Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Oct 29, 1996 - History - 800 pages
Albert Speer was not only Hitler's architect and armaments minister, but the Fuhrer's closest friend--his "unhappy love." Speer was one of the few defendants at the Nuremberg Trials to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even as he denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Now this enigma of a man is unveiled in a monumental biography by a writer who came to know Speer intimately in his final years. Out of hundreds of hours of interviews, Sereny unravels the threads of Speer's personality: the genius that made him indispensable to the German war machine, the conscience that drove him to repent, and the emotional wounds that made him susceptible to Hitler's lethal magnetism. Read as an inside account of the Third Reich, or as a revelatory unsparing yet compassionate study of the human capacity for evil, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth is a triumph.



"Fascinating...Not only a major addition to our knowledge of the Third Reich, but a stunning attempt to understand the nature of good and evil."--Newsday


"More than a biography...It also constitutes a perceptive re-examination of the mysterious appeal of Adolf Hitler."--San Francisco Chronicle
 

Contents

Introduction
3
Prologue
16
An Infusion of Stable Stock
38
I Felt He Was a Human Being
61
Dizzy with Excitement
86
A Kind of Love
104
A Shared Devotion
125
Youve All Gone Completely Insane
143
A Blinkered Commitment
339
The Unbearable Truth
369
It Was Not Yet My Time
408
The Twentieth of July
437
Scorched Earth
456
I Stand Unconditionally Behind You
488
He Is the Dream
517
The One Interesting Person
545

A Slight Discomfort
160
Unleashing Murder
178
A Grey Path Indeed
204
A Moral Sore
231
A Fatal Appointment
273
An Irresistible Challenge
290
A Maelstrom of Intrigues
303
A Common Responsibility
562
I
597
II
637
The Great Lie
702
Notes
727
Index
735
Copyright

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About the author (1996)

Gitta Sereny was one of Europe's foremost journalists with a special interest and expertise in the Third Reich. She has written extensively for London's Daily Telegraph magazine, the Sunday Times, and the Independent, as well as for Die Zeit and Le Nouvel Observateur. In America, she has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. Her books include Into Darkness: An Examination of ConscienceThe Invisible Children, and Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. She had two children and two grandchildren and lived with her husband, the photographer Don Honeyman, in London. She died in 2012.

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