The Devil's Architect (Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth - Gitta Sereny)

Member Name: edie

Product:	Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth - Gitta Sereny
Date:	24/02/01 (221 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Utterly compelling

Disadvantages: Thoroughly depressing

Gitta Sereny certainly likes to pick controversial subjects to write about. Following her books about child murderer Mary Bell and death camp commandant Franz Stagl comes her biography of Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s Minister of Armaments, Hitler’s personal architect and probably his closest friend.

The book starts, as it should, at the Nuremberg trials where Speer was the only defendant to admit his guilt and where he was sentenced to 20 years for war crimes. And where Gitta Sereny, then a young Hungararian nurse, was present as an observer and first became aware of Speer. Some time after his release from Spandau she interviewed him extensively, eventually producing this detailed, mainly chronological account of Speer’s life.

Speer, was always unique in the Nazi elite in that he was recognizably human: young, intelligent, educated, lacking (as far as the evidence goes) any racist views; a talented architect rather than a politician or thug. And yet he happily devoted himself to the Third Reich and his technical brilliance was vital to its propaganda machine and supporting its war effort (his production improvements were personally responsible for prolonging the war by up to a year.) This book clearly portrays Speer’s growing corruption- of architectural designs for a new Berlin shifting with depressing inevitability into plans for munitions factories and, crucially, the use of slave labour.

A contradictory, elusive character like Speer is both a biographer's dream and nightmare and Sereny goes someway to unraveling the enigma, even if she doesn’t manage to quite answer the central question of why he followed Hitler so zealously and for so long (his doubts only seemed to have surfaced right at the end.) It’s apparent how, decades later, Speer was still totally unresolved, both proud and ashamed of his Nazi past. And one of Sereny’s more profound conclusions is how much he was a mystery e
ven to himself: hence the book’s subtitle.

I finished this book still unsure what Speer was, but whatever you think of the man this biography is a remarkable piece of work. Despite the frequently grim subject matter it’s a compelling, absorbing account of a long, strange life. As a writer Sereny is thorough and non-judgmental and often offers interesting insights into the biographer’s art- the delicate negotiations involved in interviewing a subject. The only flaw was that she sometimes seems too sympathetic to Speer (as Sereny herself recognizes) and I wished she’d have called him more on the evasions in his answers. Though her approach is quite disingenuous too. She draws many startling revelations out of Speer that a more hostile questioner might not have received- notably his creepy friendship with Hitler.

Ultimately the book and Speer’s reputation itself pivots on the controversial issue of whether he knew about the Holocaust. Despite his claims of ignorance it seems impossible one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich could have been totally unaware of the Final Solution. Although the question is really unknowable (the answer lying only between Speer and his conscience) Sereny concludes with the most likely though, in its own way, shocking truth: that Speer understood something was happening but deliberately avoided finding out what because it would have made him too uncomfortable. A key moment is when one of Speer’s friends warns him never to go to Auschwitz, that "unspeakable" things were being done there. And Speer fails to queation his friend about what he'd seen: "I did not want to know".


The real achievement of this book is making you think about what you’d have done if you were living in Nazi Germany. Into all that that is horrific and unimaginable there is some disturbingly recognizable psychology. How many people do, on a much smaller scale, wha
t Speer did: acted pragmatically, lied to themselves, thought that the end justified the means? Speer’s story is a cautionary reminder of where such thinking eventually leads. (To Spandau jail for Speer, to concentration camps for millions of more unfortunate others.) And Gitta Sereny’s biography stands as a fitting document of such a fascinating and regretful life.

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