Am euphoric at completing this mammoth book, and my first memoir read. The book does exactly what it claims to do, although one would still be skeptical about Speer's knowledge of the Holocaust. One explanation I can think of in his favor, is that he was simply too bogged down with his own responsibilities and the extreme irrational attitude of the Reich, that when Hanke told him what he had seen at a concentration camp, he simply couldn't get himself befuddled more! Apart from this, there is not even an iota of mention about the Holocaust - it was so surprising that you begin to think they are isolated incidents, but it was happening right there! But the book gives amazing information. One would think, the regime with its clean uniforms and extreme military decorum would be the classic example of perfection in execution, a well oiled machine, but it just appears so! The amount of confusion and the battle between the corrupt and power hungry sharks shake us and the veil which so beautifully describes Hitler as being this perfect military dictator with panache just breaks into pieces. The guy was stupid and driven more by sentiment than practicality most of the time. And who else could have contributed more to this madness, than Dr.Goebbels. Wonder how he was even classified vaguely as being intelligent!The Gaulieters and the Reichmarshalls had wonderful sounding titles. As the members of the Stauffenberg team(July 20th plot), called these leaders - "nodding donkeys", we all agree. Not even one of them had the integrity or raw courage or faintest impulse to stop Hitler from his irrational decisions. For example, when a general relentlessly tries to explain to Reichmarshall Goering that he indeed has seen an American fighter plane down in the West, Goering simply arm twists him to not only say otherwise, but also believe that such a plane never existed in the German airspace! Under such ridiculous, superficial regime, one would just go mental or end their lives, like they all did. Sometimes when Speer explains his complete inability to express his crude thoughts about Hitler's decisions, just because of Hitlers overwhelming charisma over Speer, the reader doesn't feel pity. Being so close to the dictator, only increases the chances of trying to make him understand the consequences. Many a times Speer has indeed committed mistakes and in plain language, behaved like a chicken, but he had the guts to accept his faults in the Nuremberg Trial of course when Hitler was no longer alive.At least in this area, as Speer rightly points out, Dr.Goebbels had a better sense of manipulating the Fuhrer, but for all the wrong needs. In my opinion, General Guderian was much more brave than Speer. Guderian screamed at Hitler, with boiling rage that the war was lost, without any inhibitions, so much so, that Hitler was taken aback. Guderian was not in the least favorable or in the inner circle of Hitler even, but Speer was. He had so many things in his power and stood just a witness to it. Speer displays this really slimy attitude that puts you off. He gulps insults from Hitler and seethes inside. At the start of the book there are a lot of details which bog you down, regarding the architectural plans and how they were carried out. Speer goes into a very detailed narration, graphs, footnotes etc, but most of the book shows how when the dictator was successful, his so called inner circle loved to be in his favor and even plotted against each other and pulled each other down, but when the regime fell , their insincerity knew no bounds. How, in a single minute, Bormann could completely misrepresent someone who was getting a little too close to the Fuhrer. In this aspect, I would blame Hitler's foolishness than Bormann's cunning. Also Speer gives us some wonderful insight into the mood of the German people when they cheered for Hitler and how the Fuhrer knew exactly where they were hurt and how he rightly struck the chords using his passionate speeches to get himself elected. A history unimaginable but one which we should all be reminded of again and again. Well, it could happen again, we never know. To sum it up, started this book in November and it took me quite a while to read, but I enjoyed it. This book is a must read for people who are World War 2 literature enthusiasts. After reading this book, this image of Adolf Hitler as a dictator, and the whole aura or fear vanishes and all you begin to see is a man who was at the core - a plain fool - in fact, a plain cold fool. The book is such a revelation. Am happy I read it. Here are some of the excerpts which just stick themselves straight in your brain. Loved the writing here. Avoided some spoilers, though they are quite interesting. 1. Albert Speer says "As I see it today, Hitler and Goebbels were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course, Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences. Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler's and Goebbels' baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme. To compensate for misery, insecurity, unemployment, and hopelessness, this anonymous assemblage wallowed for hours at a time in obsessions, savagery and license. The personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. By lashing out at their opponents and villifying the Jews, they gave expression and direction to fierce primal passions." 2. Throughout this trip, frau goebbels proved a pleasant and sensible woman. In general, the wives of the regimes bigwigs resisted the temptation of power far more than their husbands. Eva braun too proved her inner superiority. At any rate she never used for personal ends the power which lay within her grasp. 3. Hitler knew nothing about his enemies and even refused to use the information that was available to him. Instead, he trusted his inspirations, no matter how inherently contradictory they may be and these inspirations were governed by extreme contempt and underestimation of the others. 4. At headquarters, where everyone lived under the tremendous pressure of responsibility, probably nothing was more welcome than a dictate from above. That meant being freed of a decision and simultaneously being provided with an excuse for failure. 5. The communications apparatus at HQ was remarkable....it was possible to communicate directly with all important theaters of the war.....they could be directed from hitlers table in the situation room. The more fearful the situation, the greater was the gulf modern technology created between reality and fantasies with which the man at this table operated. 6. He was often capable of turning to the general staff officers of his entourage and insulting them directly...a good many of the officers who came in for these tongue lashings later joined the july 20 th 1944 conspiracy against hitler. In the past hitler had had a fine sense of discrimination and was able to adapt his language to the people around him. Now he was unrestrained and reckless. The stenographers seemed like envoys from the populace who were condemned to witness the tragedy ( hitlers reckless behavior) from front row seats. 7. Fake horoscopes spoke of valleys of darkness which had to be passed through, foretold imminent surprises, intimated happy outcomes. Only in the astrological sheets did the regime still have a future. 8. Hitler in the situation conference: "We have the good fortune to have a genius in our armaments industry, I mean Saur. General Thomale put in a tactful word: "Mein Fuhrer, Minister Speer is here". "Yes, I know", Hitler replied curtly, annoyed at the interruption. "But Saur is the genius who will master the situation". Oddly enough, I [Albert Speer] swallowed this deliberate insult, almost indifferently. 9. Hitler's dictatorship was the first of an industrial estate in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, radio, made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where they were executed uncritically.
This book is definitely essential reading if you have any kind of interest at all in either WWII, or the agency which individual people can have within a totalitarian system. Inside the Third Reich is a lengthy - in my edition, seven hundred pages, not including notes, bibliography or index - memoir written by Albert Speer, focusing on the years between 1933 and 1945 when he was Hitler's architect, his Minister of Arms and Munitions, and probably one of the closest things Hitler had to a friend.At many points it's not an easy book to read - not because Speer goes into any detail about the mass killings or the conditions in the concentration camps, but because of the detail which he goes into about the construction and requisition projects which formed so much of his work at the time, the repetitive ways in which he documents tea-time with Hitler. In some ways I think this is one of the most important features of the book. You get to see the sheer banality of the regime, the statistics and demographics which make up such a large chunk of the book showing off the bureaucracy of the Third Reich which was not so very different from many other western countries at the time, or since.His observations on Hitler's personality, his initial hero-worship for him, and his gradual later disillusionment, are truly fascinating to read about. Hitler is shown, not as a madman or as an evil mastermind, but as an actual person; the descent into delusion and denial in later life is made all the more dramatic by how almost-normal he seemed in the earlier part of the book.Speer does express regret in the book for the crimes which the Nazi regime committed, and for his part in them. This is not something which he came to realise over the course of writing his memoirs - from the Nuremberg trials, we do have footage of him striking his breast and saying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Something, perhaps, of a realisation of the wrongs of the regime had already occurred to him from 1944 on, as shown by his attempts to block some or all of the scorched earth policy which Hitler tried to adopt in the last few desperate months of the war.However, I find it really and truly hard to believe that Speer was ever truly as naive and unaware as he was presented as being in the book, or that he was devoted to all the aims of Nazism with the exception of its racist ideologies. He certainly wasn't involved directly in any of the mass murder, but he did make use of slave labour in his construction projects and in the munition factories which he ran. He may have been described by others as the 'respectable Nazi'; but respectable or not, he was still a Nazi, who either found the racial policies of the regime acceptable, or capable of being ignored. Perhaps he didn't know; perhaps he didn't want to know, consciously or unconsciously. With an auto-biographical memoir of this nature and on this topic, it is hard to be certain. I think the only thing one can do is to read the book oneself, and make up one's own mind.
What do You think about Inside The Third Reich (1997)?
Although Albert Speer wasn't among the absolute innermost circle of Hitler trustees (maybe only Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Doenitz and a few others could be counted among those), he was nevertheless the highest ranking Third Reich official to open up so extensively in a book after the war.Starting out as Hitler's favourite architect and the official architect of the Third Reich, he then moved on to become the Armaments and Munitions Reich Minister and thus enjoyed Hitler's full support for most of the war. In this book he details his meteoric rise inside the Third Reich but more than his own story, it is the story of Hitler as seen by Speer. Just like countless others, Speer was mesmerized by Hitler. In hindsight he finds Hitler's speeches banal, his peculiarities eccentric and his physical features unappealing, yet he confesses he never saw any of that in Hitler's presence and was instead spellbound, inspired, emboldened and everything that fired up the Nazis at the time.Although it has been more than 10 years since I read the book, many of various details and bits of information I read from the book are still fresh in my mind. Overall I found the book extremely enlightening and a treasure trove of inside information about the Third Reich and Hitler in particular. Many of the factoids I read in the book, I have yet to encounter in other sources detailing the Third Reich, so for anyone interested in the Third Reich on more than just a casual level, this book is highly recommended.
—Anton Klink
Fascinating book but I found myself wondering if Herr Speer was really the hero he made himself out to be. Did he really single-handledly prevent the scorched-earth decree from Hitler from being carried out? Did he really face up to Hitler and say "the war is lost" and "you have no right to ask the German people to suffer because YOU lost the war"? We'll never know. But this much is sure, Herr Speer gave us a detailed look at the top level of Nazi government in both victory and in defeat. His character portrayal is amazingly believable. I feel like I personally knew Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Borman, Hess, et al ad infinitum.
—Richard Fulgham
Sixty-five years after World War II, we still find ourselves fascinated by the monsters who began it all. Hitler,Goering,Goebbels,Hessand Bormann: these names have become symbolic of the greatest evil everperpetrated by mankind. Through the eyes of Hitler's chief architect and minister of armaments,Albert Speer,we are presented with a tableau of theleadership of these nefarious forces. Speer,who almost singularly came to realize the wrongs wrought bythese purveyors of dark deeds,presents us with insights into their charac-ters.Hitler comes off as having a hypnotic ability to control people and yet always retained the basic petit bourgeois tastes with which he'd beenbred.Goering,perhaps the most aristocratic of the group, constantly demands and takes the material riches brought by the war. Goebbels,who hada doctorate, looked down his nose at the others,yet convinced himself of the propaganda he was espousing. Hess was entirely devoted to Hitler and was somewhat unbalanced.Himmler was the cold incarnation of beastiality. An aspiring young architect when he joined the Nazi Party,Speer wastotally naive about politics as well as the path upon which the Fuhrer wastaking the German people. Speer gloried in his ability to build struc-tures for Hitler's aggrandizement,but he had no inkling of where thisabsolute ruler was taking the country. It was only in the last year of the war,when defeat was at hand,that Speer realized the truth he'd deliberately tried to avoid.Hitlerhad not only wreaked havoc all over Europe,but he was now prepared to sacrifice the German people as well to appease his megalomania.It was finally at the Nuremberg trials that Speer,unlike his colleagues,voicedhis complicity in assisting Hitler's destructive reign.For what he haddone, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. It was there,with in-finite time to ponder, that he produced "Inside the Third Reich".
—Irving Koppel
