Spandau: The Secret Diaries
So, on thousands of squares of toilet paper, Albert Speer wrote his diary in tiny letters so small that they could hardly be seen, which he was then able to pass to his relatives when they visited him. By the time Speer was released on September 30, 1966, twenty years later, there were more than twenty thousand pages of secret diaries just waiting to be edited and published, but it took him another ten years before he could bear to look at them.
Albert Speer was a brilliant writer and the world should be forever grateful to him for leaving us this work, that addresses and attempts to answer questions the world will always be asking, including:
1. How was Adolph Hitler, an obvious madman, totally insane, able to attain and keep such great power?
2. Why did the German people not recognize what was happening and do something about it long before the destructive end?
3. Most importantly: Can this happen again? Could and will another Hitler arise, perhaps not in Germany again? Perhaps in the United States of America?
What assurance do we have that a lunatic madman could not enter the White House and do much worse than Hitler ever did?
"Albert Speer's book is a deeply moving document. It is also of extraordinary political & psychological interest...a must for anyone interested in psychological motivation of political action & the problem of guilt & repentance. But, beyond this it is so fascinatingly written that I could not put it down before I finished it." –Erich Fromm
463 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1,1975
This edition
- Format
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463 pages, Hardcover
- Published
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February 5, 1976 by Macmillan Publ. Co.
- ISBN
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9780026995016
- ASIN
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0026995018
- Language
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English
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Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess (Heß in German; 26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987) was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany....
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Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher (1885 - 1946) was a member of the Nazi Party. He was the founder and publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which became a central element of the Nazi propaganda machine. His publishing firm also released three ant...
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Albert Speer
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer (March 19, 1905 – September 1, 1981) was a German architect who was, for a part of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany. Speer was Adolf Hitlers chief architect before assuming ...
About the author
An architect by training, Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party, and he became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Hitler commissioned him to design and construct structures including the Reich Chancellery and the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg. In 1937, Hitler appointed Speer as General Building Inspector for Berlin. In this capacity he was responsible for the Central Department for Resettlement that evicted Jewish tenants from their homes in Berlin. In February 1942, Speer was appointed as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Using misleading statistics, he promoted himself as having performed an armaments miracle that was widely credited with keeping Germany in the war.[1] In 1944, Speer established a task force to increase production of fighter aircraft. It became instrumental in exploiting slave labor for the benefit of the German war effort.
After the war, Albert Speer was among the 24 "major war criminals" charged with the crimes of the Nazi regime before the International Military Tribunal. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, principally for the use of slave labor, narrowly avoiding a death sentence. Having served his full term, Speer was released in 1966. He used his writings from the time of imprisonment as the basis for two autobiographical books, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Speer's books were a success; the public was fascinated by an inside view of the Third Reich. He died of a stroke in 1981.
Through his autobiographies and interviews, Speer carefully constructed an image of himself as a man who deeply regretted having failed to discover the crimes of the Third Reich. He continued to deny explicit knowledge of, and responsibility for, the Holocaust. This image dominated his historiography in the decades following the war, giving rise to the "Speer Myth": the perception of him as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionizing the German war machine. The myth began to fall apart in the 1980s, when the armaments miracle was attributed to Nazi propaganda. Adam Tooze wrote in The Wages of Destruction that the idea that Speer was an apolitical technocrat was "absurd". Martin Kitchen, writing in Speer: Hitler's Architect, stated that much of the increase in Germany's arms production was actually due to systems instituted by Speer's predecessor (Fritz Todt) and that Speer was intimately aware of and involved in the "Final Solution", evidence of which has been conclusively shown in the decades following the Nuremberg Trials.
