Word: hitler
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Like an ancient despot, Hitler meant to commemorate his schemes of grandeur with great avenues and overpowering buildings. In Berlin alone, he planned a three-mile-long street of splendor, with the centerpiece a domed hall that would hold 150,000 people. The man Hitler took into his intimate circle to create these edifices was a fledgling architect named Albert Speer...
...Speer thought he saw in the Führer an alternative to the Weimar Republic's decadence. In Hitler's monumental designs, he hoped to escape such dreary projects as garage annexes and a house for his in-laws. In these memoirs, drafted in Spandau Prison while he was serving a 20-year sentence for war crimes, Speer recalls: "For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles...
Bourgeois Banality. Speer was a strange figure among the crowd of beer-drinking gangsters who made up most of Hitler's inner councils. He came from a fastidious upper-middle-class background and joined the Nazi Party early in 1931, after hearing Hitler address a meeting of Berlin students and professors. The decision, Speer insists, was casual and apolitical. He knew little of Hitler's program and did not understand the seriousness of the Nazis' antiSemitism. Incredibly, during a dozen years of continual association with Hitler -first as architect-in-chief, then as wartime Minister of Armaments...
Inside the Third Reich is likely to be the last, best first-person story of what took place at the power center as Hitler moved from political triumph to military disaster. While he was murdering Jews, ravaging Europe and destroying Germany, life at his court was a round of bickering intrigue, interminable monologues and atrocious boredom...
...Hitler rose late in the morning and worked for only a few hours before settling into a lunch that often lasted until after 4 p.m. Everyone then trooped off to a teahouse for more food and drink. In the prewar years, only a few hours later came supper and films. Hitler's taste in movies ran to romantic schmalz and leggy revues; he could not abide Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, Speer notes dryly. When the films were over, everyone else was glassy-eyed with fatigue, but Hitler prattled on as beer, wine and sandwiches were handed around until...