Speer

Hitler's Architect

By: Martin Kitchen

Narrated by: Michael Page

A new biography of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler's chief architect and trusted confidant, reveals the subject's deeper involvement in Nazi atrocities.

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.

©2015 Yale University (P)2018 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A devastating portrait of an empty, narcissistic, and compulsively ambitious personality." (Wall Street Journal)

excellent insight into an evil soul

after listening to this book I am not ambiguos about Speer any longer. he was not the technical genius he liked to portray himself, but a (maybe genius) self-image creator and polisher. the production wonder he is still famous for in Germany was a fiction created by him. The ideological distance to the nazis he is still famous for was fiction. people like him were and are necessary to make the devil accepted by the masses.

Excellent disposition on the career and disgraceful rehabilitation of a war criminal.

Meticulously researched and documented history of the life and crimes (and the subsequent cover up) of Albert Speer. Brilliant narration and thorough analysis.

Excellent analysis

I have read numerous books on Albert sphere, including his own memoirs and other biographies, and this by far is the best and definitive work I have come across. The author does his due diligence researching this complex and often contradictory figure from Nazi Germany. If you want to read a book on Albert Speer, don’t waste your time with any of the others, just read this one.

A Gem for History Buffs

A well researched biography on Speer who tried to revise history to appease his guilt.

Mythbusting the “Good Nazi”

The book is a good overview of Speer’s role within the Third Reich, especially in the economic sphere (see what I did there?). It’s main argument is that Speer deliberately cultivated a false image of himself as an apolitical technocrat, but that the evidence actually shows a man devoted to Hitler and the Nazi cause, a brutal exploiter of Jewish forced labor, and a dishonest self-promoter who avoided the hangman’s noose by pretending to be remorseful while also denying most of his own crimes. It also shows Speer as an empty, selfish man, without friends and without genuine values beyond a lust for power, fame, and money.

I do have a few critiques, which are more about style and structure than content. The book is very repetitive. Kitchen delivers identical assessments of Speer’s role and character over and over again, and he also uses repetitive word choice when is comes to construct sentences, such as “discussed… at discussions.” The book is organized topically within a broader chronological framework, so it’s sometimes difficult to tell what happened when, since the same historical ground keeps getting covered from a different perspective. These are all criticisms of Kitchen’s skill as a writer, however, and not a historian, so they don’t matter that much in the end.