Highly intelligent, educated and refined, from a prominent German family, Speer was light-years removed from the stereotypical Nazi leaders--the corrupt, morphine-addicted Hermann Goering, and the fanatical and sadistic SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who could carry out a policy of mass murder without a twinge of conscience. But if the Nazi movement had only been able to attract these grotesque figures it would probably have never gotten beyond the failed beer-hall putsch of Suddenly one day, Hitler plucked the young Speer out of the crowd, and invited him to lunch, lending him one of his own jackets for the occasion. This combination of almost unlimited power and flattering personal attention was an irresistible, addictive mixture for the ambitious young Speer. His ministry depended increasingly on slave labor imported from the conquered territory of Eastern Europe and by the end of the war, Speer had 14 million laborers working in subhuman conditions under his command. Speer tried to remain detached from the nitty-gritty details of arms production.
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Highly intelligent, educated and refined, from a prominent German family, Speer was light-years removed from the stereotypical Nazi leaders--the corrupt, morphine-addicted Hermann Goering, and the fanatical and sadistic SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who could carry out a policy of mass murder without a twinge of conscience. But if the Nazi movement had only been able to attract these grotesque figures it would probably have never gotten beyond the failed beer-hall putsch of Suddenly one day, Hitler plucked the young Speer out of the crowd, and invited him to lunch, lending him one of his own jackets for the occasion.
This combination of almost unlimited power and flattering personal attention was an irresistible, addictive mixture for the ambitious young Speer. His ministry depended increasingly on slave labor imported from the conquered territory of Eastern Europe and by the end of the war, Speer had 14 million laborers working in subhuman conditions under his command.
Speer tried to remain detached from the nitty-gritty details of arms production. While he ranted and raved about the Jews with cruder audiences, he presented a much quieter and more reasonable front to men like Speer. When Speer went to visit the concentration camp at Mathausen, he was given a VIP phony tour with well-fed prisoners in immaculate model barracks. To function effectively, Speer needed to have a clear, unvarnished grasp of reality. At the same time, to serve such an atrocious cause, he also needed an extraordinary capacity for avoiding or repressing the devastating consequences of his work.
The deeper Speer became involved in the war effort, the harder it became to maintain the equilibrium between these conflicting needs; in early , this led him to a physical and emotional breakdown. And yet, in the final days of the war, he again risked his life by flying back to Berlin to say goodby to his once-beloved Fuhrer.
It is significant that Speer actually contacted the author after reading an article of hers on the Nazi period, which is in keeping with his desire to control and manipulate the picture of himself that would be handed down to posterity. Speer presented himself as a sincerely penitent man who had tried his utmost to confront the truth, while his critics have portrayed him as a slick opportunist who has distorted the facts to rehabilitate his image.
But since Speer and so many others are now gone, she has performed a tremendous service by gathering so many eyewitness accounts, by showing the considerable human variety among the people of the Third Reich and by giving three-dimensional weight to people who are rarely seen as anything other than caricatures of evil. Hot Property. About Us. Brand Publishing. Times News Platforms. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options.
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Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth
Gitta Sereny, the writer and journalist, who has died aged 91, spent her adult life wrestling with the huge moral question of how to explain evil. She did it primarily through an extraordinarily intense process of research and writing about the twin themes of the evils of the Third Reich, on which she became a formidable expert, and of deeply troubled children, including the child-murderer Mary Bell. She returned repeatedly to her subject, in biographies of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp, of Hitler's architect and close companion Albert Speer, and of Bell, and in writings on the boy murderers of the toddler Jamie Bulger — pursuing her subjects indefatigably, with a passion to understand and an intense moral commitment. Gitta attributed her fascination with evil to her own experiences of Nazism as a child of central Europe in the early 20th century. Hers was not a happy childhood. She was born in Vienna, the daughter of a beautiful Austrian actress, whom she later described as "without moral opinions", and a wealthy Hungarian landowner. Her father, Gyula, died when she was a child; her elder brother left home at 18 and disappeared from her life; Gitta herself was sent to Stonar House boarding school in Sandwich, Kent, an experience she remembered with some affection.
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Albert Speer
Out of hundreds of hours of interviews, Sereny unravels the threads of Speer's personality: the genius that made him indispensable to the German war machine, the conscience that drove him to repent, and the emotional wounds that made him susceptible to Hitler's lethal magnetism. Read as an inside account of the Third Reich, or as a revelatory unsparing yet compassionate study of the human capacity for evil, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is a triumph. Not only a major addition to our knowledge of The Third Reich, but a stunning attempt to understand the nature of good and evil. It also constitutes a perceptive re-examination of the mysterious appeal of Adolf Hitler.
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Gitta Sereny obituary
Alfred A. The truth about Albert Speer, Hitler's most powerful henchman, has been passionately debated ever since he escaped a death sentence at the Nuremberg war crime trials in and was condemned to 20 years in Spandau prison in Berlin. On one side is Speer's own view of himself, as presented in his two remarkable memoirs, "Inside the Third Reich" and "Spandau: The Secret Diaries" , in which he accepted responsibility for Nazi crimes in general yet insisted on his ignorance of the death camps in particular. At the other extreme is Matthias Schmidt's "Albert Speer: The End of the Myth," a doctoral thesis published in a year after Speer's death arguing that Speer altered the historical record in his favor and not only knew about the death camps early in World War II, but was himself responsible for the deportation of 75, Berlin Jews. Gitta Sereny, as a European journalist concerned with the Holocaust and the author of "Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience," about Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, has been on both sides of the Speer debate.
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Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in for services to journalism. Sereny was born in Vienna , Austria in When she was thirteen, her train journey to a boarding school in the United Kingdom was delayed in Nuremberg where she attended one of the annual Nuremberg rallies. After writing about the rally for a class assignment she was given Mein Kampf to read by her teacher so she might be able to understand what she saw there.