Speer

Hitler's Architect

De: Martin Kitchen

Narrado por: Michael Page

A new biography of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler's chief architect and trusted confidant, reveals the subject's deeper involvement in Nazi atrocities.

In his best-selling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi Germany, repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. In this revealing new biography, author Martin Kitchen disputes Speer's lifelong assertions of ignorance and innocence, portraying a far darker figure who was deeply implicated in the appalling crimes committed by the regime he served so well.

Kitchen reconstructs Speer's life with what we now know, including information from valuable new sources that have come to light only in recent years, challenging the portrait presented by earlier biographers and by Speer himself of a cultured technocrat devoted to his country while completely uninvolved in Nazi politics and crimes.

The result is the first truly serious accounting of the man, his beliefs, and his actions during one of the darkest epochs in modern history, not only countering Speer's claims of non-culpability but also disputing the commonly held misconception that it was his unique genius alone that kept the German military armed and fighting long after its defeat was inevitable.

©2015 Yale University (P)2018 Tantor

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A devastating portrait of an empty, narcissistic, and compulsively ambitious personality." (Wall Street Journal)

excellent insight into an evil soul

after listening to this book I am not ambiguos about Speer any longer. he was not the technical genius he liked to portray himself, but a (maybe genius) self-image creator and polisher. the production wonder he is still famous for in Germany was a fiction created by him. The ideological distance to the nazis he is still famous for was fiction. people like him were and are necessary to make the devil accepted by the masses.

Excellent analysis

I have read numerous books on Albert sphere, including his own memoirs and other biographies, and this by far is the best and definitive work I have come across. The author does his due diligence researching this complex and often contradictory figure from Nazi Germany. If you want to read a book on Albert Speer, don’t waste your time with any of the others, just read this one.

Excellent disposition on the career and disgraceful rehabilitation of a war criminal.

Meticulously researched and documented history of the life and crimes (and the subsequent cover up) of Albert Speer. Brilliant narration and thorough analysis.

A Gem for History Buffs

A well researched biography on Speer who tried to revise history to appease his guilt.

Mythbusting the “Good Nazi”

The book is a good overview of Speer’s role within the Third Reich, especially in the economic sphere (see what I did there?). It’s main argument is that Speer deliberately cultivated a false image of himself as an apolitical technocrat, but that the evidence actually shows a man devoted to Hitler and the Nazi cause, a brutal exploiter of Jewish forced labor, and a dishonest self-promoter who avoided the hangman’s noose by pretending to be remorseful while also denying most of his own crimes. It also shows Speer as an empty, selfish man, without friends and without genuine values beyond a lust for power, fame, and money.

I do have a few critiques, which are more about style and structure than content. The book is very repetitive. Kitchen delivers identical assessments of Speer’s role and character over and over again, and he also uses repetitive word choice when is comes to construct sentences, such as “discussed… at discussions.” The book is organized topically within a broader chronological framework, so it’s sometimes difficult to tell what happened when, since the same historical ground keeps getting covered from a different perspective. These are all criticisms of Kitchen’s skill as a writer, however, and not a historian, so they don’t matter that much in the end.

End of book missing

I’m confused... there is no ending. Just stops. I was enjoying it. Good story, great details and the author does not glorify a man who should have known better. But it just ends. I wanted the entire book, not 3/4ths of it :(

The REAL Speer~ 3 stars over all~ way to long~

Plot: the detailed factual account of Albert Speer and job as Prime Minister of Armorments during WW2.

This is not a bio. This shows facts and figures of the German Armorments and manufacturing under The Todt Organization under Speer during WW2. It gives very little about his personal life. We lose interest in the overly "detailed" facts and figures of how he maintained Weapon production during the War. Why Bother? It does give a close up look at how Speer manipulated his role is the actual events that eventually prevent him from a death sentence and successfully help him with a 20-year prison sentence. And does for the first time show how aware he really was and his involvement in the slave labor of prisoners. And how he was able to keep the war production going in spite of bombing and decreased the availability of metals and oil to keep Germany able to make war. I give the reader 4 stars and the overly long detailed plot 3 stars.

Well researched, but….

You should probably read Speer’s Memoirs before listening to this book, so that a lot of what Martin Kitchen calls fabrications and lies will make more sense. You might also want to watch the 1981 movie, The Bunker, before reading this book, as well, since it appears to have been scripted by Albert Speer, himself. Makes him a real hero. Albert Speer was a slick dude, who got away with murder and talked his way out of being hanged. A true genius, but Kitchen doesnt let him get away with anything. Narrator is obviously and thankfully fluent in German, but didnt impress me with the overdone pronunciation. It did bother me that a good deal of the book is about pre-war European Architecture, which just takes up space. By the end of the book, I was saying “OK, OK, enough. You proved Speer was a liar and deserved to be hanged.

Rich in detail

Technocratic monster is about all I can say about Speer. He knew what he was doing yet embraced it. Is it possible to be more dangerous than Hitler? I think so…

Interesting, but extremely biased

Ideally when you write a history book you do so without opinion and let the story speak for itself. However the author in this case sets out with an agenda, to destroy the legacy that Speer built in the post war years, which is a shame since had he just told the story without injecting his opinion I think this book would be a lot more useful. Instead it comes off as a 19 hour rant a lot of the time and brings the story to a halt. However there isn't anything else in depth about Speer on Audible, so this will have to do. From that perspective you do learn quite a bit and the story is often interesting when the author isn't ranting. While you learn a lot about Speer the author also leaves out a ton, it's like he's writing a counter history to some other unknown book, and without that other half the book is incomplete. So this is worth checking out so long as you realize you're reading about 50% propaganda (or as I'm sure the author would say it's counter propaganda). Also the authors version of the economy under the National Socialists is pretty laughable, I've read hundreds of books on WW2 and have a pretty good grip on how things run, and his version of events is again very much the propaganda of a modern socalist. The author also feels the need to constantly give his opinion on architecture, which is pure opinion, but presented as facts.

So to sum it up most of the above is negative, and that's the opinion I was eventually left with, but it was still interesting in spots and I still learned quite a bit, even if it's incomplete.

The reader does an OK job, he has kind of an annoying and pompous voice, but listening at 1.25x speed makes things a lot more bearable.