Albert Speer

Author: Gitta Sereny
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679768122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 802

Book Description
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

Albert Speer

Author: Gitta Sereny
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 816

Book Description
Sereny takes readers through the emotional desert of Speer's childhood and marriage, his architectural co-creation with Hitler, and his service as Minister of Munitions and Armaments, when his brutal use of slave labor extended a lost war. The riveting tale of an extraordinary man who made a stunning Faustian bargain, Speer's story is also an unforgettable study of how good exists with evil. Photos.

Inside the Third Reich

Author: Albert Speer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781857998566
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 832

Book Description
'INSIDE THE THIRD REICH is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates... Speer's full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Fuhrer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic' NEW YORK TIMES

Speer

Author: Martin Kitchen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300216009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Book Description
“Sets the record straight on Albert Speer’s assertions of ignorance of the Final Solution and claims to being the ‘good Nazi.’”—Kirkus Reviews In his bestselling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi Germany, repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of Hitler’s Third Reich. In this revealing new biography, author Martin Kitchen disputes Speer’s lifelong assertions of ignorance and innocence, portraying a far darker figure who was deeply implicated in the appalling crimes committed by the regime he served so well. Kitchen reconstructs Speer’s life with what we now know, including information from valuable new sources that have come to light only in recent years. The result is the first truly serious accounting of the man, his beliefs, and his actions during one of the darkest epochs in modern history, not only countering Speer’s claims of non-culpability but also disputing the commonly held misconception that it was his unique genius alone that kept the German military armed and fighting long after its defeat was inevitable. “A devastating portrait of an empty, narcissistic and compulsively ambitious personality.”—The Wall Street Journal “Kitchen’s exhaustively researched, detailed book nails, one by one, the lies of the man who provided a thick coat of whitewash to millions of old Nazis. Its fascinating account of how the moral degradation of the chaotic Nazi regime corrupted an entire nation is a timely warning for today.”—Daily Mail (“Book of the Month”) “[An] excellent new biography . . . Kitchen has taken a wrecking ball to Speer’s mendacious and meticulously created self-image. And about time, too.”—History Today

Albert Speer

Author: David Edgar
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9781854594853
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
A mighty new play about the Nazi High Command based on Gitta Sereny's book.

Infiltration

Author: Albert Speer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9784871878777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
Albert Speer - gifted architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich - cannot forget. "At seventy-five, decades after the events. I am still haunted by the thought that I could have made decisions in a minute that would have improved the situation of the unfortunate inmates."Although not responsible for the concentration camps, Speer was in charge of the arms produced by the inmates, who were forced into factory work in hellish conditions. Speer set out to tell the story of German armaments in World War II and in his research stumbled across the records of the SS for the period. These included the documents of its chief, Heinrich Himmler, who was determined to infiltrate the war economy with his own people and build an SS industrial empire. Acting with Hitler's consent, Himmler would have made the SS independent of state and party.The insidiousness of the plot was well known to Speer, one of Himmler's targets However, the breadth of Himmler's machinations, the depth of his ruthlessness, the sheer mania of his last-ditch schemes to increase production became a book in themselves.Thus Infiltration is the only-book about the SS written by a high-ranking official within the Third Reich. It is also the most telling portrait of Heinrich Himmler ever written.

Albert Speer—Escaping the Gallows

Author: Adrian Greaves
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1399009540
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, Albert Speer, Hitler’s one-time number two, persuaded the judges that he ‘knew nothing’ of the Holocaust and related atrocities. Narrowly escaping execution, he was sentenced to twenty years in Spandau Prison, Berlin. In 1961, the newly commissioned author, as the British Army Spandau Guard Commander, was befriended by Speer, who taught him German. Adrian Greaves’ record of his conversations with Speer over a three year period make for fascinating reading. While the top Nazi admitted to Greaves his secret part in war crimes, after his 1966 release he determinedly denied any wrongdoing and became an intriguing and popular figure at home and abroad. Following Speer’s death in 1981 evidence emerged of his complicity in Hitler’s and the Nazi’s atrocities. In this uniquely revealing book the author skilfully blends his own personal experiences and relationship with Speer with a succinct history of the Nazi movement and the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing new light is thrown on the character of one of the 20th century’s most notorious characters.

Speer

Author: Joachim C. Fest
Publisher: Harvest Books
ISBN: 9780156028745
Category : Architects
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Albert Speer was an unemployed architect when Hitler came to power in 1933. Soon he was designing the Third Reich's most important buildings. In 1942 Hitler appointed him Armaments Minister and he quadrupled production, an astonishing achievement that kept the German Army in the field and prolonged the war. Yet Speer's life was full of contradictions. The only member of the Nazi elite with whom Hitler developed more than a purely functional relationship (he has even been called "Hitler's unrequited love"), Speer was always an outsider in Hitler's inner circle. He saw himself as an artist, above the crass power struggles of the roughnecks around him. But his enormous ambition blinded him to the crimes in which he played a leading role. Brilliantly illustrated, this gripping account of one man's rise and fall helps explain how Germany descended so far into crime and barbarism.

The Healing Wound

Author: Gitta Sereny
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393323825
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Book Description
"[A]n astonishing, subtle study of many Holocaust perpetrators and participants."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

Spandau

Author: Albert Speer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9784871878791
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 566

Book Description
These prison diaries of Hitler's chief architect and Minister of Armament and War Production couple a record of his 20 year incarceration in Spandau Prison along with Hess, Shirach, Doenitz, et al. with his recollections of the Third Reich.