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Speer cover art

Speer

By: Martin Kitchen
Narrated by: Michael Page
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Summary

A new biography of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler's chief architect and trusted confidant, reveals the subject's deeper involvement in Nazi atrocities.

In his best-selling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi Germany, repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. In this revealing new biography, author Martin Kitchen disputes Speer's lifelong assertions of ignorance and innocence, portraying a far darker figure who was deeply implicated in the appalling crimes committed by the regime he served so well.

Kitchen reconstructs Speer's life with what we now know, including information from valuable new sources that have come to light only in recent years, challenging the portrait presented by earlier biographers and by Speer himself of a cultured technocrat devoted to his country while completely uninvolved in Nazi politics and crimes.

The result is the first truly serious accounting of the man, his beliefs, and his actions during one of the darkest epochs in modern history, not only countering Speer's claims of non-culpability but also disputing the commonly held misconception that it was his unique genius alone that kept the German military armed and fighting long after its defeat was inevitable.

©2015 Yale University (P)2018 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A devastating portrait of an empty, narcissistic, and compulsively ambitious personality." (Wall Street Journal)

What listeners say about Speer

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    4 out of 5 stars

Overall just what I hoped for

This is a very good overview of the life and actions of Speer, some of it is somewhat repetitive if you are very familiar with the war production etc. of Germany during WW2 as Speer obviously had a defining part in that after 1942. My only complaint about the book is related to how it’s structured, it is overall chronological, but for certain topics it follows the process all the way through from the 30s to the end of the war, even though in the overall chronology of the book WW2 hadn’t even started yet. That is done for many topics and while I understand that it might be good to cover that specific topic all the way through in one chapter or section of the book, it's sometimes a bit jarring to go back and forth in time like this. It didn’t ruin the book in any way though. The narrator is very good, no issues with that at all. Recommended for all history enthusiasts!

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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Subject; Albert Speer

This book was about the war and not the Albert Speer story, it made no mention of anything that happened after the war, which to me was part of the reasons I wanted to listen to it.
I was disappointed.

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4 people found this helpful

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Brilliant

A fascinating, revealling and brilliantly put together analysis of one of the most ambiguous of the Nazi leaders. The narration is superb, and really compliments the narrative

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1 person found this helpful

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Interesting....

informative and compelling to listen to. Well structured book. I highly recommend this book. The narrator was very good.

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  • CS
  • 09-04-18

Speer

As the other review says, it's not a complete book. Stops at a random point and no mention of the end of the war or post war. Pity as it was interesting until then.

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3 people found this helpful