Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

By MW

September 3, 2020

Book Review: Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

-Simon White

Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth by Gitta Sereny is a psychological and historical profile of Albert Speer. Speer was Hitler’s architect and later, Minister of Armaments and War Production. At one point, he was groomed as Hitler’s successor. In the Nuremberg Trials he was one of the only Nazis to admit some responsibility for the war crimes of the Third Reich and to renounce Hitler. This admission saved his life and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Sereny was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and author. She was anti-Nazi and present in France during the occupation. She interviewed and researched Speer for over a decade, along with many of his companions and contemporaries.

Unlike many journalists and authors, Sereny did not allow her privileged access to her subjects to dissuade her from critical analysis. Throughout her book, she repeatedly exposed Speer’s deception regarding his claim that he was ignorant of the Holocaust through her extensive research of his life and from the testimony of his associates and family members.

However, this book did not engage in “gotcha journalism,” Sereny presents a nuanced portrait of Speer that shows both his positive and negative sides. Her thought provoking writing explores themes of individual and general culpability, redemption, and acceptance of responsibility as a means to deny wider guilt..

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Treblinka train station sign

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In 1971, over the course of several months, historian Gitta Sereny trudged regularly into a prison in Dusseldorf, Germany to sit across a small table from Franz Stangl, former commandant of the extermination camp Treblinka. Between April and June of that year, Sereny collected over 70 hours of interviews with Stangl who died on June 28–within hours of her last visit. For the following 18 months Sereny continued researching details of the stories Stangl had told her and to speak to people who had known him when he was in charge of killing operations at Treblinka.

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