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| albert speer early life: Albert Speer Gitta Sereny, 1996-10-29 Albert Speer was not only Hitler's architect and armaments minister, but the Fuhrer's closest friend--his unhappy love. Speer was one of the few defendants at the Nuremberg Trials to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even as he denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Now this enigma of a man is unveiled in a monumental biography by a writer who came to know Speer intimately in his final years. 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. Fascinating...Not only a major addition to our knowledge of the Third Reich, but a stunning attempt to understand the nature of good and evil.--Newsday More than a biography...It also constitutes a perceptive re-examination of the mysterious appeal of Adolf Hitler.--San Francisco Chronicle |
| albert speer early life: Golden Boy Paula Astridge, 2019-06-01 Albert Speer was one of the most brilliant and controversial men of the Twentieth Century. Although he was the Adolf Hitlers favourite for many years, Speer refused to share in his suicide and was condemned to twenty years in Spandau Prison for war crimes. His open confession of guilt at the Nuremberg Trials spared him the noose but, to this day, a question mark hangs over his head. What was the level of his involvement in the Holocaust? Was he a man of integrity caught up in a web of evil from which he couldnt escape - or was he just clever and convincing enough to have obscured the worst of his sins? No-one has ever argued convincingly one way or the other. Paula Astridges very personal - and exhaustively researched account - will both entertain and enable the reader to draw their own conclusions. |
| albert speer early life: Albert Speer Joachim C. Fest, 2007-07-10 Albert Speer remains the most mysterious character of the leadership of the Nazi regime. He was the chief architect of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s confidant. Speer built the “Reichskanzlei” (official offices), discovered the “Lightdome” and was finally, in 1942, named as the minister for arms. But he characterised himself as apolitical, called Hitler’s hatred of Jews an anomaly, and the conspirators of the 20th July placed Speer’s name on their cabinet list. Here at last are the memoirs of the mysterious Albert Speer, the “good Nazi” Joachim Fest’s records of conversations with Speer provide a fascinating insight into the psyche of Hitler’s architect This book is a vital contribution towards the understanding of the psychology of the national socialist leadership Fest has created a volume that provides a unique portrait of a member of the Nazi party until now clouded in mystery |
| albert speer early life: Speer Joachim C. Fest, 2002 Albert Speer is the great Enigma of Nazi Germany. Before he was thirty he had become Hitler's architect. Soon he was building the new Reich's Chancellory and had transformed the Nuremberg rallies with his cathedrals of light' and gift for stage management. In 1942 Hitler appointed him his Armaments Minister and Speer quadrupled German arms production, keeping the German Army in the field and prolonging the war. Joachim Fest examines all the phases of Speer's life and work. Precisely because of Speer's contradictions, Fest sees him as representative of the mood and susceptibilities of the German people of the time. In this brilliant and persuasive book Fest argues that Albert Speer's life helps to explain how Germany broke with its traditions in 1933 and descended so far into crime and barbarism. This book is a crowning achievement for the writer who pioneered a new school of biographical writing in the 1960s with his FACE OF THE THIRD REICH and his masterly Hitler biography, which has become a classic. |
| albert speer early life: The Good Nazi Dan Van der Vat, 1997 Biography of Nazi leader Albert Speer who served Hitler as a minister of wartime production, looking at Speer's knowledge of Holocaust activities, discussing his personal role in the exploitation of slave labor, and questioning his denial of war crimes. |
| albert speer early life: The Good Nazi Dan Van der Vat, Albert Speer, 1997 Biography of Nazi leader Albert Speer who served Hitler as a minister of wartime production, looking at Speer's knowledge of Holocaust activities, discussing his personal role in the exploitation of slave labor, and questioning his denial of war crimes. |
| albert speer early life: My Life is like a Fairy Tale Robert Irwin, 2021-06-01 ‘Robert Irwin vividly and brilliantly blends the fictional life and all-too-real times of a film star of the Nazi era in this a narrative of diminishing options and the advance to death and destruction. Cultured, clever and funny at times, in a grim Charles Adams way, Robert Irwin’s novel is engrossing and enveloping. From a dull Dutch childhood in Dordrecht and a waitressing job, sexy Sonja Heda, cigarette in hand, wangles her way on to the film sets of various independent production companies making the films of the Weimar and Nazi eras. From The Blue Angel, The Gypsy Baron, Jew Suss, Habanera and Munchausen she lands the starring role in the Nazi screwball comedy Bagdad Capers. Although German cinema became a key part of the Nazi war effort, the film industry continued to produce commercial films appealing to the varying film tastes of German filmgoers. Joseph Goebbels at the head of the Ministry of Propaganda propagated Nazi supremacist ideology and indoctrinate the population of Germany though film and radio, not unlike the way reality TV and social media are used today by populist politicians in the US and UK.’ Georgia de Chamberet in Ten Books for Independent Minds from Bookblast |
| albert speer early life: Spandau Albert Speer, 1977 |
| albert speer early life: High Society in the Third Reich Fabrice D'Almeida, 2008-12-22 This book is the first systematic study of the relations between German high society and the Nazis. It uses unpublished archival material, private diaries and diplomatic documents to take us into the hidden areas of power where privileges, tax breaks, and stolen property were exchanged. Fabrice D'Almeida begins by examining high society in the Weimar period, dominated by the old imperial aristocracy and a new republican aristocracy of government officials and wealthy businessmen. It was in this group that Hitler made his social debut in the early 1920s through the mediation of conservative friends and artists, including the family of the composer Richard Wagner. By the end of the 1920s, he enjoyed wide support among socialites, who played a significant role in his access to power in 1933. Their adherence to the Nazi regime, and the favors they received in return, continued and even grew until defeat loomed on the horizon. D'Almeida shows how members of German high society sought to outdo each other in showing zealous support for Hitler, how the old elites starting with the Kaiser's sons partied alongside parvenus, and how actors, aristocrats, SS technocrats, and diplomats came together to form a strange imperial court. Women also played a role in this theatre of power; they were persuaded that they had gained in dignity what they had lost in civil rights. There emerges a fascinating and disturbing picture of a group that allowed nothing - not war, the plundering of Europe, nor the extermination of peoples - to alter their cynical enjoyment of pleasures: hunting, regattas, the opera, balls, dinners and tennis. More than a study of a class or a chronicle, this book lifts the veil that has concealed a society that used secrecy to protect itself. High Society in the Third Reich makes an important and unique contribution to the current reevaluation of the extent to which German society, including German high society, was responsible for Hitler's accession to power and the crimes that were committed by his regime. |
| albert speer early life: The Occult in National Socialism Stephen E. Flowers, 2022-09-20 A critical history of the roots of Nazi occultism and its continuing influence • Explores the occult influences on various Nazi figures, including Adolf Hitler, Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Heinrich Himmler • Examines the foundations of the movement laid in the 19th century and continuing in the early 20th century • Explains the rites and runology of National Socialism, the occult dimensions of Nazi science, and how many of the sensationalist descriptions of Nazi “Satanic” practices were initiated by Church propaganda after the war In this comprehensive examination of Nazi occultism, Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D., offers a critical history and analysis of the occult and esoteric streams of thought active in the Third Reich and the growth of occult Nazism at work in movements today. Sharing the culmination of five decades of research into primary and secondary sources, many in the original German, Flowers looks at the symbolic, occult, scientific, and magical traditions that became the foundations from which the Nazi movement would grow. He details the influences of Theosophy, Volkism, and the work of the Brothers Grimm as well as the impact of scientific culture of the time. Looking at the early 20th century, he describes the impact of Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, Rudolf von Sebottendorf, Friedrich Hielscher, and others. Examining the period after the Nazi Party was established in 1919, and more especially after it took power in 1933, Flowers explores the occult influences on key Nazi figures, including Adolf Hitler, Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess, and Heinrich Himmler. He analyzes Hitler’s usually missed references to magical techniques in Mein Kampf, revealing his adoption of occult methods for creating a large body of supporters and shaping the thoughts of the masses. Flowers also explains the rites and runology of National Socialism, the occult dimensions of Nazi science, and the blossoming of Nazi Christianity. Concluding with a look at the modern mythology of Nazi occultism, Flowers critiques postwar Nazi-related literature and unveils the presence of esoteric Nazi myths in modern occult and political circles. |
| albert speer early life: Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Karin Wieland, 2015-10-05 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) Named of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Boston Globe Magisterial in scope, this dual biography examines two complex lives that began alike but ended on opposite sides of the century’s greatest conflict. Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, born less than a year apart, lived so close to each other that Riefenstahl could see into Dietrich’s Berlin apartment. Coming of age at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, both sought fame in Germany’s burgeoning motion picture industry. While Dietrich’s depiction of Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel catapulted her to Hollywood stardom, Riefenstahl—who missed out on the part—insinuated herself into Hitler’s inner circle to direct groundbreaking if infamous Nazi propaganda films, like Triumph of the Will. Dietrich, who toured tirelessly with the USO, could never truly go home again; Riefenstahl could never shake her Nazi past. Acclaimed German historian Karin Wieland examines these lives within the vicious crosscurrents of a turbulent century, evoking piercing insights into the modern era’s most difficult questions, about illusion and mass intoxication, art and truth, courage and capitulation (New Yorker). |
| albert speer early life: Secret Reports on Nazi Germany Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, 2013-07-14 A groundbreaking book that gathers key wartime intelligence reports During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School—Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer—worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time. These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war. Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context. |
| albert speer early life: The Origins of the Second World War R. J. Overy, 2008 The Origins of the Second World War explores the reasons why the Second World War broke out in September 1939 and not sooner, and why a European war expanded into world war by 1941. Richard Overy argues that this was not just 'Hitler's War' but one that had its roots and origins in the decline of the old empires of Britain and France and the rise of ambitious new powers in Germany, Italy and Japan. Any explanation of the outbreak of hostilities must be multinational in scope taking into account the basic instability of the international system that had still not recovered from the shocks of the Great War. In this third edition: - The role of Italy in the approach to war has been re-evaluated - Overy addresses recent revelations about Soviet policy in the 1930s, particularly exploring Soviet military planning and preparations - Arguments about Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement are rethought and reassessed. This new edition has now been completely overhauled, updated, expanded and reset. With a comprehensive documents section, colour plates, guide to who's who, a chronology and lists of further reading, TheOrigins of the Second World War will provide an invaluable introduction to any student of this fascinating period. Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has authored 17 books on the Third Reich, the Second World War and air warfare which include: The Air War 1939-1945 (2nd ed, 2006), Why the Allies Won (2nd ed, 2006) and The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004)which won both the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for History in 2005. |
| albert speer early life: Hitler's Last Witness Rochus Misch, 2014-08-30 This memoir of Hitler’s personal bodyguard presents “convincing first-person testimony of the dictator’s final desperate months, days and hours” (Huffington Post). After being seriously wounded in the 1939 Polish campaign, Rochus Misch was invited to join Hitler’s SS-bodyguard. There he served until the war’s end as Hitler’s bodyguard, courier, orderly, and, finally, as Chief of Communications. On the Berghoff terrace, he watched Eva Braun organize parties, observed Heinrich Himmler and Albert Speer, and monitored telephone conversations from Berlin to the East Prussian Headquarters on July 20, 1944—after the attempt on Hitler’s life. As the Allied forces closed in, Misch was drawn into the Führerbunker with the last of the faithful. He remained in charge of the bunker switchboard as his duty required, even after Hitler committed suicide. Misch knew Hitler the private man. His memoirs offer an intimate view of life in close attendance to Hitler and of the endless hours deep inside the bunker. They also provide new insights into military events—such as Hitler’s initial feeling that the 6th Army should pull out of Stalingrad. Shortly before he died, Misch wrote a new introduction for this English-language edition. |
| albert speer early life: The Third Reich Thomas Childers, 2017-10-10 “Riveting…An elegantly composed study, important and even timely” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) history of the Third Reich—how Adolf Hitler and a core group of Nazis rose from obscurity to power and plunged the world into World War II. In “the new definitive volume on the subject” (Houston Press), Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, he found his voice and drew a loyal following. As his views developed, Hitler attracted like-minded colleagues who formed the nucleus of the nascent Nazi party. Between 1924 and 1929, Hitler and his party languished in obscurity on the radical fringes of German politics, but the onset of the Great Depression gave them the opportunity to move into the mainstream. Hitler blamed Germany’s misery on the victorious allies, the Marxists, the Jews, and big business—and the political parties that represented them. By 1932 the Nazis had become the largest political party in Germany, and within six months they transformed a dysfunctional democracy into a totalitarian state and began the inexorable march to World War II and the Holocaust. It is these fraught times that Childers brings to life: the Nazis’ unlikely rise and how they consolidated their power once they achieved it. Based in part on German documents seldom used by previous historians, The Third Reich is a “powerful…reminder of what happens when power goes unchecked” (San Francisco Book Review). This is the most comprehensive and readable one-volume history of Nazi Germany since the classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. |
| albert speer early life: Artists Under Hitler Jonathan Petropoulos, 2014-01-01 'Artists Under Hitler' closely examines cases of artists who failed in their attempts to find accommodation in the Nazi regime as well as others whose desire for official acceptance was realised. They illuminate the complex cultural history of this period and provide haunting portraits of people facing excruciating choices and grave moral questions. |
| albert speer early life: Eva Braun Heike B. Gortemaker, 2012-12-11 From one of Germany’s leading young historians, the first comprehensive biography of Eva Braun, Hitler’s devoted mistress, finally wife, and the hidden First Lady of the Third Reich. In this groundbreaking biography of Eva Braun, German historian Heike Görtemaker reveals Hitler’s mistress as more than just a vapid blonde whose concerns never extended beyond her vanity table. Twenty-three years his junior, Braun first met Hitler when she took a position as an assistant to his personal photographer. Capricious, but uncompromising and fiercely loyal—she married Hitler two days before committing suicide with him in Berlin in 1945—her identity was kept secret by the Third Reich until the final days of the war. Through exhaustive research, newly discovered documentation, and anecdotal accounts, Görtemaker turns preconceptions about Eva Braun and Hitler on their head, and builds a portrait of the little-known Hitler far from the public eye. |
| albert speer early life: Infiltration Albert Speer, 2010 Albert Speer - gifted architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich - cannot forget. At seventy-five, decades after the events. I am still haunted by the thought that I could have made decisions in a minute that would have improved the situation of the unfortunate inmates.Although not responsible for the concentration camps, Speer was in charge of the arms produced by the inmates, who were forced into factory work in hellish conditions. Speer set out to tell the story of German armaments in World War II and in his research stumbled across the records of the SS for the period. These included the documents of its chief, Heinrich Himmler, who was determined to infiltrate the war economy with his own people and build an SS industrial empire. Acting with Hitler's consent, Himmler would have made the SS independent of state and party.The insidiousness of the plot was well known to Speer, one of Himmler's targets However, the breadth of Himmler's machinations, the depth of his ruthlessness, the sheer mania of his last-ditch schemes to increase production became a book in themselves.Thus Infiltration is the only-book about the SS written by a high-ranking official within the Third Reich. It is also the most telling portrait of Heinrich Himmler ever written. |
| albert speer early life: The Nazi State and German Society Robert G. Moeller, 2009-08-21 The Nazi State and German Society invites students to view the history of the twentieth century’s most infamous totalitarian regime through the voices of people who experienced it. Robert Moeller’s comprehensive introduction presents an overview of the Nazi regime, from Weimar to the end of the war, explaining the factors that led millions of ordinary Germans to sacrifice individual rights in the interest of collective goals and national security. The effects of Nazi rule on Jews and other persecuted groups are explored, along with a discussion of why so few people organized against the regime. Over 50 documents from a broad range of perspectives bring this history to life and illustrate the effect of Nazi rule on German society. |
| albert speer early life: Culture in the Third Reich Moritz Föllmer, 2020 A ground-breaking study that gets us closer to solving the mystery of why so many Germans embraced the Nazi regime so enthusiastically and identified so closely with it. |
| albert speer early life: Hitler's Religion Richard Weikart, 2016-11-22 A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country! |
| albert speer early life: New German Architecture Albert Speer, 2020-04-30 This is a dual language ( German/English ) reprint of the now extremely rare and expensive book, Neue Deutsche Baukunst, published in 1941 to showcase the architectural beauty of the building programme instituted by National Socialist Germany. Book consists of photographs of these new structures with details of the architect or artist involved in the project. |
| albert speer early life: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich William L. Shirer, 2011-10-11 History of Nazi Germany. |
| albert speer early life: Hitler Volker Ullrich, 2016 Selected as a Book of the Year by the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement and The Times Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the F�hrer had no private life. Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the F�hrer. While charting in detail Hitler's life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the F�hrer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile - and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the clich�d image of the monster. This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss. |
| albert speer early life: Alain Elkann Interviews , 2017-09-15 Alain Elkann has mastered the art of the interview. With a background in novels and journalism, and having published over twenty books translated across ten languages, he infuses his interviews with innovation, allowing them to flow freely and organically. Alain Elkann Interviews will provide an unprecedented window into the minds of some of the most well-known and -respected figures of the last twenty-five years. |
| albert speer early life: History and Memory: Lessons from the Holocaust Saul Friedländer, 2014-10-01 This ePaper, History and Memory: lessons from the Holocaust, presents the original text of the Leçon inaugurale delivered by Professor Saul Friedländer on 23 September 2014 at the Maison de la Paix, which marked the opening of the academic year of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. The lecture highlights an original analysis of the evolution of German memory since the end of World War II and its consequences on the writing of history. Generations of historians have been particularly marked in a differentiated manner, depending on their personal proximity to the war, but also on collective representations conveyed by film and television in a globalised world. Saul Friedländer is Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988. |
| albert speer early life: Hitler: Downfall Volker Ullrich, 2021-09-14 A riveting account of the dictator’s final years, when he got the war he wanted but led his nation, the world, and himself to catastrophe—from the author of Hitler: Ascent “Skillfully conceived and utterly engrossing.” —The New York Times Book Review In the summer of 1939, Hitler was at the zenith of his power. Having consolidated political control in Germany, he was at the helm of a newly restored major world power, and now perfectly positioned to realize his lifelong ambition: to help the German people flourish and to exterminate those who stood in the way. Beginning a war allowed Hitler to take his ideological obsessions to unthinkable extremes, including the mass genocide of millions, which was conducted not only with the aid of the SS, but with the full knowledge of German leadership. Yet despite a series of stunning initial triumphs, Hitler’s fateful decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 turned the tide of the war in favor of the Allies. Now, Volker Ullrich, author of Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939, offers fascinating new insight into Hitler’s character and personality. He vividly portrays the insecurity, obsession with minutiae, and narcissistic penchant for gambling that led Hitler to overrule his subordinates and then blame them for his failures. When he ultimately realized the war was not winnable, Hitler embarked on the annihilation of Germany itself in order to punish the people who he believed had failed to hand him victory. A masterful and riveting account of a spectacular downfall, Ullrich’s rendering of Hitler’s final years is an essential addition to our understanding of the dictator and the course of the Second World War. |
| albert speer early life: The Heidelberg Myth Steven P. Remy, 2002 In the first work to examine both nazification and denazification of a major German university, Steven Remy offers a sobering account of the German academic community from 1933 to 1957. Deeply researched in university archives, newly opened denazification records, occupation reports, and contemporary publications, The Heidelberg Myth starkly details how extensively the university's professors were engaged with National Socialism and how effectively they frustrated postwar efforts to ascertain the truth. Many scholars directly justified or implemented Nazi policies, forming a crucial element in the social consensus supporting Hitler and willingly embracing the Nazis' German spirit, a concept encompassing aggressive nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the rejection of objectivity in scholarship. In elaborate postwar self-defense narratives, they portrayed themselves as unpolitical and uncorrupted by Nazism. This Heidelberg myth provided justification for widespread resistance to denazification and the restoration of compromised scholars to their positions, and set the remarkably long-lasting consensus that German academic culture had remained untainted by Nazi ideology. The Heidelberg Myth is a valuable contribution to German social, intellectual, and political history, as well as to works on collective memory in societies emerging from dictatorship. |
| albert speer early life: Spandau Albert Speer, 2000 He served as Hitler's architect, the undisputed master of the German war machine, and the one responsible for conscripted foreign labor in the Third Reich. And, when Albert Speer was captured and sentenced at Nuremberg--after becoming the only defendant to plead guilty--he started keeping this secret diary, much of it on toilet paper. After 20 years of imprisonment, he found 25,000 of the smuggled pages waiting for him, and from those entries he shaped this deeply powerful document. Albert Speer's book is a deeply moving document. It is also of extraordinary political and psychological interest...a must for anyone interested in psychological motivation of political action and the problem of guilt and repentance. But, beyond this it is so fascinatingly written that I could not put it down before I finished it. --Erich Fromm. |
| albert speer early life: Albert Speer HOURLY. HISTORY, 2025-02-03 Discover the remarkable life of Albert Speer... Albert Speer was the man in charge of designing Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Yet he was more than just an architect-he was one of Hitler's closest confidants and a key player in the Nazi war machine. Born into a wealthy German family, Speer's life was shaped by privilege and ambition. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Nazi Party after impressing Hitler with his grand architectural visions and sharp organizational skills. Before long, he found himself at the heart of the Third Reich, helping to fuel its war effort and shape its image. But who was Albert Speer, really? Was he, as he later claimed, simply an apolitical technocrat who got in too deep? Or was he fully aware of the horrors happening around him? After the war, Speer worked hard to distance himself from the worst crimes of the Nazi regime by crafting the image of the so-called Good Nazi. He always insisted that he had no knowledge of the darker side of the Nazi regime. This book dives into Speer's fascinating and complex story, exploring his rise to power, his close relationship with Hitler, and the moral choices that defined his life. This is the story of Albert Speer. Discover a plethora of topics such as Early Life: In the Shadow of Versailles Joining the Nazis Hitler's Friend Ramping up the German War Machine Prisoner Number Five Life on the Outside: The Good Nazi And much more! So if you want a concise and informative book on Albert Speer, simply scroll up and click the Buy now button! |
| albert speer early life: Albert Speer—Escaping the Gallows Adrian Greaves, 2021-08-30 At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, Albert Speer, Hitler’s one-time number two, persuaded the judges that he ‘knew nothing’ of the Holocaust and related atrocities. Narrowly escaping execution, he was sentenced to twenty years in Spandau Prison, Berlin. In 1961, the newly commissioned author, as the British Army Spandau Guard Commander, was befriended by Speer, who taught him German. Adrian Greaves’ record of his conversations with Speer over a three year period make for fascinating reading. While the top Nazi admitted to Greaves his secret part in war crimes, after his 1966 release he determinedly denied any wrongdoing and became an intriguing and popular figure at home and abroad. Following Speer’s death in 1981 evidence emerged of his complicity in Hitler’s and the Nazi’s atrocities. In this uniquely revealing book the author skilfully blends his own personal experiences and relationship with Speer with a succinct history of the Nazi movement and the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing new light is thrown on the character of one of the 20th century’s most notorious characters. |
| albert speer early life: Endpapers Alexander Wolff, 2021-03-04 'Remarkable lives in extraordinary times - a gripping and exceptional literary journey.' Philippe Sands 'Alexander Wolff is keen, after a generation of silence, to follow the untold stories wherever they might lead.' Claire Messud, Harpers Magazine 'As riveting as the fiction the Wolffs themselves have published, and deeply affecting.' Newsweek In 2017, acclaimed journalist Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to take up a long-deferred task: learning his family's history. His grandfather Kurt Wolff set up his own publishing firm in 1910 at the age of twenty-three, publishing Franz Kafka, Émile Zola, Anton Chekhov and others whose books would be burned by the Nazis. In 1933, Kurt and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and later to New York, where they would bring books including Doctor Zhivago, The Leopard and The Tin Drum to English-speaking readers. Meanwhile, Kurt's son Niko, born from an earlier marriage, was left behind in Germany. Despite his Jewish heritage, he served in the German army and ended up in an prisoner of war camp before emigrating to the US in 1948. As Alexander gains a better understanding of his taciturn father's life, he finds secrets that never made it to America and is forced to confront his family's complex relationship with the Nazis. This stunning account of a family navigating wartime and its aftershocks brilliantly evokes the perils, triumphs and secrets of history and exile. |
| albert speer early life: Hitler's Hangman Robert Gerwarth, 2011-11-15 A chilling biography of the head of Nazi Germany’s terror apparatus, a key player in the Third Reich whose full story has never before been told. Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the Final Solution, Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany. He shouldered a major share of responsibility for some of the worst Nazi atrocities, and up to his assassination in Prague in 1942, he was widely seen as one of the most dangerous men in Nazi Germany. Yet Heydrich has received remarkably modest attention in the extensive literature of the Third Reich. Robert Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich's private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office. Fully exploring Heydrich's progression from a privileged middle-class youth to a rapacious mass murderer, Gerwarth sheds new light on the complexity of Heydrich's adult character, his motivations, the incremental steps that led to unimaginable atrocities, and the consequences of his murderous efforts toward re-creating the entire ethnic makeup of Europe. “This admirable biography makes plausible what actually happened and makes human what we might prefer to dismiss as monstrous.”—Timothy Snyder, Wall Street Journal “[A] probing biography…. Gerwarth’s fine study shows in chilling detail how genocide emerged from the practicalities of implementing a demented belief system.”—Publishers Weekly “A thoroughly documented, scholarly, and eminently readable account of this mass murderer.”—The New Republic |
| albert speer early life: Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination Stefan Ihrig, 2014-11-20 Early in his career, Hitler took inspiration from Mussolini—this fact is widely known. But an equally important role model for Hitler has been neglected: Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, who inspired Hitler to remake Germany along nationalist, secular, totalitarian, and ethnically exclusive lines. Stefan Ihrig tells this compelling story. |
| albert speer early life: Albert Speer Gitta Sereny, 1997-06-17 Albert Speer was not only Hitler's architect and armaments minister, but the Fuhrer's closest friend--his unhappy love. Speer was one of the few defendants at the Nuremberg Trials to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even as he denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Now this enigma of a man is unveiled in a monumental biography by a writer who came to know Speer intimately in his final years. 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. Fascinating...Not only a major addition to our knowledge of the Third Reich, but a stunning attempt to understand the nature of good and evil.--Newsday More than a biography...It also constitutes a perceptive re-examination of the mysterious appeal of Adolf Hitler.--San Francisco Chronicle From the Trade Paperback edition. |
| albert speer early life: Hitlers American Model James Q. Whitman, 2017-02-28 Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws--the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world. |
| albert speer early life: Beneath a Scarlet Sky Mark Sullivan, 2018 A teenage boy in 1940s Italy becomes part of an underground railroad that helps Jews escape through the Alps, but when he is recruited to be the personal driver for a powerful Third Reich commander, he begins to spy for the Allies. |
| albert speer early life: Will The Real Albert Speer Please Stand Up? Geetanjali Mukherjee, 2014-04-24 He presented many faces to the world, but which one was genuine? Over the years Albert Speer has been given several titles – ‘the good Nazi’, ‘Hitler’s architect’, ‘future Reichchancellor’, and even ‘the only penitent defendant at Nuremberg’. There is no doubt that there are many faces to Albert Speer: he was a man who had far greater power during the war than any other aside from Hitler, and was widely believed to succeed Hitler; his tremendous powers of organization raised German production to its peak at a time when resources were at an all-time low; and it was expected by all, including himself, that he would receive the death sentence like the other Nazi leaders, instead escaping the noose with only twenty years. In light of his extended involvement in the Nazi party, both as Hitler’s architect and the Minister for Armaments, and his contributions to the illegal war waged by the regime, the question naturally arises: did Speer receive adequate punishment? Did the verdict reflect the perception that Speer was somehow ‘less culpable’ than the other defendants, or did he mastermind his defence in a way that reduced his sentence? The events leading up to the Nuremberg trial, and the trial itself, provides clues to answering these questions: what can we learn about the personality of Speer from the evidence available, and why does it matter? |
| albert speer early life: The Two Worlds of Albert Speer Henry Thomas King (Jr.), Bettina Elles, 1997 This book offers a close 'inside' account of the psyche of Albert Speer, one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich and a close personal associate of Hitler. King, a Nuremberg prosecutor, offers firsthand observations based upon his encounter with Speer as a defendant at Nuremberg, as well as his 35 year relationship with Speer which ended with the latter's death in 1981. |
| albert speer early life: Diary of a Man in Despair Fritz Percy Reck-Malleczewen, 1970 This is a prophetic insight into the psychotic soul of Nazi Germany, written by a Prussian aristocrat in the years between 1936 and 1944. It charts the rise of Hitler and the blind allegiance of the masses to his suicidal cause. |
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