Nazi party rally grounds: An expansive field, known as Zeppelinfield, which played host to military rallies.

Far off in the distance, you can barely make out a swastika in the middle of an all-white ledge. That's where Adolf Hitler delivered his rousing speeches to the Nazis assembled before him, the field filled to capacity.

The rally grounds were supposed to include 4 square miles of structures, though most of the components never came to fruition.

That includes a Congress Hall, several deployment fields, a "great road" for Nazi parades, and a stadium that never rose from its foundation.

 Lichtdom: Over 150 light beams arranged in a square around the Nazi party rallies at Nuremberg, which Speer called the "cathedral of light."

 Despite heated resistance from Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's top Nazi leaders, Hitler borrowed the searchlights from the German air force.

The move convinced the world, Hitler surmised, that the Nazis had unlimited searchlights at their disposal, despite them actually being in short supply.

Of the effect created by the beams of light, Speer said, "The feeling was of a vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely light outer walls."

Book Excerpt: A Conversation With Albert Speer

Excerpted from “Witness to an Extreme Century” by Robert Jay Lifton. Copyright 2011 by Robert Jay Lifton. Excerpted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, in his memoir “Witness to an Extreme Century,” interviews Albert Speer about his 15 years as a prominent Nazi and “Hitler’s architect.”

* * *

Three of our four meetings took place at his home on the outskirts of Heidelberg, and the fourth at his isolated retreat in southern Bavaria.  His Heidelberg home seemed isolated enough, high in the hills behind the city’s famous castle.  I remember the house seeming cavernous, its furnishings neither attractive nor cozy.  Speer himself was welcoming but I was struck by how old he looked (he was then seventy-three), by the awkwardness of his movements (he had considerable difficulty getting up and sitting down, leading me to wonder whether he had Parkinson’s disease), and by his “thousand-mile stare” (the term we used to describe the psychological remoteness in repatriated American prisoners of war in Korea in 1953).  The word I used to characterize his general demeanor was weary (though I should add that a little more than a year later he was to be enlivened by a passionate love affair with a younger woman).

Speer was interested in talking to me, and made clear that nothing he said was confidential.  But he quickly suggested an agenda of his own centered on his bond with Hitler.  He told me how he had heard the Nazi leader speak at his university in Berlin in 1930, was “really spellbound” at the time and remained so for the next fifteen years covering the entire Nazi era.  His question for me was how, in retrospect, he could have been so enthralled by such a man.  He then made a startling proposal: that he undergo psychotherapy with me in order to better understand how that had happened.  The strong implication was that the relationship still had a hold on him, from which he wanted to extricate himself.  I was much interested in hearing more about his conflict but had no wish to take on responsibility for his psyche.  I needed my freedom as a researcher and did not see my task as one of easing the pain of a prominent former Nazi.  Nor did I wish to have our meetings structured around his way of framing his problem.  So I suggested instead that we explore in some detail his relationship with Hitler without my becoming his therapist.  Speer agreed and we did so, but we were able to explore much else that enabled me to relate this strange bond to larger questions of evil and knowledge of evil, and of death and immortality.

Speer explained that the speech that had so moved him was Hitler’s relatively intellectual and historical treatment of German history, as opposed to his more demagogic, rabble-rousing street version.  The narrative was one of revitalization: now Germany is weak and everything seems hopeless but by uniting behind Hitler and the National Socialist movement – and above all renouncing the guilt for World War I assigned by the Versailles Treaty – Germany and its people can once again be strong.  Speer was then a twenty-five-year-old instructor in architecture in a collapsed economy and he and others around him were experiencing only despair about their future.  Images of … humiliated German troops returning from World War I twelve years earlier were still fresh in his mind, as were postwar scenes of every kind of social chaos.  Hitler’s words were for him transformative, a message of new hope and a promise, as he put it, that “all can be changed” and “everything is possible.”  Feeling “drunk from the talk,” Speer walked for hours through the woods outside Berlin, seeking to absorb what he had heard.  He was in the process of experiencing a secular form of a classical religious conversion, described by William James as “perceiving truths not known before” that enable a “sick soul” to “give itself over to a new life.”  Intense “self-surrender” is accompanied by new spiritual strength.  Speer demonstrated the emerging power of the combination of national and personal revitalization, which I came to see as the psychological core of Nazi appeal throughout the German population.

Speer joined the Nazi Party soon after that speech and told me of his rapid rise within tis circles, first as an enthusiastic party worker and then as an architect.  From his sensational early success in designing the light and space for the large Nuremberg rallies, beginning in 1933 (as depicted by Leni Riefenstahl in her film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will), he progressed to the planning of vast buildings, even cities, to extol the omnipotent Nazi regime and, above all, its Fuhrer.  He emphasized how, in becoming “Hitler’s architect,” he was drawn toward a vision of personal immortalization, of “having a place in future history books,” “building for eternity,” and becoming in that way “someone who is surviving his own life.”  The sense of immortality, which I emphasize in my work, intoxicated Speer to the point of becoming something close to a promise of literally living forever.  So grandiose were the projections he and Hitler made together that some of the buildings were to hold as many as 150,000 people on vast balconies in a new Berlin that would become the center of the world, dwarfing the grandeur of Paris and the Champs-Elysees.  Few of the structures were actually built but many were imagined, as part of what Speer called “a daydream that was a very serious daydream.”

On one of my visits to the Heidelberg home, he showed me a large glossy book that had just been published, titled Architecture of the Third Reich.  It contained gaudy photographs of buildings I noted to be “profoundly vulgar” and “totalitarian,” and Speer seemed initially to share that judgment: “I admit that the proportions are all wrong,” he said, and “I criticize the grandiose side.”  Then, without the slightest trace of irony, he added, “But of course it was what the client wanted.”  He attributed all excess to that “client,” but he could hardly dissociate himself from the grandiosity involved.  Indeed, his pride in the volume was clear enough as he clutched it affectionately and pointed also to pictures of rally sites he had designed:  “I was one of the first to use light in nighttime as a device for creating space.  The searchlights came so high that when you were standing inside you saw it as being in the stratosphere.”  He did not say that his innovative lighting enabled the Fuhrer to be seen as descending from the heavens.  I thought of Speer’s overall contribution to the mystical appeal of the Nazi movement, converting Nazi darkness into a manipulated sense of illumination.  Witnessing his enthusiasm for that early work and his nostalgic pride in projections of architectural world domination, I felt that whatever sympathy I had for Speer was dissolving.  It occurred to me that Nazi architectural hubris had a certain parallel to its biological hubris: apocalyptic architecture followed upon apocalyptic biology.

Speer made it clear that Hitler was more than a mere client: he was the closest of collaborators.  Hitler was not only a constant critic and appreciator of Speer’s architectural suggestions; the Fuhrer became himself an architect and even provided sketches of his own.  As they imagined the unprecedented grandeur of buildings, highways, archways, and cities, their thoughts blended to the degree that it became unclear who had provided the original idea.  The two men shared this descent into a version of apocalyptic fantasy: they were re-creating a perfect Nazi world from the ruins of what they were destroying.  It is this merger in fantasy that constituted their architectural folie a deux.

Yet however superior Speer’s knowledge of architecture, Hitler remained the guru.  As Speer put it, “I was so much in that ambience that I was infiltrated with [Hitler’s] ideas without realizing how much I was infiltrated.”  He said that even now, when working on his writing, he frequently has the experience in which “I see that it’s an idea Hitler had in some way” and “I’m quite astonished.”  In their particular fashion, the two men formed a close personal relationship.  Speer would later write that if Hitler were capable of having a friend, he, Speer, would have been that friend.  But gurus, especially the most paranoid and destructive among them, do not have friends; they have only disciples.  Speer believed that Hitler was drawn to him as a fellow artist, and that appreciation worked both ways: “For an artist to see somebody at the head of the state who is something of an artist too … has a gift of excitement.  Being overwhelmed by … a Wagner performance or a ballet in Nuremberg, this for me was a strong, positive influence.”  They also shared an intense theatricality – Speer with his dazzling night-lighting of rallies, and Hitler, whose “whole life,” Speer told me, “was acting, performance, theatre.”

Speer’s merging with Hitler resembled the kind of fusion of guru and disciple that I encountered in studying fanatical religious cults, notably Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the nineties.  But with Speer and Hitler the fusion involved the shared hubris of a perceived artistic and structural project to transform the world.  In that way Speer was probably, at least for a period of time, the disciple most important to Hitler in affirming his omnipotent guruism.  But Speer also provides for us a kind of window to more ordinary German people who also experienced fusion with a guru/leader rendered godlike.  As Speer poured out details of his interaction with the Fuhrer, I could be there with the two men at various levels: observing them pore over their architectural plans as “friends” and “colleagues”; and imagining their fusion in a version of architectural madness perceived as an all-consuming gift to the world.  And here was this man sitting opposite me describing quite rationally and methodically this most bizarre expression of evil from his past – wishing to separate himself from it and renounce it, but not entirely.  No wonder that Speer was so difficult for me to grasp.

An important clue to his psychology was the anxiety he began to develop in connection with his projections of grandiose building.  As he explained to me, he found himself as a young architect with little experience thrust into a situation without rules or boundaries, one in which “nothing is fixed.”  He had no clear tradition or architectural group that could guide and constrain him, so that professionally “I could do what I wanted,” and despite Hitler’s support, “I was alone.”  The Fuhrer’s involvement, far from a steadying influence, obliterated limits and took the fused duo more deeply into unmanageable architectural fantasy.  At some level of his mind, Speer perceived this gap between the grandiosity of the shared vision and what could be called architectural reality. He also had inner doubts about the quality of the architecture, “fear as to whether it would stand [the judgment] of the times, of how it would be acknowledged in future times.”  Related to that fear was his discomfort, as a highly educated upper-middle-class intellectual, among the mostly crude members of the Nazi inner circle.

He told me about experiencing two kinds of symptoms.  The first took the form of claustrophobia: in certain enclosed spaces, particularly when on trains, he would feel anxious and would nearly pass out.  On one occasion the symptoms were sufficiently severe that there was talk of stopping the train in order to get him to a hospital.  The second set of symptoms required no particular locale, and were those of acute anxiety (or panic attack): he would experience a feeling of great pressure in his chest and a terrified sense that he was dying.  These two sets of symptoms occurred only during his time of intense, unlimited architectural dialogue with Hitler and what he called his accompanying “burden.”  In my work I have related such symptoms both to feeling too much (the overwhelming anxiety) and too little (the numbing toward what one could not allow oneself to be consciously aware of).  Speer was fending off his conflicts not only about his illegitimate architectural freedom, but about his overall role in the Nazi regime.  Something in him began to doubt the Hitlerian vision of brutally remaking the world.

In our discussions he tried to explain – or explain away – his problem mainly in terms of his susceptibility to Hitler’s charisma.  That charisma was real enough but Speer would seem at times to hide behind it in order to avoid the probing of still more difficult questions of his own ethical responsibility.  What I believe was involved in these symptoms was his struggle against the realization of the fraudulence of the Fuhrer’s larger vision, and of his own corruption personally and professionally.  His architectural folie a deux with the Fuhrer epitomized the problem.  As in the case of doctors at Auschwitz, Speer could adapt sufficiently to diminish his anxiety and serve the regime, in his case with high energy and intelligence.  His symptoms contributed to that adaptation by covering over existential truths, and then disappeared when he ceased to be “Hitler’s architect” and became instead minister for armaments.  Nor did they reappear during his imprisonment or the years following his release … .

In keeping with my concerns about different forms of participation in evil, I focused much of our discussion on Speer’s relationship to the “Final Solution,” the Nazi program of systematic mass murder of the Jews.  Over the years he had claimed ignorance and uninvolvement, a claim that seemed increasingly untenable, and toward the latter part of his life he backtracked and admitted having sense that “something was happening to the Jews,” without having wished to learn any more about what that was.  As evidence mounted against his earlier claims, many who had been sympathetic to him became critical, including one of his biographers, Gitta Sereny, who concluded that he was “living a lie.”  In order to explore the matter with him I pressed him on the sequence of his attitude toward Jews and encounters with their suffering.

He made clear to me that he was by no means immune to the anti-Semitism of the time, resonated to it in Hitler’s early speech, resented “rich Jews in furs” during times of economic deprivation, was critical of the Jewish domination of the medical profession, and, more to the point, of what he took to be the inordinate Jewish influence on German architecture in determining who received commissions for buildings.  As he rose in the regime, Speer did not emphasize anti-Jewish ideas in speeches or writings but blended with the existing ambiance, with an anti-Semitism that was, as he put it, “standard” and “legalized” so that “one felt at home in it.”  He was aware of Hitler’s rage toward the Jews, but the two men did not talk about the subject during their architectural meditations, or later when they were preoccupied with armaments.  But he recalled … how the Fuhrer would, in small groups of his inner circle, “Speak in that cold, slow voice in which he revealed terrible decisions” and declare that he would “destroy the Jews.”  Speer even came to realize that doing so was a central motivation, Hitler’s “engine.”  The murderous “engine,” that is, did not interfere with Speer’s fusion with his guru; indeed one could say that the fusion required that he himself connect in someway with the engine.

Speer admitted to me that he encountered considerable evidence of Nazi brutality and Jewish pain: the suicide of a distinguished scientist his family knew at the University of Heidelberg, a scene at a railroad station in which a few hundred “miserable looking people” he knew to be Jews were “loaded on trains to be taken from Germany,” and selective tours of Nazi concentration camps in which he claimed to be convinced by his manipulative hosts that the inmates were in reasonably good shape.  More damning, he told me of providing certain materials for the work camp at Auschwitz in 1943 and having at the time “some insight into the bad conditions of such camps.”  But he insisted that the construction materials were only for improving the facilities, and when I asked about his knowledge of the rest of Auschwitz and its role in extermination, he insisted sharply that “I knew nothing of the other.”  I had never before heard anyone claim in this way close knowledge of the slave labor function of Auschwitz and ignorance of its function as a death camp.  (Nor did we discuss Speer’s early participation in removing Jews from their Berlin homes and later suppression of that episode, or his providing, as minister of armaments, slave labor to German industry.)

Speer told me how he “pushed aside very quickly” all such matters, sensing that dreadful things were happening to Jews but stopping short of fully realizing what they were because “I didn’t want to know.  I didn’t want to see it.”  Very much at issue was his sense that confronting the truth would have undermined his entire Nazi worldview and deepest life commitments and required him “to admit that all this was for nothing, that it wasn’t right.”  At the end of our third interview I noted that one had two choices with Speer: either one could believe that he was consciously lying all along, or one could see him as involved in a sustained inner struggle around the psychology of knowing and now knowing.  I favored the latter view.  I thought he was “living a lie” but that he had not experienced it as a lie.  Because of his extreme psychic numbing, he had ceased to feel almost anything of the abuse and suffering of Jews.  And because of his “derealization” (emphasized by Mitscherlich in connection with Nazi behavior), he could avoid experiencing his participation in the Holocaust as actual or real.  Speer could explore his participation in a regime he now condemned but could never allow himself to experience the dimension of guilt associated with its mass killing.  Therefore, he could never allow himself fully “to know.”  His wish to focus exclusively on his emotional bondage to Hitler – and with my help find a “cure” for it – was an effort to psychologize his Nazi behavior in a way that avoided ethical truths.  None of this makes him any less culpable for what he did and did not do, but it does help explain his contradictory statements about what he knew.

Throughout, I had been more critical of Speer and more reserved about his “repentance” than had such people as Alexander Mitscherlich, George Mosse (a scholar whom I knew and greatly respected), and Erich Fromm (the well-known psychoanalyst who befriended Speer and expressed great enthusiasm for his change).  Still, I had conversed with him in a civil, even friendly fashion, finding him at least at moments likable, and had been impressed by the fact that someone so high in the regime was making this kind of articulate turnabout – even if Hitler was always there with us.  I concluded that our interviews had revealed extraordinary dimensions of enthusiasm and corruption, of complex immersion in evil – and that to learn about all this I had no choice but to sit in that room with him and his Fuhrer.

Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

By Robert Jay Lifton

Free Press, 448 pages

Albert Speer Part I

Albert Speer, the son of an architect, was born in Mannheim, Germany 19 March 1905. He grew up in the family residence in the picturesque university town of Heidelberg under rather emotionally cold conditions.

Like his father young Albert studied hard and became an architect, though Speer himself actually had preferred a degree in mathematics.

He completed his architectural studies at the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg and became assistant to Professor Heinrich Tessenow, a champion of simple craftsmanship in architecture.

He met and fell in love with Margarete Weber, a lovely open minded girl. After a period couple and after completing studies they got married without the blessing of the Speer family as his fiancée was not of the same class but later things sorted out anyway.

In 1931, Speer joined the NSDAP and soon was offered a succession of commissions for the party. He felt fortunate to have been given this opportunity to build and create in a world full of unemployment. His talent and ability were quickly recognized and soon he came to the attention of the leader of the party, Adolf Hitler.

Because of the same burning interest for architecture Speer became one of Hitler's best friends. That in a different way than the others around the Führer as Speer had no political intentions or eager for power. In 1933 the Nazi Party won the elections getting to rule Germany.
After proving his skills in a variety of small and large projects Speer spent more and more time in the "inner circle" at the Führer's side.

Hitler demanded buildings that could stand the test of times for a thousand years! The skilled architect Speer was the man to give him that.
A real challenge!
Speer was asked to build the new Reich's chancellery and he accepted. Hitler needed the building already one year later but Speer assured him that it all would be ready in time!

A promise Speer probably hoped not to have given as it seemed impossible to draw and construct the large official building in that time. Hitler was amused as he wanted to see if the young architect really could manage to do what he told.

Albert Speer employed an army of labour to work in shift. He planned everything in detail, supervised it all and could take an impressed Hitler for a tour before the date agreed upon. The Führer expected to find workers on the site at least making last adjustments, but the place was not a construction site - it was a huge impressively Reich Chancellery ready to be used at that very moment!

Through this Speer proved that he was not only a talented architect but also a great organizer.
Together Hitler and Speer made plans for the new Berlin, a capital that was to be the finest and most important in, all of Europe. All was set to be completed in the early 1950's but the work was finally halted by the war.

When Doctor Fritz Todt, the genius behind the great autobahn project, died in a plane crash Hitler chose Speer to succeed Todt as Reichs minister of armaments and munitions. Speer was never interested in politics, never used a military weapon and knew nothing of armaments but responded to the call of duty and accepted. His genius proved adaptable and he soon proved himself to be the right man for the job. He mobilized German industry by introducing principles of mass production, "democratic" economic leadership, improvisation, and a general anti-bureaucratic approach that resulted in a dramatic boost in Germany production. The result was that things ran smoother, better and faster. As usual he acted without pretence and won the hearts and minds of his colleagues and workers around Germany and even in some of the occupied Western countries(!) Speer became a powerful man despite (or thanks to) his unconventional methods. He was trying to minimize bureaucracy and kept the working men and women in mind.

At the end of the war he did his best to save the infrastructure and even whole cities from destruction for the sake of the German people. At great personal risk he disobeyed Hitler's orders calling for the ruthless demolition of anything possible use to the enemy on evacuated German territory. In addition, he actively enlisted others to preserve resources for German reconstruction once the war was over by using his position to countermand Hitler's orders. He couldn't see how making the civilians suffer even more could change a war that was already lost.
  
After Hitler's suicide, and inn accord with his political testament, Karl Dönitz, the commander of the Navy, was appointed the new Führer.

As most of Germany was occupied by allied forces and Berlin was lost, Dönitz, Speer and a few others were left with only a small area of Germany and some occupied territories to the north over which to rule. Dönitz ordered the end of the destruction of resources in Germany and the remaining occupied territories. He also tried to negotiate a peace treaty but in the end had to surrender unconditionally.

After the war, Speer was the only one of the accused to plead guilty at the Nuremberg trials. His life was spared but he was sentenced to 20 long years in prison. Dönitz who wasn't politically involved until the very end received a 10 years sentence.

During the years of imprisonment, Speer kept in contact with his family and in secrecy started to write his memoirs. In 1966 he was released from Spandau prison.
The great architect and organizer Albert Speer passed away in 1981.

Albert Speer is said to have prolonged the war for at least a year, with the consequent death of hundreds of thousands and widespread ruin. It also gave the Nazis more time to pursue their mass murder of Jews, Russians, Gypsies and others deemed not fit to live.

The Holocaust

Albert Speer studied at the technical schools in Karlsruhe, Munich, and Berlin, and acquired an architectural license in 1927. After hearing Hitler speak at a Berlin rally in late 1930, he enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party January 1931 and so impressed the Führer by his efficiency and talent that, soon after Hitler became chancellor, Speer became his personal architect.

He was rewarded with many important commissions, including the design of the parade grounds, searchlights, and banners of the spectacular Nürnberg party congress of 1934, filmed by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will.

A highly efficient organizer, Speer became 1942 minister for armaments, succeeding the engineer Fritz Todt. In 1943 he also took over part of Hermann Goering's responsibilities as planner of the German war economy. From Todt, Speer inherited the Organisation Todt, an organization using forced labor for the construction of strategic roads and defenses.

Under Albert Speer's direction, economic production reached its peak in 1944, despite Allied bombardment. In the last months of the war Speer did much to thwart Hitler's scorched-earth policy, which would have devastated Germany.

Speer was jailed in 1946 for 20 years in the post-war Nuremberg trials. After his release he wrote his memoirs, grew wealthy, and until his death in 1981 worked hard at being a penitent, presenting himself as someone who should have known what was being done, but did not know. Albert Speer offered himself as the scapegoat for Germany's collective guilt.

On the stand at Nuremberg Albert Speer stood out among the accused as the one "good Nazi." A dedicated servant of the party who, as Hitler's minister of wartime production, was the Nazis' principle exploiter of forced labor.

Albert Speer Part II

Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny's biography meticulously re-creates for the reader the professional, emotional, and psychological life of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later his Minister of Armaments. Throughout the 12-year history of the Third Reich, Speer remained one of Hitler's most trusted confidants and one of the most powerful political leaders of the Nazi party.

Researched and written over an eight year period, Albert Speer weaves together information from innumerable personal interviews with Speer, his family, close friends, and professional colleagues, the author's own solid grasp of German history, and critical readings of Speer's own writings, including various drafts of his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, first published in 1969.

Throughout, Sereny consciously avoids the pitfall of many Speer biographers, who seek to either blame or exculpate Speer for the Nazi's atrocities. Instead, she succeeds in helping the reader understand a "morally extinguished" man and place into context "all the crimes against humanity which Hitler initiated, which continue to threaten us today, and of which Speer, who was in many ways a man of excellence, sadly enough made himself a part." Well over 700 pages, Albert Speer is not a quick read, but superbly written and meticulously researched, it is a pleasure to read, providing unprecedented insight into one of the most complex figures in modern German history. --Bertina Loeffler





The Good Nazi : The Life and Lies of Albert Speer by Dan Van Der Vat,  Albert Speer

The New York Times Book Review, David Murray

Dan van der Vat, a Dutch-born British journalist, makes an effective case in The Good Nazi, a well-written and sceptical account, that while the slippery (Albert) Speer knew for years about the atrocities, he was able to pretend that he only "suspected ... that something appalling was happening" to Europe's Jews. As a result, he was one of only two top- ranking Nazis to escape the hangman, drawing a 20-year prison sentence instead.



Auschwitz   Bergen-Belsen   Belzec   Sobibor   Treblinka     

On the stand at Nuremberg, Albert Speer, the self-described "second man in the Reich," denied any direct knowledge of the Final Solution. But was he really the innocent functionary he claimed to be? And was he sincere in accepting his share of the Nazis' "collective guilt"? This hard-hitting biography says no--that Speer's avowals of ignorance and repentance were a self-serving sham.



Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer

From 1946 to 1966, while serving the prison sentence handed down from the Nuremburg War Crimes tribunal, Albert Speer penned 1,200 manuscript pages of personal memoirs. Titled Erinnerungen ("Recollections") upon their 1969 publication in German, Speer's critically acclaimed personal history was translated into English and published one year later as Inside the Third Reich. Long after their initial publication, Speer's memoir continues to provide one of the most detailed and fascinating portrayals of life within Hitler's inner circles, the rise and fall of the third German empire, and of Hitler himself.

Speer chronicles his entire life, but the majority of Inside the Third Reich focuses on the years between 1933 and 1945, when Speer figured prominently in Hitler's government and the German war effort as Inspector General of Buildings for the Renovation of the Federal Capital and later as Minister of Arms and Munitions. Speer's recollections of both duties foreground the impossibility of reconciling Hitler's idealistic, imperialistic ambitions with both architectural and military reality. Throughout, Inside the Third Reich remains true to its author's intentions. With compelling insight, Speer reveals many of the "premises which almost inevitably led to the disasters" of the Third Reich as well as "what comes from one man's holding unrestricted power in his hands." -- Bertina Loeffler



Charlane A. Wainwright from Syracuse, New York, USA , December 1, 1997 - Albert Speer's book in historical context

Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich" presents a historical view of daily events within the highest ranks of the Nazi power structure. He is able to humanize the Third Reich to a chilling degree, since he demonstrates again and again how little different these men were from many men. The very ordinariness of the high ranking German officials presents the reader with a vivid illustration that this could happen again!

Albert Speer may have a bit of self-interest in his presentation of events through his own eyes, but the most striking sense of the book is that he is, in fact, an extremely likeable man, and a man of thoughtfulness and conscience. His personal struggle to accept the wider meaning of his wartime activities demonstrates the capacity of a decent man to be swept away in indecent activity on the basis of personal pride in a job well done, a personal search for recognition and admiration, and an all too human ability to see through blinders for a very long time.

When we see some of the events currently taking place in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, especially in places where there is considerable ethnic cohesion and substantial economic distress, we see once again a fertile field for a drift into human atrocity. Given the locally accepted concepts that German people were "special" as well homogeneous, that perpetuation of the economic reorganization of Germany was critical to a return to tolerable life, and that the return to pride in self and nation would allow all Germans to lift their heads once again, Albert Speer took his place among others of talent and energy. They made a government and an economy WORK.

The sad fact that the Third Reich was led by a lunatic, who became even more insane and maniacal as time went by, was partially an accident to history.

Many good men, especially bright young men, follow a leader in the wrong direction, and later come to defend their wrong choice of leaders in part from loyalty, and in part to explain themselves to themselves. They cannot see that their emperor has no clothes because they are too close to him, and because they cannot bear to look at the fact that they were duped.

Eventually, realization comes, but often far later than it would have if they had not been totally embroiled already.

After I read Albert Speer's book, I admired him for coming forward to present his personal story of a man who did it all wrong, but who owed himself and humanity an account, and paid it.





The Two Worlds of Albert Speer : Reflections of a Nuremberg Prosecutor by Henry T., Jr. King, Bettina Elles

SPEER REVIEW by T.S. Peric, Cleveland, Ohio , October 19, 1998

“I knew Albert Speer better than any American,” said Henry King during an interview, at 26-years-old, the youngest prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and the author of “The Two Worlds of Albert Speer: Reflections of a Nuremberg Prosecutor” (University Press of America). It was not a comment filled with braggadocio. In 1946, fallow and a few years out of Yale Law School, King dreamt the dreams of many young men: accomplish a great deed or participate in a grand undertaking.

Hearing about a friend’s appointment to the American “team” at Nuremberg, King immediately applied for a position. Within a few months, he arrived at Nuremberg in the middle of a rainstorm and soon found himself collecting evidence against Erhard Milch, deputy chief of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), who was charged with participating in Nazi slave labor and human experiment programs. King also interviewed Reichsmarshall and Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goering and Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of staff of Germany’s military high command.

But frozen in King’s memory were the interviews with Speer in a bleak interrogation room. “Speer was remarkably composed and unshaken; he seemed to possess an inner security and objectivity that many of the others lacked,” King recalls. His composure was all the more remarkable because of the unique and key role he played in the Third Reich. “From 1942 to 1945 not only was he one of the men closest to Hitler, but he was also one who influenced Hitler’s decisions. At one time in late 1943, Speer was reputed to be Hitler’s heir apparent.”

Speer was unemotional, analytical, almost regal in his deportment. And unlike the other 20 defendants, he accepted full responsibility for his actions. “The question that haunted me then and still does today was why Speer, who appeared so decent and honest, was a close collaborator of Hitler,” King writes. “Why had he served such a monster?” Nearly half a century would intervene before King could offer any answers.

Speer spent the next 20 years locked away in Spandau prison (kept incommunicado except to his attorney and family). After his release, he became a best-selling author with “Inside the Third Reich” (1970) a personal look into the sanctum sanctorum of the Nazi leadership and “Spandau: The Secret Diaries” (1976) which described his imprisonment. King continued practicing law, including a stint as general counsel to the U.S. Foreign Economic Aid Program, moving to the private sector and eventually settling in as a professor of international law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

In 1966, King re-established contact with Speer, but was unable to pursue his goal of a book until his retirement from TRW where he served as general counsel of Automotive Operations. King interviewed Speer repeatedly (including Speer’s last interview, one month before his death in 1981). He consulted the Nuremberg records, his own notes and the literature on Speer and the Nazis. He also interviewed Speer’s daughter and Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, who observed the interaction between Hitler and Speer.


King’s book carefully plots the conditions and events in Speer’s life that drew the architect toward the summit of Nazi power. Speer was politically naïve, despite his aristocratic background, growing up in a cold, emotionless family, where intellectual prowess was demanded and ambition expected. Introduced to the Nazis at Berlin’s Institute of Technology, Speer fell victim – as did millions of Germans -- to the zeitgeist of Nazi Germany before the war, a time when the promise of a new Reich seemed to represent an unfettered, glorious future.

Speer’s ability to organize was quickly recognized, reaching new heights at the Nuremberg rallies. His Pantheon-like “Cathedral of Lights,” established Speer’s chilling brilliance for displaying raw power. The final, crowning jewel that firmly enthroned Speer to the Nazis fold was his artistic talent which brought him within handshaking distance of Adolph Hitler. Now, Hitler, the failed Viennese artist, would live vicariously through Speer’s artistic triumphs.

The Nazis’ world was Albert Speer’s first world, according to King. It was among the Nazis that Speer performed with remarkable thoroughness and unquestioned devotion, rising to the position of the Third Reich’s Architect and Minister of Armament Production. Indeed, if Speer’s artistic triumphs contributed to the physical manifestation of how the Nazi’s viewed themselves, his star as Armament Minister shone even brighter. Experts estimate that Speer’s contribution to industrial production lengthened the war by at least two years.

Despite Speer’s success, he began to enter his “second world,” according to King, even before Germany’s surrender. Speer was the only top Nazi to act in defiance of Hitler—and did so openly. He refused to carry out Hitler’s “scorched earth policy” that would destroy the remains of German industry. Speer’s second world is “where his horizon broadened and his values changed,” writes King. “The second and succeeding world of Albert Speer was the horizontal world of the questioning spirit. This was a world of ethical and cultural values, a humanistic world . . .”

In “The Two Worlds of Albert Speer,” King deftly presents how naiveté, seduction and ambition drove Speer to the pinnacle of Nazi power. He concludes that Speer was clearly unique among the top Nazis that survived the war. Speer accepted responsibility for his actions and offered mea culpas for his sins. During and after his imprisonment, Speer pondered his actions and began to search for some degree of redemption until the end of his life.

While supporting the prison sentence Speer received, King ably demonstrates that Speer was not some cardboard character from the Nazi past. Rather, he was a complex and brilliant individual who confronted issues of good and evil on a scale that most of us cannot imagine. King succeeded in his search for a great undertaking with his successful role in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

More than one half century later, he succeeds with another marvellous undertaking: the writing of “The Two Worlds of Albert Speer.”


BOOKS on Albert Speer:

• Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth(1995) – Gitta Sereny

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitta_Sereny

http://www.webofstories.com/rp/gitta.sereny

Speer : the final verdict, 2001 – Fest, Joachim C

BBC Vision of space = Albert Speer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUzX46Xk7Fw

ALBERT SPEER, (1905–1981)

Best-known architect of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist regime.

Albert Speer operated at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, Third Reich political propaganda, and, beginning in 1942, large-scale armaments production and industrial organization. Born on 19 March 1905 in Mannheim, Germany, Speer rose to become one of the key figures in the short-lived but immensely powerful and destructive twelve-year Third Reich. Albert Speer studied under the influential architect and popular professor Heinrich Tessenow at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, absorbing his teacher’s interest in a restrained neoclassicism. This historical bent, combined with Speer’s considerable charisma and gifts for communication and organization, appealed immensely to the rising dictator Adolf Hitler, himself a frustrated architect inclined toward megalomania in matters architectural as well as political. Speer’s close friendship, or at the very least close professional association with Hitler, began after the death of the Nazi architect Paul Ludwig Troost in 1934; it led to a string of large-scale commissions for Nazi Party rallying grounds and stadia in Nuremberg, along with an outsized, imperial replanning of Berlin as ‘‘Germania,’’ the new capital of the Nazis’ vaunted ‘‘Thousand-Year Reich.’’

Together, Hitler and Speer developed detailed models of a new Berlin city center, complete with a domed Great Hall to accommodate rallies of up to 180,000 people; the quarter-mile-long Reich Chancellery on Vossstrasse (constructed 1937– 1939); projects for an array of new ministries; a gigantic triumphal arch known as ‘‘Bauwerk T’’; and, at the end of a monumental north-south axis through the heart of the city, a new railway station adjacent to the new Tempelhof Airport. Realized only in part, the plans and models nevertheless figured centrally in Hitler’s and Speer’s reconceptualizations of Berlin and Munich as ideal Nazi cities, embodiments of a new German community (Volksgemeinschaft). Among the führer’s and General Building Inspector Speer’s favorite topics of discussion were the ruins left by ancient empires at Karnak and Ur, which in turn inspired plans for the use of huge amounts of marble and granite in Berlin, so that the ‘‘Thousand-Year Reich’’ would one day leave similarly inspiring ruins as well.

Speer’s proximity to the führer, coupled with his organizational talents and political skills, enabled him to rise as a very young man to the pinnacle of power in the Nazi hierarchy. Having successfully maneuvered to succeed Fritz Todt (1891–1942) as minister of armaments production in 1942, at the age of thirty-seven, Speer used German and prisoner-of-war labor to erect monuments, Nazi Party rallying grounds, and industrial buildings throughout the Third Reich while overseeing the Reich’s immense infrastructure and its industrial and military supply chain. Speer, whom Karl Hettlage, one of his subordinates, called a ‘‘rational man par excellence’’ (Sereny, p. 296) credited much of his organizational success to the innovations of Fritz Todt and, before him, to ‘‘the real originator of [the] idea of industrial ‘self-responsibility,’’’ Walther Rathenau (Speer to Rudolf Wolters, 1953; quoted in Sereny, p. 296).

Because of Speer’s polish, sophistication, and qualified admissions of war guilt at the Nuremberg war trials of 1946, he received an unusually lenient sentence of twenty years in jail; many other members of the Nazi leadership were executed for their crimes. From jail in Spandau, near Berlin, Speer released sanitized versions of his immensely readable, informative memoirs. These helped make him an important, if still controversial, celebrity in West Germany right up to his release on 30 September 1966 and his death in 1981. Making the hardly believable claim that he was ignorant to the end about the Nazis’ Final Solution, the genocide of Europe’s Jews, the charming and enigmatic Speer combined the qualities of an haut bourgeois architect and master executive technocrat with the ideological relativism and willingness to compromise that snared so many during the darkest years of modern German history.

Speer’s architectural legacy has been to inoculate many German architects and government authorities against overt expressions of monumental, modern classicism, deemed too close to Hitler’s megalomaniacal visions. In reunified, post–Cold War Berlin, such official projects as Axel Schultes’s and Charlotte Frank’s modernist master plan for the government quarter of the early 1990s, their highly sculptural chancellery building (2000), and Sir Norman Foster’s high-tech renovation of the Reichstag building (1999) reflect this aversion to direct classical quotation. Instead, these buildings express the German government’s ambition to erect modern symbols of a new ‘‘Berlin Republic,’’ leader of a modern European nation that is perceived to be simultaneously open, democratic, and progressive.

Primary Sources Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York, 1970. ———. Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York, 1976. Secondary Sources Bärnreuther, Andrea. ‘‘Berlin in the Grip of Totalitarian Planning: Functionalism in Urban Design between Hostility to the City, Megalomania and Ideas of Order on a New Scale.’’ In City of Architecture/ Architecture of the City: Berlin 1900–2000, edited by Thorsten Scheer et al., 200–211. Berlin, 2000. Lane, Barbara Miller. Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945. Cambridge, Mass., 1968. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London, 1995.

Reading, memories of father

I’m reading one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. It’s Albert Speer’s “Spandau: The Secret Diaries.”

Speer (1905-1981) was Adolph Hitler’s architect and, from 1942 to 1945, the minister of armaments for the Nazi regime.

“Spandau” is a one-volume compendium drawn from the more than 20,000 pages of “diary notes, authorized letters and smuggled letters, written in the smallest script I could manage, on leaves of calendars, scraps of notepaper, cardboard lids, toilet paper” that Speer managed to send to his wife and children during his 20-year incarceration for war crimes.

Speer came to realize that he was, if there was such a being, Hitler’s closest friend. This haunted him, but it also gave him a strange and unsettling kind of satisfaction.

Speer did not really admire Hitler — or rather he admired him in a very selective way — but he found Hitler hypnotically compelling and there was a side of the Fuhrer he genuinely liked. He did not condone the atrocities. In essence, he made a Faustian bargain with a “great” terrible man.

Speer tacitly agreed to look the other way whenever possible, in exchange for which he would be given architectural and urban design opportunities never before enjoyed by a single individual. “I was 30 when he laid a world at my feet,” Speer wrote in his diary entry for Oct. 2, 1946.

Hard to resist that.

My father, who has been dead more than a dozen years now, was fascinated by World War II, particularly by Hitler. When I was 14, he urged me to read Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich,” which is essentially an autobiography. I read the book because I wanted that exclusive arena of closeness to my father.

There is nothing quite so satisfying as sharing the experience of a great book with someone whose response to that book you know you will prize. I’m not so fond of reading a book together (you read a page aloud, I read a page), but reading the same book at the same time is one of the supreme joys of life.

The life of a reader is essentially a lonely one. There have been hundreds of times when I have been reading a book when, with a sudden inrush, I have wanted to talk with someone about the book — indeed that passage in that book — and there is no one to call. Many, many times I have blurted to a friend, “You have to read this book!” but it almost never happens. Others have instructed me to read such and such a book — with equal futility.

Still, you have to read “Spandau: The Secret Diaries.”

Eager to please my cerebral father, I read Speer’s memoir in earliest adolescence, just at that moment when we are wrestling with the “fallenness” of the world and the gap between what people say and what they actually do, between the world as it is presented to us in civics texts and the world as it really does business.

It was a time of bewilderment to me. My boy’s brain that summer was wrestling with three men: Adolph Hitler, who is our culture’s embodiment of evil; Albert Speer, who exemplifies the problem of character and the problem of ambivalence; and my father, a small town banker with unusual intellectual fascinations.

In the most heartbreaking passage of the diaries, Oct. 14, 1946, Speer imagines the effect his life and now his incarceration will have on his children. They will “want to know how I could have participated in a regime that the entire world feared and despised? They will imply that they will always remain the children of a war criminal.”

Speer was the only major Nazi figure at the Nuremberg war trials to take responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. He insisted he knew nothing specific about the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews, but at the same time he said he was in a position to know more than he chose to know.

He got a comparatively light sentence — 20 years. Many others received life sentences, and the principal surviving Nazi leaders were hanged in the same prison where Speer was beginning his long sentence. On the day of the executions, Oct. 16, 1946, Speer wrote, “Now the thought of that fills me with something akin to envy: It’s all over for them. I still have to face 20 years. Yesterday I tried to imagine myself leaving prison after two decades, an old man.”

The dangerous thing about Hitler is that he had an entrancing effect on people who knew better. He still does. I know a number of people who are fascinated with the swastika, the Nazi regime, the SS and the Gestapo, and — principally — Hitler, to the point that it feels a little icky. They swear that their interest is purely “academic,” but one senses that that is not quite true.

William Shirer, the author of the monumental “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” spent time in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, before the outbreak of the war. He attended several of the great party rallies at Nuremberg. Those rallies, by the way, were designed by Speer.

You’ve seen them in the old black and white films: the giant flags and banners, the monumental architecture, tens of thousands of young “Aryan” men goose stepping in perfect synchronization, the heroic columns of light. And, at the rostrum, the fiercely gesticulating Hitler modulating his voice up and down the scale of violence from calm “analysis” of the world situation to slavering diatribes against the “stab in the back,” America (“a mongrel race”), and of course international Jewry.

Shirer, who was born in Iowa, regarded Hitler as a fraud and a mountebank who somehow got control of one of the world’s most civilized nations. He dismissed “Mein Kampf,” which he read carefully, as a pathetic tissue of racism, illogic, jingoism, special pleading, self-love, ungrammatical writing and megalomania.

And yet, Shirer confessed, at the big Nuremberg rallies before the war, in spite of his capacity to see the vulgar gangster behind the theatrical hypnotist, he nevertheless found himself mesmerized by Hitler. This made Shirer extremely upset with himself.

Speer was another highly intelligent person who could not quite decide what to make of Hitler.

On Feb. 10, 1947, Speer wrote the following riveting and troubling paragraph. “People (Nazis in the prison) are increasingly representing Hitler as a dictator given to raging uncontrollably and biting the rug even on slight pretexts. This seems to me a false and dangerous course. If the human features are going to be missing from the portrait of Hitler, if his persuasiveness, his engaging characteristics, and even the Austrian charm he could trot out are left out of the reckoning, no faithful picture of him will be achieved.”

That’s the kind of passage I would like to sit down with my father to discuss.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck.)

Berlin is built on sand

This may not be too much of a revelation as such but the sheer amount of structures which have been built into these sandy foundations certainly is! The city's development from a little village in the Mark Brandenburg province to Germany's biggest metropolis has to be seen in context with the utilisation of Berlin's underground for the urban infrastructure – like the sewage, gas, water & electricity networks and public transportation.

The Association “Berliner Unterwelten” (Berlin Underworlds) researches these historical developments and documents them. It was founded in 1997 by people from all walks of life who are interested in the diverse aspects of the underground. Its ranks include academics (such as architects, historians, lawyers, art historians, economists, town and regional planners and students) but also craftsmen, justice officials, teachers, policemen, OAPs and pupils who contribute to the organizations in many different ways.

Focusing on the history of Berlin's underground, the organization is dealing with largely uncharted territory and consequently attracts a lot of public attention. The indicators of this success are the books written by organization members, which are already published in multiple editions.

At the moment, the organization consists of more than 230 members who coordinate their work in several independent sections. The decision-making bodies of the Berliner Unterwelten e.V. are the Department Speakers' Council and the members' meetings. Every member has the right to participate in these gatherings. Membership fees are 60 € or 30 € (concessions) per year. Members also receive the periodical “Schattenwelt” (shadow worlds), a Quarterly which reports on the organization's broad spectrum of activities, discusses literature on the subject, features a travel section and serves as a forum for discussion. The travel and literature sections can also be found on the website under the heading Suggestions.

Our primary aim is to explore and document the city's underground architecture and make it accessible to the public. Underground buildings include caverns, air raid shelters, disused railway tunnels, derelict brewery vaults and other places the public normally has no access to. We try to conserve historically relevant underground structures and preserve them for future generations. Our message has spread and we are nowadays often approached by investors and public bodies whenever questions dealing with the underground arise.

The organization's headquarters are located in an air raid shelter within the Gesundbrunnen Subway station (U 8 line). In order to provide an insight into Berlin's underworld, this particularly interesting structure has been renovated by the organization. It also managed to get the bunker listed as a protected building in 1999. The organization's members meet there every Wednesday at 18.00. Membership meetings and special events such as concerts, theatre performances and exhibitions also take place in that structure. There are also special guided tours through underground installations for members of the association only.

How top Nazi's aide dared to mock Hitler's Germania

Stefan’s cartoons poke fun at Hitler’s ‘tallest, widest …’ mantra

By ALLAN HALL

In BERLIN

THIS is one of the plans for Germania that Hitler did not sign off – and ones that would have seen their author beheaded or sent to a concentration camp if the Fuhrer had seen them.

The remarkable cartoons, which poke fun at the pompous, grandiose vision of Hitler for a super-capital of his 1,000-year Reich were thought lost in the bombing that reduced Berlin to dust in the Second World War.

But they surfaced recently and are being seen by citizens of the German capital for the first time. They show that, even in the most self-conscious, self-important police state of the time, there was dissent – albeit clandestine.

The sketches were made by Hans Stefan, an architect on the staff of Albert Speer, Hitler's court builder who was charged in 1937 with the planning for the megalopolis that would reflect the might of the Ayran rulers of Europe and Eurasia.

"Tallest, highest, widest, biggest, grandest" was the mantra of Hitler, the failed architectural student and painter. His legacy was to be preserved in buildings that would dwarf the structures of ancient Egypt and Rome, standing as testament to his leadership and his peoples' might.

Speer was ordered to cull architectural styles from ancient empires and slap them together to make the world hold its breath. Stefan, who was a Nazi party member, saw much of the designs for the self-aggrandising rubbish they were. The cartoons poke fun at the "tallest, highest, widest, biggest" concept that Germania embraced.

One has the German eagle, the national symbol, perched on top of the planned Great Hall, which was to be twice as big as St Peter's in Rome. All he hears are the "Heils!" from within and he asks a passing bird: "Can you go back under and tell me what's happening there!"

Another shows the planned east-west axis of the city being so big that people in Czechoslovakia can see it. Then there is a house dwarfed by the hideously overbearing structures of Germania with people within saying: "Do you think we are going to be a part of Germania too?"

Another shows a giant crane grabbing a chunk of the Reichstag – Berlin's most imposing building – by mistake, illustrating how small it is next to the planned Great Hall.

"The Pedestrian Convoy" cartoon is almost straight out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, showing the problems for humans in the mammoth mechanised city that Hitler envisaged and which, incidentally, he told Speer he had no time for human sentiment – ie, the views of the residents of Berlin – getting in the way.

"The state visit – the gigantic extremes of architecture won't only intimidate visiting ambassadors" – ridicules the Hitler mindset that wanted to make all visitors to the new city feel awed and small by German greatness.

The reality, of course, turned out to be far different. By 1945 just the east-west axis and a few streetlights were the sum total of Germania's realisation.

The cartoons are on show at the Architectural Museum of the Technical University of Berlin and have been drawing large numbers of people.

Experts say they served as a "safety valve" for the team put together by Hitler to design Germania and were almost certainly enjoyed by Speer. "They are less about subversion and more about being able to ventilate about the regime," said Hans Dieter Naegelke, director of the museum. "But they would scarcely have amused Hitler; he would not have liked the caricatures."

Stefan survived the war and became a designer of civic buildings, many of which survive to this day; none as grand as those drawn up by Hitler.

The sketches were discovered in a Prussian military archive, which handed them on to the museum for the display. An exhibition earlier in Berlin this year displayed the actual plans for Germania, including a massive model of the Great Hall that Speer made.

Hitler intended for the subject peoples of his Reich to journey once in their lifetimes to be awed in the "Reich Capital" before returning to their spartan villages and towns. However, he died in his bunker on 2 May, 1945, with sketches of Germania on his desktop that he was studying until minutes before the end.

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The east-west axis and a few streetlights were not quite the sum total of Germania's realisation as there were preparations made underground (which were halted by the outbreak of war but which still exist) and also the Olympic Stadium (now the home ground of Hertha Berlin). As Olympic stadiums go it is not bad and has stood the test of time.

PROFILE

ALBERT Speer was the son Hitler never had and a rarity among his inner circle; an intellectual who cared little for power-grabbing.

In the middle of the war he became armaments minister.

Tried at Nuremberg as a war criminal, he acknowledged his guilt while denying the existence of the Holocaust, but escaped the gallows.

He was sentenced to 20 years in jail which he served, writing formidable memoirs afterwards about his time at the centre of Nazism.

He continued to deny knowledge of the Holocaust right up until his death in 1981.