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Jonah

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Jonah is Currently Reading

Jonah is currently reading

一句顶一万句

by Liu Zhenyun

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Apr 08, 2026 03:03PM

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红高粱家族

by Mo Yan

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Apr 07, 2026 05:24AM

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Inside the Third Reich

by Albert Speer

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Jonah said: " I am only a third through and have not had the time to get through the rest for a while, but am writing a review first lest I forget. I may revise this again in the future. Maybe take this with a pinch of salt then.

I found this book interesting for I am only a third through and have not had the time to get through the rest for a while, but am writing a review first lest I forget. I may revise this again in the future. Maybe take this with a pinch of salt then.

I found this book interesting for two main reasons. First, for the fact that it gives a unique insight into what Hitler was like in his inner circle, something Speer was privy to. Speer met Hitler only shortly before the latter's ascendency to power and so we know little of his early years, but the book is littered with fascinating anecdotes of life around Hitler the Reichführer. One of my favourites is Hitler's regular dinner and movie nights at the Obersalzburg. According to Speer these occurred almost daily for a period of time and would start early in the evening, during which Hitler often went on long monologues about past achievements or rants about political opponents (sometimes egged on by Bormann). After dinner came the movies which would play until about midnight, followed by further monologues from Hitler in a private lounge with only close inner circle members that would stretch to as late as 2-3 in the morning. As Hitler was not a morning person, he would get up at close to noon and spend the rest of the day thinking in his study or poring over architectural plans with Speer. You can imagine then how little work Hitler got done and how this stood in contrast to his public image as an ambitious, well-intentioned leader working tirelessly for the German folk. When we look at some world leaders today perhaps it is not so surprising to mention these qualities in the same breath. Speer provides many more anecdotes that seriously calls into question Hitler's fitness to lead even before the war began. He was lazy, exceptionally vain and overconfident, prone to making instinctual rather than informed decisions, and had little appetite for criticism, all that combined with a supreme sense of destiny and absolute authority over the land made for a potent cocktail that would years later claim the lives of millions.

The second and maybe more interesting is that the book should never have existed at all; given what we know now about Speer it is not controversial at all to say that he should have hanged with the rest of his colleagues. This book was not only the result of 20 years of reflection but also meticulous planning in Spandau prison. It is the very cornerstone of the 'Speer myth' and the lies he later propagated. This in itself should render the book highly unreliable as a source of historical knowledge, yet it is instructive in the ways in which guilty men sometimes try to justify or even rewrite their own history. Speer takes great pains to reference his love for and expertise in architecture across the book, and all too often the reader is confronted with mundane building dimensions and architectural conjectures. We are presented with the image of a falsely modest and apolitical architectural genius who, after a chance encounter with Hitler in 1933, gets swept unwittingly into the corridors of power. He was, we are led to believe, first an architect then begrudgingly a Nazi. Yet even some of his architectural claims have been either debunked or thrown into doubt in light of recent evidence. Speer's "theory of ruin value" was not invented by him as he so claimed, and he did not complete the (at that time) new Berlin Chancellory within a year from scratch - the site was already razed before work had even begun. He also presents himself as a passive bystander to the events of the Kristallnacht which barely received a mention, and certainly no mention was made of how he was responsible for the eviction of thousands who were sent to concentration camps nor of his use of slave labour. In reading this book readers must take extra effort to balance Speer's claims with cross reference against modern evidence and keep in mind the revisionist agenda of the book.

As far as the reading of the book goes, the translation is smooth and reads well, though I find the book (so far) unnecessarily long and littered with too many mundane, uninteresting facts about architecture. The first third of the book covers Speer's life up until the war begins in 1939 with the occupation of Poland and Bohemia and it is probable that things get more interesting later on as we move into the thick of the war. ...more "

Apr 12, 2024 03:22AM · see review

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Jonah’s Quotes

“The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”
― Thomas Paine

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“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
― René Descartes

tags: doubt, truth

721 likes

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
― Carl Sagan

tags: evidence, faith, science, skepticism

1514 likes

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
― Brendan Leonard, Sixty Meters to Anywhere

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“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
― Thomas Jefferson

tags: atheism, philosophy, religion

1341 likes

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