The Good Nazi : The Life and Lies of Albert Speer

Rating:
Summary: Good Biography
Review: Dan Van der Dat, the Dutchman, created an account of Speer that no one else dared to entertain. Van der Dat truely understands the one falacy of Speer and uses this point to underscore his facts and thesis. Van der Dat accurately portrays the man that lays under the shadow of the man who knew Hitler the best. This book is a good illustration of Speer, although he could have done more. Which is what Van der Dat accuses him of failing to do.

Rating:
Summary: Highly illuminating, but too black-and-white
Review: Dan van der Vat makes no secret of his purpose with this book. It is to damage Albert Speer's reputation by exposing him as a hypocrite and a liar. He wants to drag him down in the dirt. In my view this was completely unnecessary. Speer was a war criminal, and there was nothing inherently "good" about him. The things that have made bestsellers out of the books by and about him have very little to do with his personal dirty laundry.

Van der Vat's basic ambition is to prove that Speer must have lied when he said he didn't "know" about the atrocities against the Jews. He invests a lot of effort in convincing his readers that Speer "must have known" where he only admitted to "should have known".

Knonwledge is never just "on" or "off". It's a matter of degrees. The process starts with input data that get filtered and interpreted as information. It continues as a state of awareness that gets deeper or shallower as time goes by, and more or less conflicted internally. Van der Vat overlooks this. He turns the matter into a black-or-white issue. This is the greatest weakness of the book.

The best part, on the other hand, is about the developing conflict between Speer and his old friend and helper Wolters in the last years of their lives. Not because of who they were or what they did, but because of the deep symbolism of what they were disagreing about.

Nobody in Germany had absolutely no information about what was going on. Everybody knew something about persecution. Speer knew more than most, but less than some, but everybody knew about neighbours who had been evicted, colleagues who had lost their jobs, shops that had been sacked and relatives who had had their spouses arrested. They didn't know for sure that these people had been deported or murdered. But they must have noticed that there was nowhere any trace of them. No letters, no phone calls. Nothing. They had disappeared into something that must have appeared, even at the time, rather similar to the Nazi name for the system that swallowed them up. It was called "Nacht und Nebel", abbreviated NN, and it meant "night and fog".

This term was not widely known during the war. But significant parts of the reality behind it were. And what did people do with it? Nothing! They turned their backs on the scraps of information that they couldn't avoid altogether, and they went on with their lives as best they could. Individually, they were powerless. The shock of the exposure after the war wasn't just about seeing something that hadn't been realised before. On a deeper level, it was the shock of seeing something that everybody "should", as opposed to "must" have known. The suspicion must have been there, and this is the basis of the collective responsibility.

On the personal level, Speer was also relatively powerless when his friend Karl Hanke told him in the summer of 1944 that he must never ever accept an invitation to inspect an unnamed concentration camp in Oberschlesien. Speer wrote later about that conversation that "the whole responsibility had become a reality again". Van der Vat pounces on the last of those words (page 217). To him, it means that Speer must have known earlier that atrocities were going on. Therefore, he must have been a liar when he didn't admit it. To me, on the other hand, the word "again" means only that this can't have been the first time that Speer was troubled by his conscience for things he had good reason to suspect, and which he had managed to turn his back on for the time being.

Speer's masterstroke in Nürnberg was to admit to a principal share in this phenomenon of collective guilt, and to offer himself up as a national sacrifice for it. An atonement in the good old tradition, the Christian myth about the man who takes on himself the guilt of others, and expunges all their sins. It was a risky strategy, but it worked. The judges were were OK with hanging people, but they didn't want anything to do with what could have been seen as a symbolic crucifixion. That is, in my opinion, the reason why Speer got away with 20 years in prison while others were executed.

Van der Vaat does a good job of showing how shamelessly Speer treated his old friend and helper Wolters towards the end. I can understand his indignation. But I have worked professionally with interpersonal conflicts for over 20 years, and I've seen such things happen again and again to basically decent and honest people. That it happened to a war criminal like Speer sholdn't surprise anybody. The thing that ought to catch the reader's attention is not that Speer and Wolters fought, or what they did to each other, but the nature of the underlying problem. The real issue was not personal. It was political, and one could almost say that it bordered on the religious.

Wolters' point of view was that Speer never should have admitted any responsibility in the first place. According to him, Speer's biggest sin was to drag the German people down into the dirt with him, because there was no such thing as individual or collective guilt in the first place. And even if there had been a collective guilt, Wolters must have felt that there was no way that Speer's punishment could atone for it. Speer was a bueraucrat, not a saviour. Wolters punished Speer by making sure that his lies should come to the surface after his (Wolters') death, not in order to avenge the Jews (far from it), but in order to drive a wedge between "the liar" Speer and the "innocent" German people.

Dan van der Vat has done a good job of dragging his subject down in the dirt. And in the process of exposing quasi-lies, real lies and marital infidelity, he has also managed to throw some light on the most important and still unresolved issues that have made bestsellers of the books by and about Albert Speer.


Rating:
Summary: Speer has already taken full blame, so why?
Review: I do not understand the purpose for this book. Albert Speer had admitted that he knew something was going on in the concentration camps, but could not bring himself to investigate it. For this, he claims, that he should be held responsible for these atrocities. He wanted to be tried and treated as if he knew fully what was happening. So, what does it matter if he really did know or not, when he took full responsibilty for it anyway? He does not claim to be a "good" Nazi nor would he want to be. He did not try to scam anybody. He stood up in front of the judges at Nuremburg and claimed himself to be as guilty as one can be. If the author feels that the punishment was lenient, he should be critical of the judges who decided on the sentence, not on Speer.

Make no doubt about it. Albert Speer was a Nazi and an evil man, if for nothing else than being a part of that regime and for not investigating further into its atrocities which was his duty. I do not think anyone disagrees with this point. He did spend twenty years in jail and was not let out until he was an old man.

I recommend reading Speer's INSIDE THE THIRD REICH which allows alot more insight to how the whole nation of Germany could be seduced by such an evil man as Hitler, and how he was too. I do however give this author credit for taking the other side of the argument and the unpopular view.

Rating:
Summary: Surely This is Not a Mandatory Reading
Review: If you are researching on Albert Speer, you might as well read Gitta Sereny's book biography. If you already read Sereny's book, this one will be boring for you until the 17th chapter. The weak points about The Good Nazi are: The author did not succeed in interviewing Speer. Dan van der Vat tries then to say this is a good thing by saying that this way he avoided getting under Speer's spell. His only one acchievement was to reveal that Speer tried to hide from the public some information about decisions he toke on Berlin evacuation of jews apartments by trying to destroy the original Chronicle of his activities at the GBI. The book is good in showing how Speer worked hard after Spandau release to build an image for himself of an apolitical member of the 3rd Reich, not involved in its racial policies.That is all it will add to you, if you know Sereny's book. Concentrating his work in trying to destroy this effort done by Speer instead of making a more deeper research on his time at the Nazi government makes the book sounds like Speer was more important after Spandau than in the Reich itself, for the historians and researchers of Nazism. Finally, as Gitta Sereny, the author could not bring up any document or testimony to prove and show how much commited Speer was with the Holocaust and the deportations, being able only to discuss that he knew it by his position in the leadership of the Reich Government.The book is written in an ironic and sarcastic tone which I did not like.

Rating:
Summary: Well done, but falls short of other books on Speer
Review: It is too easy and historically dishonest to deny Nazi party members any humanity. All too often historians depict these people as monsters. Even though Van der Vat does not demonize Speer, he does however present a less than complete picture of Speer as a high-ranking Nazi and as a human being. For those doing research on Speer or the Nazi party, a better book would be Gitta Sereny's "Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth." Van der Vat's greatest strength is his writing style. This book is surely a good read, but beyond that he misses the complexity of Speer, that was crucial to his motivations within the Nazi party. To demonize these men removes them from human experience, which presents them and the Nazi regime as a mere glitch in German history. Van der Vat's book does not rise above this flaw. However, this book would be most useful for spot research for facts and numbers alone, as opposed to a rich interpretation of history and Speer, the Nazi "Architect."

Rating:
Summary: Insightful, Shocking Examination of Nazi Albert Speer
Review: Like many contemporary works of non-fiction, "The Good Nazi" provides support for the axiom that truth is often stranger than fiction. Albert Speer remains in many ways one of the most enigmatic figures of the 20th century, admired for his singular and seemingly forthright admission of guilt and culpability for crimes committed by the Third Reich during the Nuremberg War Trials, but reviled by many later for conducting a campaign of disingenuous prevarication to justify his actions and stances before during and after the war. Speer spent two decades years in the allied prison at Spandau as one of the few members of the Nazi hierarchy to escape the death sentence, and wrote a best-selling book that he secretly smuggled out over the course of the twenty years with the cooperation of his wife and family. With its publication in the early 1970s, he became internationally famous, and he shamelessly used the bully pulpit of his own notoriety to forward his own revisionist notions about what really happened during the 12-year reign of the Third Reich.

The present book revolves around the complex nature of the issues raised during this post-prison campaign. On the one hand, Speer was the only of the accused former Nazis to admit his own guilt and complicity in the crimes and misdeeds of the Third Reich, yet on the other hand he always denied any direct knowledge of the Holocaust. This terrific biography by Dan vander Vat, subtitled 'The Life and Lies of Albert Speer'. represents a well-documented and penetrating investigation into the admittedly contradictory aspects to Speer's explanations, justifications, and rationalizations of his own role and conduct during and after the Second World War. The author lays an exhaustive groundwork for his claims that Speer was in actuality the ultimate opportunist, one who used his charm, position, and influence both to rise shamelessly through the Nazi ranks to become the second in command and who subsequently ployed these obfuscating skills to further ingratiate himself with the world at large.

The essence of the author's argument is that Speer was basically an amoral and extremely ambitious opportunist who did whatever was necessary to further his own life situation, whether it be that of a rising Nazi official or as a prevaricating apologist for a shameless German past. Thus, at one point Speer is depicted as the ultimate company man, a dedicated Nazi zealously and shamelessly pursuing the maximization of forced and slave labor in service to the Reich's war objective, deliberately and systematically exploiting the millions of captive peoples, most usually to the point of physical exhaustion and death. Try though he might, Speer could never adequately explain away his own behavior and actions during the war, and it seem quite evident that he did indeed conduct a campaign of deliberate obfuscation and prevarication regarding his own role in the Nazi murder machine. This is a book that sometimes makes one uneasy because of the nature of the facts it is investigating, yet which also does so with great care and endless levels of scrupulous detail. I heartily recommend it for anyone who cares to peer into what Hannah Arendt so memorably described as being the utter 'banality of evil'. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: He inflicted it upon countless people, but he escaped?.
Review: One of the great enigmas of The Nuremberg Trials from the reading I had done, was how Albert Speer escaped death, and instead went to prison and spent the better part of 2 decades a free man. Speer is known to many as The Architect Of The Third Reich. Known for his heavy Neo-Classic designs, he made for an ideal kindred spirit with the Corporal, who was a frustrated/failed architect. He became the man that would design, and then oversee construction of some of the largest, and some would say designs of questionable artistic merit, until Berlin began to be reduced to the post war rubble pile it was destined to become. Many of the planned buildings and monuments would dwarf buildings even by today's standards. While the war made redecorating the homes of the Nazi elite, and Hitler's projects increasingly difficult and then impossible, Speer never lacked work.

The net result of Speer's greatest contribution to the Nazi war effort was his remarkable ability as a manager of production, which actually lengthened the War. By any measure Speer was responsible for countless deaths that otherwise would never have happened had he not been one of Hitler's zealots, one of those mesmerized and totally loyal to the Corporal. The production of war material actually increased under the direction of Speer, and did so as the War was winding down. Production of weapons was actually at some of its highest levels at various times later, rather than earlier in the War.

None of the incredible feats of production he was able to conjure despite seemingly hopeless odds, match the odds he beat when his life was at a very high probability of ending at Nuremberg. How this Nazi at the very highest echelons of power, a man who was a close confidant's of the Corporal would survive the fate of his peers is the story that Mr. Dan Van Der Velt shares in his work "The Good Nazi". I don't know if anyone was offering odds of who would beat the hangman, but the odds Speer beat, have to have made him was of the longest shots ever to come in a winner in history.

There are those who say his "attempt" to kill Hitler, and his refusal to follow orders for the destruction of Berlin mitigated the crimes he was guilty of. These people would say that had he carried out all of the final orders to destroy Berlin's infrastructure, it would have lengthened the City's recovery, and brought additional suffering to the survivors. His acts or lack of action in these respects in a purely pragmatic sense may have mitigated some adverse results. But these have to be placed side by side with his conduct for year after year as a very high ranking member of Hitler's Staff, a man that did as he was told, who did not question anything, until the outcome was crystal clear, and it was to his advantage to do so.

Speer ran his factories with slave labor; he personally was responsible for the rounding up and "resettlement" of 75,000 Jews from Berlin at a minimum. He oversaw the factories, the brutal conditions, and vicious punishments that were as much a part of his way of carrying out his orders as any other high-ranking Nazi.

But this criminal's greatest talent was as an actor, who played a role he had one chance at, and anything other than a flawless performance would result in his death. Not only did he cheat death, he spent the better part of 2 decades living as a free man after serving a prison term in Spandau Prison. He was able to convince his judges that "The Final Solution" was something he was ignorant of, and to the extent he knew of any act of cruelty his was Germany's Penitent.

Even after reading this account of Speer I find it incredible that he accomplished the greatest scam of the war. I would like to think he provided some incredible service that is unknown, so as to justify the leniency this man was dealt with, some set of mitigating circumstances that are almost unimaginable in light of the crimes he did commit. I can find none, I cannot find one, and I remain as baffled by his escape, if better informed, than prior to reading this book. The work is extremely well done, and my failure to understand what led to his lack of punishment in no way reflects on the quality of the work.

Speer lived to be an old man who enjoyed his freedom into the 1980's. He may never have built Hitler's "Germania", with monstrosities like a 400,000 seat stadium in the city where he went on trial. But in the end he won, he survived, and to this day must remain an enigma, the consummate escape artist who left Nuremberg alive, and later in 1966 walked out of prison a free man, a man who theoretically paid backed Humanity for a war many felt he lengthened for a year, and a man who convinced his accusers the Holocaust was not something he could in any way be held accountable for.

Rating:
Summary: Bad History
Review: This book claims Albert Speer was far worse than he himself confessed, though his confessions were quite full. It builds a case against him of even greater crimes - complicency in the holocaust - on two extremely flimsy and unrelaible pieces of evidence - that he might - or might not! - have been in a room when Himmler mentioned killing Jews, and he knew Jews were being deported by the Nazis from Berlin - though there is no evidence he knew where.

Speer served a little over 21 years in prison, more or less in solitary confinement with a couple of other Nazi leaders, for having used slave-labour in World War II. He committed a major crime, but certainly received a major punishment. He did not attempt to minimise his guilt in this matter, accepted the sentence - the only Nazi to do so - and seems to have been sincerely repentant. This book, lacking evidence that he was even worse than he admitted, bolsters its "case" with emotional overkill - for example saying Speer behaved oddly the day he was released after serving 21 years prison - well, he would, wouldn't he?

I think this is another book trying to exploit the Holocaust and prove again that "There's no business like Shoa business."

The book has a bombastic, sneering tone not only towards Speer but generally. Although the author claims to be a naval writer, one notices mistakes when he touches on naval subjects. He was co-author of a book containing an outstandingly ridiculous conspiracy-theory on the Titanic, which seriously claimed it had been swapped for a different ship and delibertely sunk. Yeah! And the Captain, first officer, engineers and a lot of the crew went down with it to keep the secret - that's company loyalty for you!