Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth

I had already been introduced to Gitta Sereny when I read her chilling account of the Nazi commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, in “Into That Darkness.” But this biography of Albert Speer was an achievement of a considerably higher order and the crown of her career as a journalist-historian. Speer is easily the most intriguing and disquieting of the high officials in the Third Reich. By his own admission, he should have been hanged along with the 10 who were sentenced to death at the main Nuremberg trial. One can only assume the judges were seduced into giving him a 20-year sentence instead because of his intelligence and apparent remorse. Speer served his sentence and then enjoyed an additional 15 years of freedom, during which he became a phenomenally successful author. Gitta Sereny befriended him and challenged him over the course of many interviews to confront the central truth of his life: that, despite his protestations, he knew of the scope of the Holocaust as it was happening and did nothing. It makes for riveting reading and the story of Speer’s life and of the Third Reich of which he was such a key figure would be incomplete without this towering book. I’ve read it three times and probably will again. — Chris

Synopsis from online sources:

Albert Speer was not only Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, but the Fuhrer’s closest friend — his “unhappy love.” Speer was one of the few defendants at the Nuremberg Trials to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even as he denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Now this enigma of a man is unveiled in a monumental biography by a writer who came to know Speer intimately in his final years. Out of hundreds of hours of interviews, Sereny unravels the threads of Speer’s personality: the genius that made him indispensable to the German war machine, the conscience that drove him to repent, and the emotional wounds that made him susceptible to Hitler’s lethal magnetism. Read as an inside account of the Third Reich, or as a revelatory unsparing yet compassionate study of the human capacity for evil, “Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth” is a triumph.

“Fascinating … Not only a major addition to our knowledge of the Third Reich, but a stunning attempt to understand the nature of good and evil.” — Newsday

“More than a biography … It also constitutes a perceptive re-examination of the mysterious appeal of Adolf Hitler.” — San Francisco Chronicle