Word: speere
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...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...
...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 2 a.m. Speer writes: "When, I would ask myself, did he really work...
Magnetic Power. The inefficiencies and inconsistencies of the modern world's most savagely totalitarian state were staggering. Hitler's satraps ran separate duchies of their own, and the supposedly all-powerful Fuhrer often found his orders circumvented by his lieutenants-even by Speer, who, as Armaments Minister in the waning months of war, quietly sabotaged Hitler's scorched-earth policy for territories about to be lost to the Allied armies. Hitler sometimes found his close associates absurd. When SS Chief Heinrich Himmler sought through archaeological excavations to demonstrate the early growth of German culture, Hitler scoffed...