Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

March 2, 2016

Albert Speer: Hitler’s Willing Architect

Setting the record straight about “the good Nazi.”

Unlike his fellow defendants at the Nuremberg trials, Albert Speer—the Third Reich’s chief architect and, from 1942, the man in charge of munitions and infrastructure—admitted wrongdoing while insisting he was unaware of what was really happening to the Jews. As a result, he got off with a twenty-year sentence, during which he penned a series of memoirs and made a reputation for himself as “the good Nazi.” Michael J. Lewis, reviewing Martin Kitchen’s new biography of Speer, assesses his culpability in the Final Solution (he signed off on the construction of the crematoria at Auschwitz, and managed an extensive empire of slave laborers) as well as his significance as an architect:

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