Speer, Martin Kitchen
Speer, Martin Kitchen
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Speer
Hitler's Architect

Author: Martin Kitchen

Narrator: Michael Page

Unabridged: 19 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/20/2018


Synopsis

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 bestselling 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.

About Martin Kitchen

Martin Kitchen is professor emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University and the author of numerous books on European and German history. He lives in British Columbia.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David

One of the few Nuremburg defendants to avoid the gallows, Albert Speer, architect to the Third Reich and Hitler's minister of armaments from 1942 to the end of the war is reexamined here and revealed to have known a great deal more about the atrocities of the Nazi regime than he ever admitted to. Of......more

Goodreads review by Gayle

As interesting but shorter than Gitta Serreny's "Albert Speer: His Battler with Truth", this book strips bare Albert Speer's claim not to have known what was really going on from 1933-45. Long story short, the Nuremburg Tribunal and the reading public of 1970s were taken in by Speer's acceptance of......more

Goodreads review by John

I've read most of Albert Speer's books (Inside the Third Reich, Infiltration, and the Spandau Diaries) along with most of the biographies of the man (The Good Nazi, Fest's Albert Speer, and Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth). And I'll admit a bit of fascination with the man who is sometimes referr......more

Goodreads review by Pat

I've read several other books on Speer, so I had to read this one. For those that may be interested in it, it contains very little of his personal life. It concentrates on a great deal of administrative wrangling between Speer and his colleagues, before and after the war. The author gives somewhat o......more