Inside the Third Reich by
Albert Speer, excerpt:
Albert Speer said:
IN THE LAST WEEKS OF HIS LIFE, HITLER SEEMED TO HAVE BROKEN OUT OF THE rigidity which had gradually overcome him during the preceding years.He became more accessible again and could even tolerate the expression of dissent. As late as the winter of 1944, it would have been inconceivable for him to enter into a discussion of the prospects of the war with me.
Then, too, his flexibility on the question of the scorched earth policy would have been unthinkable, or the quiet way he went over my radio speech.
He was once more open to arguments he would not have listened to a year ago. But this greater softness sprang not from a relaxation of tension.
Rather, it was dissolution. He gave the impression of a man whose whole purpose had been destroyed, who was continuing along his established orbit only because of the kinetic energy stored within him. Actually, he had let go of the controls and was resigned to what might come.
There was actually something insubstantial about him. But this was perhaps a permanent quality he had. In retrospect I sometimes ask myself whether this intangibility, this insubstantiality, had not characterized him from early youth up to the moment of his suicide. It sometimes seems to me that his seizures of violence could come upon him all the more strongly because there were no human emotions in him to oppose them. He simply could not let anyone approach his inner being because that core was lifeless, empty.
Try as one might, one cannot humanize Hitler.
Inside the Third Reich by
Albert Speer attempts mightily to do so. He wrote the book after serving a 20 year term in Spandau Prison. He was perhaps able to justify himself well enough not to ingest lethal poison the way many of his compatriots did. There are other books about people who lived high and mighty, but ended shattered, such as
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Those, however, were novels, not true tales about someone who launched perhaps the world's greatest slaughter, WWII combined with the Holocaust.
When the book came out in 1969-70 (there was apparently an early release in Europe in October 1969, then release as translated in late August 1970) there was fawning press coverage about the "good Nazi." Speer got his start as Hitler's architect, and then progressed to be a director of armaments. Apparently the book's contents have become what is accepted history of the Third Reich. Unfortunately to some extent it humanizes Hitler, and throws a lot of blame on Goering and Bormann. Speer, Guderian and some others were technocrats, and not monsters on the scale of Hitler, Mengele or Goebbels, they were, at best, enablers. After Kristallnacht, in my opinion, it was not possible to be seriously ignorant about the utter evil.
The writing was, all things considered, pretty good. One finds themselves rooting for Hitler, the same way Speer, for most of his life, lived for Hitler's approval the same way a dog lives for the pats of his owner. I am glad I read it, since I've been staring at it on my shelf since recovering it from my parents' library after their death. All the same, it is not a book I will keep for re-reading, or one that I will recommend to my friends.
