Spandau; The Secret Diaries

New York: Pocket Books, 1977. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Mass market paperback. Very good. xiv, 514 pages. Footnotes. Illustrations. Index. Albert Speer (1905-1981), Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming the office of Minister of Armaments and War Production for Germany during World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931. His architectural skills made him prominent within the Party, and he became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler commissioned him to design and construct structures including the Reich Chancellery and the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg. In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for Berlin. He was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes. In 1942, Speer was appointed as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. He promoted himself as having performed an armaments miracle that was credited with keeping Germany in the war. In 1944, Speer established a task force to increase production of fighter aircraft. It became instrumental in exploiting slave labor for the German war effort. Speer was among the 24 "major war criminals" at the Nuremberg trials. He was found guilty of war crimes, principally for the use of slave labor. He used his prison writings for two autobiographical books, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Speer constructed an image of himself as a man who deeply regretted having failed to discover the monstrous crimes of the Third Reich. He continued to deny explicit knowledge of, and responsibility for the Holocaust. He served as Hitler's architect, the undisputed master of the German war machine, and the one responsible for conscripted foreign labor in the Third Reich. And, when Albert Speer was captured and sentenced at Nuremberg--after becoming the only defendant to plead guilty--he started keeping this secret diary, much of it on toilet paper. After 20 years of imprisonment, he found 25,000 of the smuggled pages waiting for him, and from those entries he shaped this deeply powerful document. "Albert Speer's book is a deeply moving document. It is also of extraordinary political and psychological interest...a must for anyone interested in psychological motivation of political action and the problem of guilt and repentance. But, beyond this it is so fascinatingly written that I could not put it down before I finished it." --Erich Fromm. Derived from a Kirkus review: Albert Speer spent 20 years, from 1946 to 1966, as a Nuremberg war criminal in Berlin's Spandau prison. Despite having to write this diary on the sly, he was extremely well treated. In jail Speer quickly lost interest in the outside world: in 1953 he records that he has never wondered what East Germany is like. He maintains his upper-middle-class, faintly ironic character in all its "normality" as Americans and Germans constantly try to get him released. The diaries add to Speer's impressions of Hitler, the Third Reich, and art. He makes it clear that he was never a technocrat, but a romantic reactionary with a knack for organizing wartime needs and an underlying contempt for humanity. Speer is often viewed as the closest thing to a "good Nazi," a dazzled architect who became a patriotic military overseer. He admits that he was the "employer of an army of slaves". He also remarks that Hitler didn't go "beyond the norms of European history" except for the Jews, and Speer himself was no anti-Semite. His self-presentation as an urbane professional betrayed by his emotional confidence in Hitler may lull some readers into forgetting his complicity in genocide. But the book itself is a remarkable document for psychological speculation and attention is inevitable.