Books like Infiltration by Albert Speer

A comprehensive history of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, detailing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the collapse of the Third Reich during World War II.

Explains the part that Albert Speer played in Hitler's regime and includes details of his trial at the end of the war.

Already hailed as one of the best books on Hitler's Germany, these brief and brilliantly conveived portraits of the leading Nazi figures (Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Bormann, Hess, etc.) give a fresh insight into the personalities and the manner in which they approached life in the Third Reich. Seen though their relationship to each other and to Hitler, the Party, and the bureaucracy around them, their lives emerge here in high relief, characterized by third-rate minds, petty rivalries, in-fighting, and ambitions. Even the longer portrait of Hitler here shows not a man possessed by a demon, or a fiendish intellect who blitzed his way to the top, but a man tortured with a sense of failure from his lower-class background, a deep disappointment in school, friendship, and other normal accomplishments, plagued continuously with anger, frustration, and dis-satisfaction. Among these leaders some fought to pass by others, some worked to discredit others (for instance, by spreading a rumor that Heydrich had Jewish ancestors): all spent most of their time maintaining their political and social position at the expense of first-rate leadership, although their slavish and mindless support of propaganda is evidence of their vulgar capabilities. In addition to the individual portraits, there are a few "group" portraits of women, youth, etc., which round out this fascinating and absorbing picture of those who led the world into its great holocaust.

Gitta Sereny’s biography of Albert Speer reveals the former Nazi Minister of Armaments—through interviews, unpublished manuscripts and Speer’s own prison testimony—a complex portrait of a man who rose, struggled and ultimately faced his own conscience.

The best biography yet on the self-described "second man in the Reich." Albert Speer has long occupied a singular niche in history: that of the "good Nazi," a decent and civilized man whose first love was architecture and who wished nothing more than to rebuild Germany from the misery of WW I and the worldwide depression of the 1930s. He skillfully cultivated this image until his death in 1981. Speer willingly conceded a general responsibility for his role in the Reich, and even admitted in the '70s that he had some inkling of what was happening to the Jews, but he never admitted personal responsibility for the Holocaust or the war. Naval historian van der Vat begins with a vexing question: If Speer was Hitler's right-hand man, how could he possibly claim ignorance of the genocide that was (in the words of the author) "the driving force" of the regime? Considering Speer's responsibilities heading the ministry of armaments during the war--one highly dependent on slave labor--his claims of ignorance are hard to believe. Yet many did believe him. Biographer Gitta Sereny, in *Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth* (1995), seems to accept his remorse as genuine, and she finds her subject sympathetic. No less an authority than Simon Wiesenthal also believed Speer. The highly respected German biographer of Hitler, Joachim Fest, and the social psychologist Erich Fromm concurred. Van der Vat is, thankfully, immune to Speer's charms, even after having interviewed the Nazi in 1976. Beginning with a serious study of Speer as architect, van der Vat proceeds to examine his role as minister of armaments, In that capacity, Speer was personaly responsible for the evacuation of 75,000 German Jews as forced labor. Also important is that Speer now emerges as partially responsible--along with Goebbels,--for the "spectacles" of the Reich. Writing with irony and intelligence, van der Vat forces us to confront Speer anew. [Kirkus Reviews][1] [1]: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dan-van-der-vat-3/the-good-nazi-the-life-and-lies-of-albert-speer/

"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"--

"Albert Speer is a great enigma. An unemployed, mediocre architect when Hitler came to power in 1933, he was soon designing the Third Reich's most important buildings, developing grandiose plans to turn Berlin into "Germania, capital of the world," and stage-managing the Nazi Party's Nuremberg rallies. 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 made him oblivious to the crimes of anti-Semitism and the devastation of Europe. Spared the death sentence at Nuremberg, Speer went on to rehabilitate himself in the public eye, becoming for many a symbol of German exoneration."--BOOK JACKET.