler's pet architect and later Minister of Armaments and Munitions for the Nazi regime. Perhaps this has something to do with Speer's dry German temperament, or maybe it just underscores the banality of evil. It's not a case of the author having absolutely nothing interesting to say (for instance, he recalls Hitler scolding Hess for bringing his own specially-prepared vegetarian meal to the Fuehrer's dinner table, and ridicules show more Himmler: "Himmler, on the other hand, obviously was going his own absurd way, which was compounded of beliefs about an original Germanic race, a brand of elitism, and an assortment of health-food notions...When, for example, the Japanese presented him with a samurai sword, he at once discovered kinships between Japanese and Teutonic cults, and called upon scientists to help him trace these similarities to a racial common denominator"), but unless you have a fetish for the minutiae of Nazi architecture, Inside the Third Reich is a bit of a snoozer. Speer was an architect, after all, and has few profound insights to offer about his party's role in history; he admits that he rationalized Hitler's actions, that he exposed himself as little as possible to the horrific reality of his government's racial and eugenics campaigns, and leaves it at that.

Objectively, two and a half stars...but I'll give it three because Speer was actually there. show less