Just spent 10 days frantically reading, at every opportunity, the 700 plus pages of Gitta Seveny's book, Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth, which I stumbled upon browsing in a second hand bookstore in Foxrock, Dublin. This biography, based on hours of interviews with Speer, his family and friends, and unparelled access to his documents, traces Speer's life from his unhappy youth as the second of three sons of an upper middle class couple, stern, cold and snobbish germans, his swift rise to become Hitler's architect, his deep bond with Hitler, his spell as Minister of Armaments, when he became one of the top figures of the Third Reich, his gradual disillusionment with Hitler, his acceptance of his share of responsibility for Hitler's crimes, his twenty years imprisonment in Spandau, his liberation in 1966, the enormous success of his memoir "Inside the Third Reich", his partial rehabilitation as a living memory of the Third Reich, his loneliness, his improbable love affair at the end of his life, and finally his death in a hotel room in London, hours after taping a long BBC interview, in 1981. The book hinges on Speer's overwhelming feeling of guilt for the genocide of the jews and, finally, his incapacity to acknowledge that
he knew. Part morality tale, part intimate portrait of Hitler's circle, part psychological investigation, it helps us to grasp the collective madness that gripped Germany in the 1930's and the way post war Germany tried to come terms with it - perhaps an impossible task given the enormity of the crimes.
