Speer: Hitler's Architect

by Martin Kitchen

In his best-selling 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, challenging the portrait presented by earlier biographers and by Speer himself of a cultured technocrat devoted to his country while completely uninvolved in Nazi politics and crimes. 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.

Genres: History, Biography, World War II, Germany, Audiobook, Holocaust, Nonfiction

442 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2015

About the author

Martin Kitchen is a British-Canadian historian, specialized in modern European history, with an emphasis on Germany. Professor Emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University, he started teaching in 1966. He also taught at the Cambridge Group for Population Studies (Cambridge University).

Reviews

[David Bivans · Rating 1 out of 5]

I suspect most of the other reviewers did not actually read the book. The author novelizes almost everything in this book, make wildly baseless accusations, and even appears to believe he can read the minds of everyone involved. It is the most unprofessional historical book I have ever read in my life. Im astonished that the publisher allowed this to get past the editor.

[David Corleto-Bales · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few Nuremburg defendants to avoid the gallows, Albert Speer, architect to the Third Reich and Hitler's minister of armaments from 1942 to the end of the war is reexamined here and revealed to have known a great deal more about the atrocities of the Nazi regime than he ever admitted to. Often lionized and admired as the "Good Nazi", Martin Kitchen points out how that contradiction in terms is overwhelmingly inaccurate in his portrayal of Speer as an ambitious social climber privy to crimes of the Nazis but mostly indifferent; (he served 20 years in prison and after release in 1966 wrote several best-selling books, the best known among them, "Inside the Third Reich."

[George · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have made a comment under David Bivans (1 star) review. What I added to his review is that the author - a history professor - describes Speer's lawyer as asking him questions in "cross examination"!
I suspect a lot readers who haven't had the benefit of a legal education or even a tertiary education know the difference between an examination-in-chief and a cross examination just by watching courtroom dramas on TV.
It makes one wonder about a lot of assertions the author makes in the rest of the book and it is a poor reflection on the editing. And this book is a bore! I have read a great deal about Speer, the Nazi regime and the Nuremberg trials. I do not recommend this book and I'm glad I borrowed it from the library, but I do recommend Gitta Sereny's: Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth.

[Gayle · Rating 3 out of 5]

As interesting but shorter than Gitta Serreny's "Albert Speer: His Battler with Truth", this book strips bare Albert Speer's claim not to have known what was really going on from 1933-45. Long story short, the Nuremburg Tribunal and the reading public of 1970s were taken in by Speer's acceptance of responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. He accepted responsibility but not guilt which, legally, was a very clever move. He thereby escaped the noose but not prison - which he did expect to escape as well. In the 1970s, when Speer's "Inside the Third Reich" came out, people believed his tale of being an apolitical artist and he was considered the "Good" Nazi. Martin Kitchen lays out the evidence that there is no way that Speer's organizational accomplishments would have been possible without the brutal use of slave labor. He also presents proof that Speer knew about what was going on at Auschwitz and other extermination camps.

What is almost as hard to accept as that the readers were duped by this man is the fact that Speer was cold in his familial relationships. He made certain that supporters contributed to his family's upkeep while he was in prison. This fund was called the Tuition Account. The truth is that he had a significant fortune of ill-gotten gains squirrelled away.

[John Vandike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read most of Albert Speer's books (Inside the Third Reich, Infiltration, and the Spandau Diaries) along with most of the biographies of the man (The Good Nazi, Fest's Albert Speer, and Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth). And I'll admit a bit of fascination with the man who is sometimes referred to as "Hitler's only friend" and the technocrat that (somewhat) accepted the mantle of guilt for the crimes of the Third Reich, though the latter as much at arm's length as possible.

So I came to Kitchen's new biography looking for some new perspectives on one of the most important technocrats of the twentieth century. Kitchen obliges us familiar with Speer by covering his youth in only the lightest of detail. In fact, by page 29 of a book that runs to 377 pages (excluding the endnotes), we find ourselves at Speer's original commissions for the Nazi party where his "cathedral of ice" concept where dozens of aircraft search lights are pointed upwards to convert Nazi Party Rallies into something closer to a religious experience. And he sweeps us along to the beginning of World War II and Speer's rise from an architect to the Minister of Armaments after the death of Fritz Todt in a plane crash.

Anyone who has not read much, or even anything, on Albert Speer will find Kitchen's work adequate to providing a depthy study of Albert Speer.

Those who have read either Speer own books or biographies Kitchen's narration of Speer's role in WWII tends to be a bit more focused on how Speer fudged armament production numbers and played statistical gains to continue to ingratiate himself to the Fuhrer. Kitchen also examines Speer's personal relationships with Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, who Speer himself had been careful to distance himself from in his own autobiographical works. Finally, Kitchen takes a much more critical view of Speer through the Nuremburg trials, his years in Spandau, and finally his long post-prison life than Fest and Sereny (who interestingly were heavily associated with Speer during the editing of his autobiographical works, which he suggest strongly colored their perspectives).

Though there are no startling revelations, Kitchen's prose reads fairly easily. With his more critical perspective of Speer and his recent biographers, he provides a counterpoint to much of what I had read about Speer. While he certainly did pull off an 'Armaments Miracle', it was not so great as Speer made it out to be. His relationships with Himmler and his knowledge of the Holocaust were much closer than many thought. But, possibly most interesting is Kitchen's view that Speer was fundamentally a hollow man, his happiest times seeming to have been his 20 years in Spandau prison, with mostly Speer himself to keep him company.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read several other books on Speer, so I had to read this one. For those that may be interested in it, it contains very little of his personal life. It concentrates on a great deal of administrative wrangling between Speer and his colleagues, before and after the war. The author gives somewhat of a contrast between Speer as the man wanted to be portrayed to the world, and many of his contradictory acts. The author starts out in a very sneering biased tone, but then seems to lose that to a degree as he gets lost in detail. The conclusion seems rather to point up the contradictions of the man, from Speer's own point of view rather than the condemnation with which it began. Almost as if the author had started with a bias and while not losing it, had less conviction. Given the author had discussed some of the, by now, well known lies Speer told, this felt odd to me and the ending felt rather weak. I think the book could have used another rewrite, to bring the details into accord with the ending. It seems everyone in contact with Speer has their vision somewhat clouded by Speer's rendering of his past. Not that even Speer himself entirely believes this rendering (unlike some psychopaths, he does not entirely believe his own rendition of his history) but he seems good enough that even those who know better as well, come across as less condemning than perhaps they should be. The author regards him as essentially morally hollow, but Speer puts on such a good front, that he manages to get somewhat of a pass based on his outward characteristics such as wealth, looks, manner and facile if shallow arguments. Speer certainly put those abilities to good use, using them, no doubt to launch him with Hitler, to save himself at Nurenburg and to become extremely popular as an author and interviewee post his release. I would have liked a chapter or two of his story after his death because the book ends abruptly. Having so assiduously accumulated wealth at the expense of almost everyone, it would have been nice to see how he disposed of it in his will. Did he leave it to his largely estranged family? Give it to charity? Did embarrassing treasures come to light? What about his buying up of the plots of land take from evicted Jews? Did any of that get restored? And what of the revelations that came out after his death - how did they change the image Speer had so carefully built of himself? The book ends too abruptly to me with the story somewhat incomplete. Again the book has a wealth of detail in the bulk of the manuscript, but to me, the ending felt as hollow as the man himself

[Amarillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Speer is a slimy little Nazi

[Bobby Daugherty · Rating 1 out of 5]

The repeated insistence by the author that Speer and Hitler had a pseudo-homoerotic relationship wears thin and some of the dates and information is off by years.

[Schvenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book about a dangerous man. When I was younger, I watched the TV mini-series "Inside the Third Reich" in which Rutger Hauer played the role of Albert Speer, who portrayed him as the mythical "good Nazi" and I bought into the lie, mainly because I thought it was impossible that wartime Germany could have existed without resistance at every level. As I got older, I realized that this fabrication of Speer was a carefully orchestrated persona that hid something far more sinister. A read of "The Nuremburg Trials" confirmed my suspicions and I therefore searched to find something much more specific regarding the life of Albert Speer, in order to fill in the gaps that were created by my understanding of this man. This book completed this in spades.

Albert Speer is the scariest of the entire regime. He was talentless, ruthless, dishonest to the core, callous, manipulative and opportunistic. He took full advantage of the opportunities the evil empire that created him presented and many it did not, and rose to the top. He never felt any guilt for his crimes, because he was a sociopath, incapable of doing so. After the war, he careful manufactured a public persona to demonstrate an outward appearance of contrition, but this was so thinly veiled that it took very little to reveal his true intentions. He was evil because he didn't care. He encouraged and knowingly took full advantage of slave labour. He even complained that the concentration camps were too luxurious. He stole, made up all his production numbers, took credit for everyone else's work and actually accomplished nothing that was the result of his own efforts. It's men like Albert Speer that are far scarier than Hitler or the rest of his upper echelons, because those monsters were readily recognizable. Speer hid in plain sight.

I highly recommend reading this book, to pull back the curtain on the public illusion he created of himself.

[Elaine Booth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satisfying rake over the coals

This book further opened my eyes to the myth of Albert Speer. Years ago I read Speer's memoir of his imprisonment at Spandau and the faint distaste of his story stayed with me. Something about his so called guilt and angst didn't quite pass the sniff test. Gitta Sereny's book on Speer opened the door on his guilt and inherent dirty nature just a little more but left unsaid his more glaring amorality. It is noted that there are disturbing but unsurprising parallels in politics and governments in the present day. Authoritarianism is on an alarming rise, and no one seems to be aware of it. Politicians are more interested in feathering their own nests than advocating for the people they represent. They are drunk with power as Albert Speer was. It's repulsive. We have learned nothing.

[Laurence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wolf in sheep's clothing.

Speer's reputation after WW2 is fairly positive as a pragmatic intelligent organiser who although high in the chain of command and on a very personal basis with Hitler was categorically, not evil.

Kitchen's book makes the argument that this positive perception is due to a clever post war spin campaign orchestrated by Speer, who effectively positioned himself as a rather charming penitent who was not directly responsible for atrocities. Speer pushed the blame on Hitler and the rest of his inner circle, he was not aware. Not Speer. He's an artist who has a penchant for organisation, not responsible or complicit in mass murder.

I find Kitchen's evidence very persuasive. That Speer pulled the wool over the eyes of the Nuremburg court and subsequent allied staff at various levels. I've not read Speer's own writing but it is clear this and other interviews with journalists is how he built his clean reputation, reinforced during the Cold War (which of course adds another layer of complication) and unfortunately I think this reputation remains popular today. Kitchen even makes a case that actually Speer's reputation as a genius for war production may also have been more evidence of Speer's manipulation of facts.

This more critical biography showing that he was actually quite aware and more than involved in the atrocities of WWII. Far from the innocent, 'Good Nazi', after all.

[Roberta Westwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good

I wasn’t very familiar with Speer, aside of him being Hitler’s architect, so this definitely gave me a broader picture. Interesting that much in his biographies has bern debunked. He can’t claim not to have blood on his hands. Overall though, I got a lot more background on the goings on inside Germany during WWII from listening, so that was the real bonus for me. Lots of information on how extensive the manufacturing of aircraft was going on, at breakneck speed, right into 1945. It was phenomenal, yet they were building lower performing planes as they were faster to finish. The simultaneous (yet futile) efforts to rebuild rail lines and fuel distribution added another layer.

I did not like the chapter titling though, just numbers, and many chapters longer than an hour, so with no PDF accompaniment, it would be hard, if not impossible, to go back and re-listen to a segment.

[David Bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find it hard to imagine anyone coming to this book who has not read Speer’s autobiography first, with the question in mind, can Speer be trusted?

Because its engagement with Speer’s own account is intermittent, this volume represents a lost opportunity: the research of the last couple of decades would allow for a more nuanced take on Speer’s deceptions than was available for van der Vat, even if the broad outline remains similar. But there is no consistent effort to distinguish the various strata of information, contemporary with the war, from the Spandau notes, Speer’s publications, or his interviews. The narrative leaps forward and backward in ways that undercuts understanding of the evolving deception.

The major innovation is a deconstruction of Speer’s performance as Minister.

[Mary Christensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed and data driven look at Speer's account of himself, especially his book, Inside the Third Reich, and other factual data and sources. Kitchen could have written an easier account to read, had he been willing to take more license and freedom in using his intuition. Perhaps it would have been better if he had concentrated more on a few telling events or responses of Speer's, rather than creating a whole historical record because it was long and wrote about details that I didn't think were necessary. Even so, for a WWII historian who is trying to understand how the Nazis could get away with wholesale destruction without compunction, this will be very helpful.

[Chet Slonina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book on Albert Speer gives insight as one of Hitler's top cronies in the Third Reich. A man who was one of the main characters who believes and lives for the Third Reich. Yes. I did finish the book and am always perplexed on such individual's that are so highly motivated when things are in their favor and so disavowing when not. as you read, you be the judge of a man pivotal in history and if bias and contradictions portray the man from the myth.

[Alexander J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Speer was a real fucker. One of those monsters of history who totally dodged karma. It’s also a fascinating story on an organizational level. Gives good insight into the intrigues of the third Reich. It’s so wild how significant the say so of a single tyrant can be, Speer basically became economic supremo with a bunch of executive orders. His work in the arms industry was impressive, but the main result of that impressive work was prolonging WWII.

[Armando Mejia Moheyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comentarios

Tiene mucha información y detalles pero a mi parecer trata desde el principio de establecer que fue un criminal de guerra como miembro de la camarilla íntima de hitler, y no deja de incriminarlo,a su vez creo también que se entromete en cuestiones de arte y arquitectura que no se ve el motivo, en conclusión: es para definir un mejor conocimiento del personaje pero como expuse antes la idea es mostrarlo culpable y
miembro activo del clan íntimo de hitler .

[Mikołaj Florczak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Przydałoby się dołączenie fotografii omawianych projektów architektonicznych czy przykładów styli architektonicznych, do których odnosi się autor.

[Kelly Korby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book. The author makes Speer out to be either completely evil, or a bumbling fool

[Kostadis Roussos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great boon to my life.

[Monika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not easy book to read, but good read for people who want to know a bit more about Nazis.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Used for my History IA

[Dan LeSeure · Rating 4 out of 5]

His premise is sound: Speer was more Nazi than he pretended to be after the war. This is very detailed but also repetitive. Would be improved by some pruning.

[Coleman]

This is worth reading if you want a different perspective on Albert Speer.

I have read Inside the Third Reich followed by Gitta Sereny's biography of Speer. I recommend reading them in the same order that I did. In the first, Speer defends every single action he took or didn't take. Sereny peels back multiple layers of the Speer defense.

The Kitchen book takes the entire opposite approach of Speer. He makes a convincing case that Speer was overwhelmingly guilty of all crimes and deserved to be shot (during his hanging, preferably). Kitchen often gets off topic and is so overcome with hatred for Speer (justifiably so) that he often cannot complete making a point he is attempting to prove. He jumps around the timeline and it would be too confusing for the amateur.

Overall it is great and I am glad i read it. I would prefer more polish and panache. It is often difficult to follow.

Speer deserves the trial he never received at Nuernberg - this book is a good starting point for such a case.

[Guy Tellem · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most important and frightening lesson promoted in this very thorough research is that catastrophes are made possible by normative, talented and educated individuals, the ones that don't necessarily stand out in the crowd, no less than by the crazy charismatic vocal ones.

[MinhTu Thomas Hoang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for HSC Modern History’s works. Martin Kitchen’s book not only challenges the view of Speer as a creative architecture and a brilliant organiser but also exposes the extend of his ruthlessness as an opportunist & careerist within Nazi regime. The final chapter, “The Good Nazi”, is especially captivating in its discussing in-depth of how the man claimed to be apolitical managed to make a fortune out of his intimate relationship with the Fuhrer. Although the details of Speer’s involvement in issues of the Jew Flats and the Final Solution are extremely plausible, I personally think that Martin Kitchen has played down his archivements as Hitler’s favourite architect and the Minister of War Production.