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Speer
- Hitler's Architect
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 19 hrs
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Speer
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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.
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Critic reviews
"A devastating portrait of an empty, narcissistic, and compulsively ambitious personality." (Wall Street Journal)
What listeners say about Speer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 29-04-23
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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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- John Loynds
- 09-04-18
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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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Man-O-War1977
- 20-01-23
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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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Janet Jones
- 19-07-23
Interesting....
informative and compelling to listen to. Well structured book. I highly recommend this book. The narrator was very good.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- T. J. Gluckman
- 12-08-24
Scholarly bk tho' it grinds axes vs Speer
A thorough and scholarly work which mostly focuses on analysing Speer's claims about his transformative role in raising National Socialist Germany's arms production from 1942 on. The author spells out in detail just how terrible the exploitation was of labour raised by press gangs, from concentration camps, by false promises (e.g. to French ppl) etc. Because of that he attacks Speer throughout e.g. exposing AS' alibi-claims that he didn't know about the disgusting conditions in e.g. the underground factories at Project Dora for instance; however, he does give him some credit for not carrying out Hitler's Nero orders in 1945 i.e. to destroy all of the remaining German industry & infrastructure still standing after Allied bombings.
An example of this overly negative view is that he even roundly condemns Speer for an affair he had in S.E. England very late on in life. This is pure moralising, given Speer had been married almost 50 years, his wife bore six children, and Speer had served 20 years in Spandau jail (1946-66). He quotes AS' daughter Hilda who claimed that this affair had caused his wife's Parkinson's Disease. I cannot see that having one affair is any business of a historian to evaluate..
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- 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