Speer - The Final Verdict

Albert Speer is a great enigma. An unemployed architect when Hitler came
to power in 1933, he was soon designing the Third Reich's most
important buildings. In 1942 Hitler appointed him Armaments Minister and
he quadrupled production, an astonishing achievement that kept the
German Army in the field and prolonged the war.
Yet Speer's life was
full of contradictions. The only member of the Nazi elite with whom
Hitler developed more than a purely functional relationship (he has even
been called "Hitler's unrequited love"), Speer was always an outsider
in Hitler's inner circle. He saw himself as an artist, above the crass
power struggles of the roughnecks around him, but his enormous ambition
blinded him to the crimes in which he played a leading role.
Brilliantly
illustrated, this gripping account of one man's rise and fall helps
explain how Germany descended so far into crime and barbarism.