Spandau The Secret Diaries

Fülszöveg

"Speer's new book is —if at all possible—an even more remarkable human document than his Inside the Third Reich. More directed toward inner conflicts, Spandau is a brutally honest, at times full of sarcasm and humor, often terribly painful legacy of the Third Reich and of a man who helped build it as well as destroy It."—fugene Davidson
ALBERT SPEER was Hitler's personal architect, confidant, and prote'ge; Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production; and second most powerful man in Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. Speer was also the only defendant of the twenty-two top Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials to assume the burden of guilt for the Reich's war crimes. He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, and served it in Spandau with six other top Nazi officials —Hess, Raeder, Schirach, Funk, Neurath and Donitz.
Spandau: The Secret Diaries is an intensely powerful, moving, personal narrative —a brilliant individual's effort to retain his strength and sanity during... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"Speer's new book is —if at all possible—an even more remarkable human document than his Inside the Third Reich. More directed toward inner conflicts, Spandau is a brutally honest, at times full of sarcasm and humor, often terribly painful legacy of the Third Reich and of a man who helped build it as well as destroy It."—fugene Davidson
ALBERT SPEER was Hitler's personal architect, confidant, and prote'ge; Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production; and second most powerful man in Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. Speer was also the only defendant of the twenty-two top Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials to assume the burden of guilt for the Reich's war crimes. He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, and served it in Spandau with six other top Nazi officials —Hess, Raeder, Schirach, Funk, Neurath and Donitz.
Spandau: The Secret Diaries is an intensely powerful, moving, personal narrative —a brilliant individual's effort to retain his strength and sanity during twenty years' near-solitary confinement through extraordinary feats of self-discipline and moral reeducation. As Speer states, " these thousands of notes are one concentrated effort to survive, an endeavor not only to endure life in a cell physically and intellectually, but also to arrive at some sort of moral reckoning with what lay behind it all."
Speer offers a spellbinding account of the psychological effects of imprisonment on his fellow inmates—their pointless arguments about the bureaucratic policy and war strategies of the Reich, their strict adherence to protocol in their dealings with one another, their petty quarrels over work details, their games to outwit the guards, and Hess's pretended loss of memory.
Speer's gift for recalling events and conversations in vivid, factual detail makes his diary one of the most fascinating chronicles to emerge from the rubble of the Third Reich. He demonstrates his ability to bring the past
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(ContiriLied from front flap)
to life in the many new insights he gives us into the complex personality of Hitler, as in this chilling glimpse of the Fijhrer's maniacal plan for the destruction of New York: "I never saw him so worked up as toward the end of the war, when in a kind of delirium he pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire. He described the skyscrapers being turned into gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky."
Albert Speer
"Albert Speer's book is a deeply moving human document. It is also of extraordinary political and psychological interest. His self-analysis of the reasons why and how he could have been involved with the Nazi criminal gang and his remarkably frank account of the change within himself during twenty years are truly convincing. His description of the life of the former Nazi leaders in Spandau prison is a revealing record of the psychology of power bearers who have lost their power. The picture he paints of the four-power prison administration and their bureaucratic methods is often hilarious. This book is a must for anyone interested in the psychological motivation of political action and the problem of guilt and repentance. But beyond this it is so fascinatingly written that 1 could not put it down before I finished it."—Erich Fromm
lacket design hy Boh Antler
printed in the u.s.a. 2 158

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ALBERT SPEER'S SECRET PRISON DIARIES
For twenty years Speer secretly wrote his memoirs in a minuscule scrawl on tobacco wrappings, pages of calendars, and toilet paper. Under constant peril of cell searches, he concealed his notes in the sole lining of a shoe and in the bandage wrapped around his leg to relieve his phlebitis, and managed to persuade sympathetic guards to smuggle them to the outside world.
At the stroke of midnight, October 1,1966, Speer was led through the prison gates past a barrage of flashbulbs and floodlights into the streets of a Berlin he could scarcely recognize. Waiting for him in the home of relatives were more than 25,000 pages of his notes.
But the prison diaries lay unread for over ten years:
" I shied away from looking at that mass of papers which is all that has remained of my life between my fortieth and my sixtieth years. There are various reasons for my presenting this iournai now. But ultimately it is an attempt to give form to the time that seemed to be pouring away so meaninglessly, to give substance to years empty of content.
Diaries are usually the accompaniment of a lived life. This one stands in place of a life." Vissza