The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer

Yes, the author is biased but he makes no secret of it so you can agree or disagree with him without having to read between lines. What I think of Albert Speer is irrelevant so I am not going to "judge" the guy but the book. What I liked the most is that contrary to recent books on the subject like Joachim Fest?s one on Speer, this one gives us a LOT of information about what was happenning in the enviroment around Speer (German politics, other countries, etc) before presenting actions by part of Speer so it is a very interesting way of understanding facts that in other biographies of Albert Speer are presented more or less like a shopping list. In other words, Speer?s life and actions are presented in a much broader context of connections and causes and consequences. Isn?t it what a person?s life is after all? Besides, the author has a nice sense of humour and writes very well. Be it that you agree or disgree with the book?s content, the book is very readable. Last but not least I expected to find -given the author?s confessed bias against Speer- facts that I could feel, having read a lot of books about Speer, that were not true or were presented in a questionable way. This is not the fact and all information presented concours and concatenates with what it is now common knowledge about Speer. In short, a very good book about a very interesting person in the history of the 20th century

Like many contemporary works of non-fiction, "The Good Nazi" provides support for the axiom that truth is often stranger than fiction. Albert Speer remains in many ways one of the most enigmatic figures of the 20th century, admired for his singular and seemingly forthright admission of guilt and culpability for crimes committed by the Third Reich during the Nuremberg War Trials, but reviled by many later for conducting a campaign of disingenuous prevarication to justify his actions and stances before during and after the war. Speer spent two decades years in the allied prison at Spandau as one of the few members of the Nazi hierarchy to escape the death sentence, and wrote a best-selling book that he secretly smuggled out over the course of the twenty years with the cooperation of his wife and family. With its publication in the early 1970s, he became internationally famous, and he shamelessly used the bully pulpit of his own notoriety to forward his own revisionist notions about what really happened during the 12-year reign of the Third Reich. The present book revolves around the complex nature of the issues raised during this post-prison campaign. On the one hand, Speer was the only of the accused former Nazis to admit his own guilt and complicity in the crimes and misdeeds of the Third Reich, yet on the other hand he always denied any direct knowledge of the Holocaust. This terrific biography by Dan vander Vat, subtitled `The Life and Lies of Albert Speer'. represents a well-documented and penetrating investigation into the admittedly contradictory aspects to Speer's explanations, justifications, and rationalizations of his own role and conduct during and after the Second World War. The author lays an exhaustive groundwork for his claims that Speer was in actuality the ultimate opportunist, one who used his charm, position, and influence both to rise shamelessly through the Nazi ranks to become the second in command and who subsequently ployed these obfuscating skills to further ingratiate himself with the world at large. The essence of the author's argument is that Speer was basically an amoral and extremely ambitious opportunist who did whatever was necessary to further his own life situation, whether it be that of a rising Nazi official or as a prevaricating apologist for a shameless German past. Thus, at one point Speer is depicted as the ultimate company man, a dedicated Nazi zealously and shamelessly pursuing the maximization of forced and slave labor in service to the Reich's war objective, deliberately and systematically exploiting the millions of captive peoples, most usually to the point of physical exhaustion and death. Try though he might, Speer could never adequately explain away his own behavior and actions during the war, and it seem quite evident that he did indeed conduct a campaign of deliberate obfuscation and prevarication regarding his own role in the Nazi murder machine. This is a book that sometimes makes one uneas

One of the great enigmas of The Nuremberg Trials from the reading I had done, was how Albert Speer escaped death, and instead went to prison and spent the better part of 2 decades a free man. Speer is known to many as The Architect Of The Third Reich. Known for his heavy Neo-Classic designs, he made for an ideal kindred spirit with the Corporal, who was a frustrated/failed architect. He became the man that would design, and then oversee construction of some of the largest, and some would say designs of questionable artistic merit, until Berlin began to be reduced to the post war rubble pile it was destined to become. Many of the planned buildings and monuments would dwarf buildings even by today's standards. While the war made redecorating the homes of the Nazi elite, and Hitler's projects increasingly difficult and then impossible, Speer never lacked work.The net result of Speer's greatest contribution to the Nazi war effort was his remarkable ability as a manager of production, which actually lengthened the War. By any measure Speer was responsible for countless deaths that otherwise would never have happened had he not been one of Hitler's zealots, one of those mesmerized and totally loyal to the Corporal. The production of war material actually increased under the direction of Speer, and did so as the War was winding down. Production of weapons was actually at some of its highest levels at various times later, rather than earlier in the War.None of the incredible feats of production he was able to conjure despite seemingly hopeless odds, match the odds he beat when his life was at a very high probability of ending at Nuremberg. How this Nazi at the very highest echelons of power, a man who was a close confidant's of the Corporal would survive the fate of his peers is the story that Mr. Dan Van Der Velt shares in his work "The Good Nazi". I don't know if anyone was offering odds of who would beat the hangman, but the odds Speer beat, have to have made him was of the longest shots ever to come in a winner in history.There are those who say his "attempt" to kill Hitler, and his refusal to follow orders for the destruction of Berlin mitigated the crimes he was guilty of. These people would say that had he carried out all of the final orders to destroy Berlin's infrastructure, it would have lengthened the City's recovery, and brought additional suffering to the survivors. His acts or lack of action in these respects in a purely pragmatic sense may have mitigated some adverse results. But these have to be placed side by side with his conduct for year after year as a very high ranking member of Hitler's Staff, a man that did as he was told, who did not question anything, until the outcome was crystal clear, and it was to his advantage to do so.Speer ran his factories with slave labor; he personally was responsible for the rounding up and "resettlement" of 75,000 Jews from Berlin at a minimum. He oversaw the fact

Van der Vat's book does something no other book on Speer seems to have done. It really leaves no doubt what many suspected for the past 50 sum-odd years: that Speer knew very well what was happening to the Jews in Germany and the occupied territories, and why. The last sentence of the book is quite powerful and will change your opinion of Speer if you had thought of him until now as "the repentant Nazi".There were some detractors, though. (1) Why would an historian, of all people, misidentify a picture of Colonel General Alfred Jodl? Van der vat calls him "Keitel" [Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel]. It's not like there aren't hundreds of pictures of those men in the archives and public domain. (2) For some reason, he describes the building used as a gymnasium at the Palace of Justice (where the executions were held following the Nuernberg trials) as having been built especially for the executions and destroyed afterwards. (3)He got the year wrong on the exhumation of Martin Bormann's remains. These and other errors are a little troubling if they point to a lack of thoroughness in research. All problems aside, if you care about the subject of Albert Speer, the book is a must-read. It is better to first read Speer's "Inside the Third Reich" and a couple of books about the trial beforehand. You need to get a feel for the depth of his apparent deception before you see it debunked for good in "The Good Nazi".

This book should probably be read after reading Inside the Third Reich (by Albert Speer). With that background, you will better appreciate The Good Nazi. The author gives a very good overview of the work of Speer during the period of 1930-1945. The evidence that the author presents regarding the knowledge Speer had of the persecutions perpetrated by the Nazi is convincing. The author argues that Speer accepted at his Nuremberg trial general responsibility for the atrocities of the Nazi regime (as he had been a Reichsminister...the rough equivalent of a cabinet member) but did this while denying specific responsibility for any particular crime. The result was much admiration by those who saw Speer as "coming clean" with a denouncement of the Nazi's...but he did this without actually admitting (and he affirmatively denied) any personal responsibility for the perpetuation of any of the specific atrocities. The author, however, provides evidence that Speer did know of the persecution of the Jews and the use of forced, slave labor in the German war economy. The author also gives some (inconclusive) evidence that Speer was aware of the Final Solution, as defined by Himmler (something Speer had always dissavowed). If you have already read Inside the Third Reich or are otherwise familiar with the general views held by those who have written about Speer's role in Nazi Germany, you will probably come away from reading this book with a diminished view of Speer...both in his role in Nazi Germany and as a person.