The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer [Hardcover]

Dan Van Der Vat (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 1997

This is the real story of Albert Speer, manipulator of history and architect of his own legend. On the stand at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, Albert Speer was alone among the accused in showing anything like remorse: he denied any direct knowledge of Hitler's Final Solution yet accepted his share of the guilt as an unwitting collaborator. But was he really what he claimed to be? In this hard-hitting biography, Dan van der Vat reveals Speer as a sham and an opportunist, a "good Nazi" of another sort: a dedicated party servant who, promoted from his role as Hitler's architect to minister of wartime production, also became the Nazis' principal exploiter of forced labor. The first biography to be written free of Speer's personal influence, this is the fullest, most incriminating portrait yet of a ruthless, masterly actor who deceived the world in the role of a lifetime. A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Best Book of the Year!

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Van der Vat (Stealth at Sea, LJ 4/1/95) claims that this is the first biography of Albert Speer written without the subject's influence. The author, a former journalist for the Guardian, once interviewed Speer, but his specialty is naval history. He wants to prove that Speer was as implicated in the Holocaust as the first-rank Nazis he served as Hitler's minister of wartime production, despite his repeated denials and Nuremberg's verdict on that subject. Whether he succeeds is open to question. The reader senses van der Vat's annoyance that Speer wouldn't admit his guilt outright, and he fairly concedes that Speer was unlikely to tell the truth at his war crimes trial because the price would have been hanging. A weakly argued epilog about whether history will absolve Speer dilutes the point being made. Information mined from Speer's unedited memoirs will be of interest to some scholars. An optional purchase for libraries with extensive World War II collections. [For another view see Gitta Sereny's Albert Speer, LJ 10/15/95.?Ed.]?Randall L. Schroeder, Wartburg Coll. Lib., Waverly, Iow.
-?Randall L. Schroeder, Wartburg Coll. Lib., Waverly, Iowa
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

The best biography yet on the self-described ``second man in the Reich.'' Albert Speer has long occupied a singular niche in history: that of the ``good Nazi,'' a decent and civilized man whose first love was architecture and who wished nothing more than to rebuild Germany from the misery of WW I and the worldwide depression of the 1930s. He skillfully cultivated this image until his death in 1981. Speer willingly conceded a general responsibility for his role in the Reich, and even admitted in the '70s that he had some inkling of what was happening to the Jews, but he never admitted personal responsibility for the Holocaust or the war. Naval historian van der Vat begins with a vexing question: If Speer was Hitler's right-hand man, how could he possibly claim ignorance of the genocide that was (in the words of the author) ``the driving force'' of the regime? Considering Speer's responsibilities heading the ministry of armaments during the war--one highly dependent on slave labor--his claims of ignorance are hard to believe. Yet many did believe him. Biographer Gitta Sereny, in Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995), seems to accept his remorse as genuine, and she finds her subject sympathetic. No less an authority than Simon Wiesenthal also believed Speer. The highly respected German biographer of Hitler, Joachim Fest, and the social psychologist Erich Fromm concurred. Van der Vat is, thankfully, immune to Speer's charms, even after having interviewed the Nazi in 1976. Beginning with a serious study of Speer as architect, van der Vat proceeds to examine his role as minister of armaments. In that capacity, Speer was personaly responsible for the evacuation of 75,000 German Jews as forced labor. Also important is that Speer now emerges as partially responsible--along with Goebbels--for the ``spectacles'' of the Reich. Writing with irony and intelligence, van der Vat forces us to confront Speer anew. (22 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 21, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039565243X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395652435
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,230,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Surely This is Not a Mandatory Reading, September 29, 1999

By 

Sérgio Luis Mota Miranda - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer (Paperback)

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well done, but falls short of other books on Speer, December 30, 1998

By 

Kristina Espy "espyka" (Cincinnati, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer (Hardcover)

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."

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, Shocking Examination of Nazi Albert Speer, June 6, 2002

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer (Paperback)

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!