Word: speers
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...reader doubts the wisdom of France's aperçu let him examine these stark entries. Albert Speer, author of the bestseller Inside the Third Reich, has unique credentials for speculation on the nature of evil and culpability. The architect was literally the Master Builder of the Third Reich and Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War Production. It was in his ministerial capacity that Speer employed some 5 million slave laborers; it was for that role that he was sentenced at the Nuremberg trials to long imprisonment...
...Reich lasted twelve years, the incarceration 20. That is merely first in a file of ironies. Forbidden to write a formal memoir, Speer scribbles on toilet paper, then smuggles out his work with the help of a Dutch guard who had once served as a forced laborer in a German factory. Speer's Russian captors-who alternate with more lenient Westerners-are as harsh and arbitrary as Reich Marshals. When he steals a cauliflower from the prison vegetable garden, Speer is caught and sentenced to a week of solitary confinement...
Spellbound Lover. His fellow prisoners, the great German admirals Raeder and Doenitz, squabble like jealous ensigns; the disintegrating Rudolph Hess, once Hitler's deputy, malingers and throws fits to garner pity. Speer, who displayed no discernible sympathy for workers during the '30s and '40s, grows hungry. He observes: "I often stoop to pick up crumbs of bread that have fallen from the table. For the first time in my life I am discovering what it means not to have enough...
This lack of moral imagination is clearest in the book within the book-a love story of Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler. It is a romance without queerness or pathos. It is simply the reminiscence of an acolyte still spellbound after all these years. "Isn't it understandable that even now the image of the enthusiastic Hitler comes to mind?" he writes, early on. Later a guard marks a significant milestone. Speer writes: "Today would be Hitler's birthday. How many birthdays I spent with Hitler in the Berlin chancellery, with delegations paying homage to him, with grandiose...
...unrequited. Though Speer recognizes the Führer's monstrous propensities, he is still able to write, wholly without historical remove: "[He] had the ignorance, the curiosity, the enthusiasm and the temerity of the born dilettante; and along with that, inspiration, imagination, lack of bias...