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Tome of a memoir, an exquisite historical document, and a profound literary achievement.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

Read it but seriously keep in mind that Albert Speer is totally full of shit. He wants you to believe that he was the one kind and moralistic soul in Hitlers inner circle and that he had no real idea what was going on with the SS, the concentration camps, and so on. HAHAHA what a joke. Save it for Nuremberg. I'm sure he was arms minister for so long without knowing what was really going on...right. It's cool that he wrote this book to give us all an insight into the weird lives of all these show more nazis but it's a tragedy that he didn't die with the rest of them. show less

I want to keep my distance from a work like this because although I feel Speer is mostly an honest narrator, his clear, somewhat banal account of the Third Reich, Hitler, and his own activities read like a generic memoir, somehow perverting the madness of the time—the destruction, inhuman cruelty, and the quest for absolute power. By giving us this account, Speer affirms that for the most part the atrocities of the the Third Reich were carried out by otherwise normal, almost boring men, show more like himself, who were tasked with a mission and carried it out to the best of their abilities. (Speer affirms this view on page 344, when he talks of an article in The Observer that spoke of him as the leader of a highly efficient, impersonal technocracy.) My fear is that this is not a sufficiently emotional account to teach us anything. It gives us an inside look, yes, but it is so self absorbed that we lose the broader view of the war's effects. We miss the sufferings of millions because we are tangled in Speer's account of day-to-day travels, power struggles within the regime, and the stubborn madness of Hitler.

Could this memoir be anything else? Should it be? Probably not. I just can't help but feel that Speer's last sacrifice should be to accept alienation, where his memoirs, like his architecture, become lost to that time. show less