Word: speers
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DIARIES ARE USUALLY the accompaniment of a lived life. This one stand in place of a life." On that dramatic note, Nazi war criminal Albert Speer begins his chronicle of his twenty years in the Spandau prison run by the four Allied powers. Speer, after openly acknowledging his guilt, was convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal for his role in the Nazi use of forced foreign labor in German factories. In his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, published four years after his release in 1966, Speer criticized his fellow Nazis for their refusal to admit any guilt, while professing anguish...
...Speer largely retains that view in these diaries, and reaffirms the self-portrayal he so carefully laid out in his memoirs. That painstaking mosaic presented Speer as a reluctant Nazi, a politically naive and unambitious man, a technocrat whose real failure lay in his moral blindness and refusal to consider the implications of his work from anything but a technical standpoint. In his first book, Speer was never really a Nazi; he just happened to be captivated by Hitler's personal magnetism, never really considering the ideology of National Socialism. Of course, Speer denied any knowledge of the death camps...
...persuasive story, and almost every reviewer praised Speer for his contrition and basic decency. Unfortunately, the story didn't bear up too well under closer scrutiny. Speer's account diverged sharply from the facts in several places and from believability at others--the accolades of many critics notwithstanding. Speer was in fact a dedicated Nazi, who had joined Himmler's Storm Troopers in 1931 and the S.S. a year later. He never opposed such things as the Scorched Earth Policy on moral grounds; his main concern was that all that fine machinery be preserved. Though it receives little attention...
...were Speer's claims of political naivete very credible. Could he really have become Minister of Armaments if all he wanted was to be a simple architect? Speer took that important post at the age of 37--an impressive achievement for such a young man, not what one would expect of someone who knew and cared nothing about the internal power struggles of the Nazi regime. The evidence of Speer's years with Hitler suggests that far from being an unschooled innocent in such political maneuverings, he was shrewd, resourceful, and highly ambitious...
NONETHELESS, Speer insists on portraying himself in similar terms in Spandau. It seems Speer did not write these diaries to unburden himself or explore personal questions, but intended to publish them all along; as a result, he is circumspect about what he includes and no doubt even more careful about what he leaves out. He made most of his entries on scraps of toilet paper and smuggled them out through friendly guards. The best diaries are those that were never intended for publication: only those can provide access to the writers' most closely guarded secrets, their most revealing qualities. Spandau...