Book Review: Inside The Third Reich, Albert Speer

So, I'm just finishing reading this pretty hefty tome. Hitler is dead, and Speer has finally been arrested.

I'm enjoying this book a lot. Speer writes about his childhood and youth, and then his rapid rise under the wings of the Nazi Eagle, first as Hitler's chief architect, and later as his armaments minister. As a member of Hitler's entourage, and at times very much part of the Führer's inner circle, Speer has a very, er... 'privileged' view of the internal workings of this extraordinary court.

He's quite candid, both about himself and the panoply of courtiers seeking favour, advancement and reflected glory from their proximity to Adolf. Speer is articulate and eloquent, and his story is fascinating. Prior to reading this I'd mainly encountered him as a talking head in the magnificent ITV World At War documentary series. 

Speer at the typewriter in his Nuremberg prison cell.

Inevitably, written as this was during his incarceration in Spandau, after the Nuremberg trials, he reflects on his role and culpability in the whole Nazi program. And this has to include the holocaust. But he doesn't spend that much time on this subject, and tries to suggest he basically looked the other way.

Instead what he writes about chiefly are these four or five things: himself, Adolf Hitler, their work together and Speer's independently (-ish) as Hitler's architect, his struggles in the fragmented Nazi bureaucracy as chief overseer of the German armaments industry, and ultimately therefore their ability to wage war, and lastly but my no means least, the internecine strife within the febrile Nazi court.

Massive pillars and huge eagles, essential elements of the Nazi architectural style.

At one point he notes with an obvious sense of regret that his architectural style, due to its huge grandiose bombastic style, in the service of a megalomaniac dictator who sought to overawe not only his enemies, but his own cronies, and even history for the following millennia, resulted in buildings that were inherently oppressive. So much for the Reich of 1,000 years, or even the 'theory of ruins'*, Hitler's architectural legacy - and Speer's even more so - was, for the most part, completely wiped away during and after the war.

Hitler could charm. Here Speer is clearly under the spell.

There are moments of pride in his accomplishments as a technocrat: Hitler and Speer were clearly 'size queens', so to speak, it was of great importance to them that Nazi buildings be bigger, preferably in every possible dimension, than anything comparable. Speer is always rattling off lists of cubic feet, or tonnes of this that or the other. He was also very proud of his columns of light effect (using air-raid lamp beams) as famously employed at Nazi Party rallies. And he isn't shy of his obvious pride in trying to make both German industry and the German war machine as efficient and effective as he could.

This last - and his constant struggle with fragmented, competing, overlapping hierarchies of power appear to be a chief component in Hitler's management style, and an integral and predictable element in both his own and his empire's downfall - is a major theme. One of the most amazing things is how spellbound he and Hitler's other acolytes were, and remained. To those of us far removed from the corridors of power certain things might seem crassly simple or obvious. But when mired in the matrix of very real and very intoxicating power, as these men were, it's clear that reality gives way to a hall of distorting mirrors, and Speer captures this element of his story very well.

Speer, Hitler, and Breker, Paris.

Breker sculpts Speer as the Mekon of WWII German artist-intellectuals.

Speer doesn't come across as a particularly bad person at all. Sometimes his own self-satisfaction is so blatant as to be embarrassing, and this makes the sculptural portrait of him by his friend Arno Breker, which is a good likeness, but gives him a Mekon-like bulbous cranium, suggestive, perhaps, of a high (self) regard centred around a sense of intellectual superiority. Like Hitler himself, Speer saw himself as an artist dragged into politics and administration, and to some extent martyring himself in a higher, nobler national cause

And it's  in relation to this that he finally, so he claims, began to separate himself from the mesmerising grip of his master, ultimately operatingly directly counter to Hitler's Gotterdammerung style scorched earth policies, and seeking to conserve industry and infrastructure for the postwar future of Germany.

All in all, a fascinating insight into a fascinating era. A compelling and enjoyable read. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Last Days of Hitler - Hugh Trevor-Roper

This is the edition I have.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's reputation as an expert on Hitler took a knock when, as Lord Dacre (he was made a life peer by Margaret Thatcher) he appeared to endorse the forged 'Hitler Diaries', which were actually the work of a certain Konrad Kujau. This whole farrago is the subject of the very interesting and entertaining British TV series Selling Hitler.

Oops! Hugh endorses the fake Hitler diaries.

Trevor-Roper in his Army Intelligence togs.

But way back in 1945 Trevor-Roper, as a British military intelligence agent, was commissioned, largely in response to Russian (or rather Stalinist) myth-mongering, to get to the bottom of what really happened to Hitler. After stating the facts pretty much as they were, Stalinist Russia was looking to exploit Hitler's downfall, and began to take the line that the Western powers were keeping the former Fürher in captivity, for some darkly malevolent bourgeois purposes. [1]

Trevor-Roper's task was to marshal all available intelligence - and he had access not just to documents, but surviving captive participants - and tell the sorry tale of Hitler's ultimate demise, in the Götterdammerung of the collapse and, as it transpired, the literal self-immolation of the supposed thousand year Reich. Such a 'Viking funeral', as he describes it, 'is the natural end of a chapter in history; the history, it seems, of a savage tribe and a primitive superstition.'

Hitler Youth jump over a Solstice bonfire. [2]

Torches at Nuremburg. [2]

I've read The Last Days of Hitler twice now, and thoroughly enjoyed the read on both occasions. Trevor-Roper is not just knowledgeable on his subject, but he is also a very entertaining and adroit writer. He's as witty as he is well-informed. Indeed, his wit can be quite caustic. The subject - words like enjoyable and entertaining seem almost blasphemous in the face of the horrors this coterie of sinister clowns were responsible for - is not an easy or straightforward one. But he handles it about as adroitly as one could hope for.

Having said this, I'm withholding half a balkenkreuz for his indulgence in his own shorthand characterisations, which in some instances (see below) don't just border on, but march in and annexe, caricature. Another theme that might not stand too much scrutiny - and something that he shares with Kenneth Clarke in his magnificent series Civilisation - is his characterisation the Germans themselves, and Southern Germans in particular - in a way that does smack of the same kind of oversimplification of racial/tribal (stereo-)types that the Nazis so obviously took too far.

Hitler originally decreed that this man, Herman Goering, should be his successor. [3]

Goebbels, the family man.

Despite these provisos, the portraits that emerge are very compelling: Hitler himself is deemed to powerfully support the 'great man' idea, inasmuch as it was his dark charisma (to use a more modern historian's term) that was the catalyst for the terrible events of these years. Even isolated in the Berlin bunker, his word was Holy Writ. And indeed, he could even command from beyond the grave, as witness the performances of many of his former cronies, at Nuremburg.

In the Byzantine labyrinthine internecine world of Nazi power-politics, Himmler built the SS Empire. 

Bormann, the omnipresent intriguer, always at Hitler's elbow.

Himmler and Bormann both emerge as strange nonentities, able to rise to enormous power purely as ciphers or channels for the dark lord's will. When he goes, they effectively cease to exist. Some characters are portrayed as outright buffoons, like Schwerin von Krosigk, or Schellenburg, whilst others, Goebbels and Speer in particular, have rather more to them. But all depend on and breath the bizarre 'metaphysical' air of Nazism.

Hitler outside the bunker, 1945. [4]

And in the cramped isolation of the bunker, it's a stifling gaseous aura of neurosis, as euphoric dreams persist, and alternate, like the stormy weather of Hitler's volatile emotional character, with the bleakly nihilistic gloom that is, for Trevor-Roper, the core and lasting testimony of Hitler's fundamentally negative ideology.

Oberwallstrasse, near the bunker, as it looked after the fall of Berlin, 1945.

As Trevor-Roper points out, Hitler understood the power of myth. And whilst this book is an attempt to put the lid on the dangerous genie of Nazism, 'myths are not like truths; they are the triumph of credulity over evidence.' And, lest we get too smug, he adds 'When we consider upon what ludicrous evidence the most preposterous beliefs have been easily, and by millions, entertained, we may well hesitate before pronouncing anything incredible.'

Inside the bunker, at the end.

US press examine the grave Hitler and Braun were cremated in. [5]

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NOTES:

[1] Whilst publicly proclaiming such balderdash, Stalin's agents were in fact compiling a huge dossier on Hitler, which became a 'book' of sorts, expressly put together for Stalin to digest. It's subsequently been published in English as The Hitler Book.

[2] I include these pictures to evoke the pagan ceremony aspect of Nazism, as also suggested in Trevor-Roper's 'Viking Funeral' statement. There are some pictures on the web purporting to show the burnt corpses of Herr and Frau Goebbels, and their six children. But in the interests of keeping this a family friendly blog, I refrained from including them.

[3] But by the time of the period this book covers, Goering had long since ceased to be either a favoured or a credible successor.

[4] Pictures of Hitler in 1945 seem to be quite a rarity. This one is allegedly a photo of an event depicted in the film Downfall, in which Hitler decorated a number of Hitler Youth, in the Chancellery garden, just outside the bunker. The cover image of the Pan edition I have might also have been taken at this same event.

[4] The Russians, first on the scene as they were, told these guys that this was where they'd found the burned remains that they believed to be Hitler and his wife.