This is a fascinating book about a dangerous man.

When I was younger, I watched the TV mini-series "Inside the Third Reich" in which Rutger Hauer played the role of Albert Speer, who portrayed him as the mythical "good Nazi" and I bought into the lie, mainly because I thought it was impossible that wartime Germany could have existed without resistance at every level. As I got older, I realized that this fabrication of Speer was a carefully orchestrated persona that hid something far more sinister. A read of "The Nuremburg Trials" confirmed my suspicions and I therefore searched to find something much more specific regarding the life of Albert Speer, in order to fill in the gaps that were created by my understanding of this man. This book completed this in spades.

Albert Speer is the scariest of the entire regime. He was talentless, ruthless, dishonest to the core, callous, manipulative and opportunistic. He took full advantage of the opportunities the evil empire that created him presented and many it did not, and rose to the top. He never felt any guilt for his crimes, because he was a sociopath, incapable of doing so. After the war, he careful manufactured a public persona to demonstrate an outward appearance of contrition, but this was so thinly veiled that it took very little to reveal his true intentions. He was evil because he didn't care. He encouraged and knowingly took full advantage of slave labour. He even complained that the concentration camps were too luxurious. He stole, made up all his production numbers, took credit for everyone else's work and actually accomplished nothing that was the result of his own efforts. It's men like Albert Speer that are far scarier than Hitler or the rest of his upper echelons, because those monsters were readily recognizable. Speer hid in plain sight.

I highly recommend reading this book, to pull back the curtain on the public illusion he created of himself.

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Wonderful

Well researched well documented well read . I thoroughly enjoyed this book, such an interesting multi dimensional character, very well presented

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Well-read, with some dry sections but brilliant

Getting through the first chapters can be rather boring, as for reasons of posterity the book begins with Speer's childhood rather than an immediate dive into 1930s Germany. On my first listen I was unsure where the book was going but it gets very very interesting from the 3rd chapter onwards. The book contrasts Speer's autobiography, "Inside the Third Reich" and portrays Speer to be just as cold and aloof as Himmler or Goebbels. the chapter "Germania" lays the blame of the fate of most of Berlin's Jewry at the feet of Speer with a parade of dry numbers of Jewish evictions. Parts of the book seem to presuppose that had Speer not evicted these people that they would have survived the war. Other chapters relate to Arms and Munitions and coldly list statistic after statistic on the production of consumer goods, war material, and the increase or decrease of production of either. I would have liked more explanations as to how he got the factories to increase production rather than that he wanted it so, how consumer goods/money flowed in the Reich economy and where the billions in public funds actually came from for rebuilding and rearmament. the book lightly touches subjects like foreign exchange reserves and deficit spending but the volumes of reichmarks described are so astronomical that to someone approaching the book without an economical foreknowledge of the third Reich would be left to assume the reichsmark was treated like monopoly money.

No book on Speer can ever have the detail or personal glimpses to his private life and his jostling for position in the Nazi hierarchy as his own autobiography does; however lacking an audiobook for that this book is a worthy replacement for home listening.

I love this book. I have listened from end to end multiple times, one of my favourite parts is where Kitchens describes 4 different official accounts of the mysterious death of Todt, the death that catapulted Speer to such power. The narrator does such a good job

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