Speer

by Fest, Joachim C.; Osers, Ewald; Dring, Alexandra

• ISBN13: 9780151005567
• ISBN10: 0151005567
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Albert Speer is a great enigma. An unemployed architect when Hitler came to power in 1933, he was soon 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.

Author Biography

Joachim Fest is the author of several widely respected books on Nazi Germany, including The Face of the Third Reich. Following Speer's release from prison in 1966, Fest worked closely with him as the editor of his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Fest lives near Frankfurt.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Preface	xi
Introduction: Questions, Contradictions, and More Questions	1	(10)
Awakening	11	(28)
Within the Inner Circle	39	(27)
Germania: The Capital of the World	66	(28)
Entanglements	94	(33)
Minister and Economic Dictator	127	(33)
Stations of Ambition	160	(33)
Crises and Intrigues	193	(27)
Scorched Earth	220	(32)
End Without End	252	(30)
Judgment at Nuremberg	282	(26)
School for Survival	308	(31)
Conclusion: The Rule and the Exception	339	(18)
Notes	357	(38)
Bibliography	395	(8)
Index	403

Excerpts

Chapter OneAwakeningAny survey of a life inevitably starts at the end. Only when the actor has left the stage do the lines emerge from the tangle of existence to form a picture. Historians are easily tempted to describe as inevitabilities those strange accidents that are no more than part of every life. This applies particularly to figures who rose to the top in the Hitler period. It has been common practice to ferret out particular circumstances in their parental homes that appear to explain their career. A lack of attention, for instance, prevented self-esteem from developing, an authoritarian upbringing engendered submissive attitudes, parental severity led to emotional impoverishment, while excessive parental love produced egotists, and so on. The arbitrary rules of this kind of psychology allowed diametrically opposite conclusions to be drawn from identical states of affairs. A child who was beaten would develop into an aggressive type, and so would one who was never beaten. Ultimately any misdeeds were attributed to the damage done in the parental home. In truth, however, all such statements merely raise the questions to which they purport to be the answers.Albert Speer, born in Mannheim on 19 March 1905, is a perfect illustration of how unpredictable life is. He came from what in his day was a "normal" privileged family, of the haute bourgeoisie. His early years followed the pattern of a regulated and uneventful youth in the provinces. There is hardly anything striking to report about it. His days passed in agreeable lassitude. Nothing upset the pleasant harmony between home and school, with adventure games by the water, sports clubs, and first love. Biographers have dissected many characteristics from the few incidental discoveries made about those years: the unapproachability of Speer's father, the apparent haughtiness of his mother, and the distant relationship between the three brothers were said, more or less, to have led to the second son's lack of emotion and the shyness that was apparent at an early age. But these simple conclusions tell us virtually nothing about how Albert Speer got into Hitler's entourage and then rose to his unique position at the dictator's court.1Like his paternal grandfather, Speer's father was an architect who had made a name for himself with administrative buildings, luxury residences, and villas in the Mannheim area. He had acquired some affluence when, in 1900, he married the daughter of a Mainz merchant, who was descended from Wallenstein's field marshal, von Pappenheim, and who although a forester's son had become a successful entrepreneur. With typical circumspection Speer's father had invested his new wealth mainly in houses and building plots well beyond Mannheim's city limits, all the way to Heidelberg.Speer grew up in an upper-middle-class world with the constraints typical of his day. His socially ambitious mother never quite got over having had to leave "golden Mainz" only to be maroon

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Excerpted from Speer: The Final Verdict by Joachim C. Fest
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