| Overview: | 110 million troops mobilized in two thirds of the world's nations. The Third Reich at war with 53 countries. More than five years of death and horror triggered by the German people. How was it possible? How could an entire nation allow itself to become part of a cold machinery of hatred and destruction? "Speer & Hitler: The Devil's Architect" helps us understand what caused the Germans to unleash such devastation upon the world. This three-part docudrama tears open the veil of myths and half-truths obscuring a central figure of the Nazi regime. A man of profound contradictions, Albert Speer was a cultivated intellectual who allied himself with the 20th-century's most horrifying embodiment of evil... A man schooled in the humanities, yet who controlled Germany's wartime industry and used slave labor to increase production... A brilliant architect willing to build the ostentatious monuments of a doomed Thousand-Year Reich... A protegé who turned against his master during Hitler's last months and was the only Nazi leader at the Nuremberg trials to admit a certain responsibility for the regime's actions, if only in an abstract sense. Filmmaker Heinrich Breloer, writer and director of the Emmy Awardwinning miniseries "The Manns," is joined by many of the same creative minds who helped produce "The Manns." For the first time ever, three of Speer's children are interviewed on camera and confronted with painful truths about their father. Breloer's research is crowned by revealing facts found in previously unknown documents. Fictional re-enactments played out by a cast of leading film and TV stars provide emotional immediacy and allow an intimate look behind the staged self-portrayals of Hitler and his architect. |
