Movies - Inside the Third Reich

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Inside the Third Reich is a memoir written by Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments from 1942 to 1945. It is considered to be one of the most in-depth descriptions of the workings and leaders of Nazi Germany, but is highly controversial because of Speer's lack of discussion of Nazi atrocities and his involvement with them.

Creation

At the Nuremburg Trials, Speer was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his use of slave labor while Minister of Armaments. From 1946 to 1966, while serving the sentence in Spandau Prison, he penned 1,200 manuscript pages of personal memoirs. Because he was not allowed to write such memoirs while in prison, he smuggled these notes out, and returned to them after his release. He was aided by Joachim Fest.

Originally titled Erinnerungen ("Recollections") upon its 1969 publication in German, Speer's personal history was translated into English and published one year later as Inside the Third Reich.

Overview

Inside the Third Reich is written in a semi-autobiographical style. While Speer begins with his childhood, he spends most of the memoirs describing his work in the Nazi hierarchy.

Speer, by his account, entered the Nazi hierarchy by an unusual chain of events. Initially, he was an architect commissioned by the Nazis. Because Adolf Hitler saw himself as both an architect and artist, he warmed to Speer and brought him into his inner circle.

Due to his relative closeness to Hitler, Speer found himself in an enviable but precarious position. He later remarked, "I would have been Hitler's best friend… if Hitler had been capable of having friends."

His duties until 1942 were occupied exclusively by architectural work, mainly large works that Hitler planned but could never build. Then, after the Minister of Armaments, Fritz Todt, died in a plane crash, Hitler unexpectedly tapped Speer for the position. Although Speer claimed he protested this appointment due to his lack of experience, he took it.

Under Speer, German arms production improved greatly. Prior to his appointment, the economy was run by Hermann Göring. However, Göring had fallen out of favor. After a power struggle, Speer managed to get most of the economy under his control.

Speer introduced economic reforms that the United States and Great Britain had implemented long before—namely, the full mobilization of factories for war purposes and the use of female workers. However, although more arms were produced, by the time Speer accomplished this, the war was already lost.

By the end of the war, Speer was disillusioned by the war, by the Nazis, and with Hitler himself. Despite being one of the few people to stay close to Hitler until the end, he sabotaged Hitler's scorched earth policy to prevent the complete destruction of Germany.

The memoirs effectively end with the end of the war and death of Hitler.

Significance

Speer was the highest-ranking Nazi official to survive both the war and the Nuremberg trials. He was also, even during World War II, described by both sides as one of the few intelligent and sane people in the Nazi hierarchy. Because of these factors, Inside the Third Reich has become the definitive work on the inner workings of Nazi Germany.

Due to his position, Speer was able to describe the personalities of many Nazi officials, including Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann and, of course, Hitler himself.

Description of the Nazi Hierarchy

Speer's memoirs revolutionized the study of Nazi Germany. Despite the popular vision of the country as a monolithic, totalitarian state that ran smoothly, Speer revealed that the country was actually sharply divided by overlapping responsibilities, court politics, and incompetent leaders. Most surprisingly, he portrayed Hitler not as an intelligent, decisive leader, but rather as a lazy, artistically tempered bohemian who worked in spurts.

Speer's personal insights into Nazi leaders themselves are nothing short of remarkable, especially since many other Nazis and their families chose him as a neutral confidant. Speer described how Joseph Goebbels' wife, Magda, complained about her husband's infidelity, and how she in turn had had an affair with one of Speer's old friends, Karl Hanke. Personally meeting with Göring in his estate, Speer wrote how the by-then overweight Luftwaffe marshal spent his days hunting, eating, and quite literally playing with stolen jewels as if they were toys.

According to Speer, even during the mid-1930s, after he attained dictatorial powers, Hitler had extremely unstable work habits that included staying up very late (typically until 5 or 6AM) and then sleeping until about noon, spending hours upon hours at meals and tea parties, and wasting both his time and that of colleagues with movies and long, boring monologues. He was incapable of normal office work. In the memoirs, Speer openly wondered when exactly Hitler ever found time to do anything important. On his personal life, Speer remarked that Eva Braun had told him, in the middle of 1943, that Hitler was too busy, too immersed, and too tired to have sex with her.

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