Blaine Taylor - Hitlers Engineers: Fritz Todt and Albert Speer - Master Builders of the Third Reich

I first began reading books on Nazi Germany about the time of the 1960 publication of William L. Shirers The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , which I reviewed later in my Calvert Hall High School literary magazine. This capped my interest in all of the various postwar movies and television documentaries on the war and the Nazis that appeared over the previous decade. Since all of the books that I read left many unanswered questionswritten as they were either by observers of the events or authors working with second-hand informationby the time I reached Towson State College in 1968, Id just begun to do what our history professors urged us to: Go back to the original sources, the memoirs of the actual participants themselves.

None were more interesting than those of Dr. Albert Speers, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs , which I reviewed for my college student paper, Towerlight . It answered many questionsbut not all. Six years later, I reviewed Professor Speers second book, Spandau: The Secret Diaries , for the then Baltimore News American newspaper, as I did his third and last postwar published book, Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire in 1981.

In those first readings, I was inclined to give Speer the benefit of the doubt, to accept his account of things as the way they actually were; I even wrote to him for an autographed pictureand received it. In the 1990s, I read all three books over again, as well as several others debunking Speers own accounts. In the preparation for the current volume, I read all of them yet a third time over.

From these multiple readings, I have come to some conclusions. Far from being the apolitical, artistic technician that he claimed to be until the time of his death, Speer was, in fact, a practitioner of the very highest order of Nazi politics and manipulation. He was also an accomplished actor and liar: he knew all about the Holocaust from the very start, as did, indeed, all the other top Nazi leaders. That is why he was treated as such a pariah at both Nuremberg and Spandau by his fellow convicted and accused war criminals: they knew what a phony he was, having observed him in Hitlers presence for almost 15 years.

Thus, the current volume will entirely dispense with all the handwringing, back-and-forth what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it? soul-searching of the last few Speer biographies. Based on all of my reading from all sources, and my 63 years of military, business, and political life in a modern, industrialized, technocratic, Western state, Ive come to the inescapable conclusion: he knew .

That having been said, this book marks a radical departure from all my previously published volumes in one important respect. In them, I baldly stated the facts as I found them, and then let the reader decide. I shall do the same here, but with the following major change: I shall state all sides of an issue, but also give my own considered view. The reader will still be free to make his or her own decision.

I also contest Dr. Speers assertion that the job of Minister of Armaments found him, rather than the other way round. It is my contention that he actively sought some such high post following the great German military victories of that high tide summer of Nazi victory of 1940, realizing as he did that only through such a top position could he not only maintain his standing within the Nationalsozialistische (National Socialist or NS/Nazi) hierarchy, but actually advance it, especially in the expected postwar Nazi world order that he, and others, felt sure was coming. Therefore, he could not allow himself to remain forever simply Hitlers architect, despite his protestations to the contrary in all his published postwar books.