Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is a tough slog, but well worth the effort. The writing is meticulous and contains all the information that one would expect from a biography of Speer, but its purpose is both more narrow and more profound than telling the story of one life.

This book is about a man who facilitated the greatest atrocities of the last century. He alone among Hitler's inner circle owned up to being party to a henious crime. But he couldn't quite commit to living in the full truth of what he knew.

Speer was spared the noose at Nuremberg because there wasn't enough evidence to prove that he knew about the murder of six million Jews. He was sentenced to and served 20 years at Spandau for the us of slave labor on his construction projects. That leniency may have been influenced by his decison to countermand Hitler's orders to implement a scorched earth policy as the allies advanced on Berlin. That decision saved many lives and the post-war miracle of West Germany's recovery might not have happened if he didn't take those steps. But that's the second most significant storyline of Speer's life.

Sereny goes to great lengths to prove how it was almost certain that Speer knew that Jews were being murdered on an industrial scale. Speer concedes that he could have known and even should have known, but he strenously denied active knowledge of the final solution.

What's really something about the story is that Speer managed to alienate almost everyone with his stances. It's difficult for most to accept his quasi-denial of knowledge aforethought of the Holocaust. It was equally difficult for Germans of his class and generation to accept Speer's admission that he should have done more to prevent Hitler's crimes.

Although he strenously avoided condeming the German people with Hitler's crimes, he was able to acknowledge that as part of the senior leadership of Nazi Germany, he shared in the collective guilt of those crimes.

There are lots of great anecdotes about his fellow prisoners at Spandau and the unimaginable difficulties of his family. But the narrative always comes back to the myster of what Speer knew and when he knew it. And the post script puts this enormous life into very human context.



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