Gitta Sereny's exhaustive biography of Albert Speer, the young, provincial architect, who, rose almost by accident, to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany during the second half of World War 2 is a fascinating, can't-put-down read for anyone who's:

• a World War 2 freak
• interested in human psychology & a complex, justified self-delusion & 
• interested in seeing a complex survivor attempt to outfox both himself and a well-meaning journalist

This isn't the story of an ordinary man. Speer was urbane, debonair and deeply sensitive, as anyone whose read his book, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, can see. No, Speer's story is uncannily that of Germany's, a country that Hitler intuitively understood so well, that he knew exactly which strings to pull to get them to willingly surrendered to his will (see also: the 1934 documentary Truimph Of The Will).

Speer's story essentially started in Depression-era Germany, in which, with the Allies, still understandably unforgiving of Germany's part in World War 1, unfortunately ignored the instability of the German political situation. Combustible internal forces, fuelled by high unemployment and rampant inflation meant that the country was violently torn between:

• Communism...with the spectre of hundreds of years of fear of invasion from the East &
• German Nationalism...masquerading as Hitler's "Social Democracy"...which eventually revealed itself as Fascism

Democracy...as the West knew it, ceased to be an option...and the two warring factions clashed repeatedly. As we now know, Hitler's Nazi party was elected to participate in a shared government...and through political manipulations (and murder), soon gained total power. Hitler then embarked on a massive restructuring of Germany:

1   political opponents were placed in concentration camps (or murdered)

2   jews were immediately disenfranchised &

3   the Nazis immediately undertook a massive rebuilding scheme, roads, railways, renovating public buildings & creating new buildings for the new Reich*   

In a few short years, Speer became the Third Reich's premier architect, chosen to oversee all major new works, in particular, the building of Hitler's capital, Germania.

Germania

By early 1942, when it appeared that the war was not going to be won quickly and major public building was halted, Speer's organizational abilities were shunted sideways to overseeing the failing German war effort from 1942-45, in particular, armaments production.

With more and more German workers entering the armed forces and Hitler refusing to use German women as war-industry laborers, Speer was given millions of concentration camp workers to take their place instead. It's a matter of History that armaments production increased significantly under Speer and many consider his contribution to have lengthened the war by at least 1 year.

However, at the Nuremburg War Crimes trials, Speer pleaded his case of being a facilitator, not a soldier, nor an active Nazi eloquently. He pleaded complete ignorance of the Holocaust but was so ready to assume his part of the Nazi's collective guilt, even if he was not personally responsible for the atrocities, that the judges ended up giving him a 20 year sentence.

With Speer's innate talents for survival not open to debate, Sereny's book almost becomes a cat and mouse game both of them pussyfooting around the issue of whether Speer knew about the Holocaust. He denies it, she proves, almost conclusively that he did, even if she acknowledges that he almost certainly blocked it from his conscious mind.

Even more telling is this interchange: