‘Spandau: the Secret Diaries’ by Albert Speer

Albert Speer (1905 – 1980) was a close associate of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and 1940s, chief architect of the Nazi regime and later minister for armaments production during the latter part of the Second World War. In this role he was an employer forced labour. In 1945, along with other leading members of the German government he was put on trial at Nuremberg. He was the only senior Nazi who pleaded guilty and, possibly as result, he was not executed (as most were) and was instead given a twenty year prison term.

The early part of his sentence was served in Nuremburg, but after a few months he, along with six others (Rudolf Hess, Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Walther Funk, Baldur von Schirach and Konstantin von Neurath), were transferred to Spandau castle in Western the suburbs of Berlin to complete their sentences under the watchful eye of a vast cadre of guards and other staff from Russia, Britain, France and America who took it in turns to supervise them on a monthly rota.

Speer is a fascinating figure in many ways – sometimes very inaccurately described as being ‘the good Nazi’. He was not it would seem a true believer in an ideological sense, but was devoted to Hitler personally and happy to advance his career in the service of a regime which became a police state run by the Gestapo that violently suppressed dissent and governed via arbitrary arrests, torture, show trials and executions.

The question of how much he knew about the holocaust and / or was complicit in its operations remains a mystery. He always denied knowing about it, but always admitted to carrying a degree of moral if not criminal responsibility for it. I think it is impossible to conclude that he was not very well aware of it and that he did not simply turn a blind eye. But I am no expert.

Either way, I find him a very interesting figure, not least because he was well-educated, erudite, able, level headed and in many ways quite decent in his personal dealings with others, yet served at a senior level one of the most monstrous political administrations ever to hold power.

Despite campaigns to get him released early, he ended up serving precisely twenty years in prison. He was sentenced at the age of forty and was released soon after his sixtieth birthday. He went on to publish three books, all of which sold well internationally and ensured that he was able to enjoy a reasonably comfortable old age.

Two of the books were largely written secretly in his prison cell at Spandau on pieces of paper that were provided to him clandestinely by sympathetic guards and smuggled out to his wife who retained each scrap. He then worked to turn these into the books. One was a memoir of his time at Hitler’s side and was entitled ‘Inside the Third Reich’. It was published in 1970. This book – a diary of his time in Spandau - was the second and it was published exactly fifty years ago in March 1976.

A third, shorter book entitled ‘Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Tried to Build an SS Industrial Empire’ would follow in 1981. Following his release from prison, he also collaborated with several historians and journalists on other books, as well as documentary films.

I know it is a weird confession to make, but I have always enjoyed reading prison diaries – particularly those that are written by highly educated people of a kind who do not typically end up being jailed. Quite a few British politicians have written such books in recent years. Jeffrey Archer’s run to three volumes and are, in my opinion, by far the best things he ever wrote. Speer’s diaries from Spandau are not only interesting in themselves, but also comprise a significant historic source of a kind. The book is lengthy – comprising 450 pages of quite small print – but very engaging and readable.

Early on, particularly, he muses a lot about his past and the close personal relationship he had with Hitler who clearly exercised a pretty mesmeric influence over him. There is a lot of reminiscence about the time they spent together, particularly enthusing about grand building projects and opera. It takes time, but steadily all illusions are lost and he ends up accepting that Hitler ‘corrupted not only classicism, but everything he touched – a reverse King Midas, who transformed things not into gold but into corpses.’

Clearly the diaries were written with publication in mind, so a lot of the self-justification from a political perspective should be taken with a humungous heap of salt. Even if we set aside the extent of knowledge of the grotesque crime that was the Holocaust, Speer was actively involved in the deployment of slave labour in armaments factories and served in a senior role in one of the most brutal, totalitarian regimes in history. It was right that he was punished for these crimes, and a twenty year term can not be considered unreasonable. While he himself naturally wanted to be released early, the diaries suggest that he did not disagree with the severity of the punishment he received.

What makes the diaries fascinating is what makes all prison diaries fascinating, namely reading about how someone who has enjoyed a privileged existence adapts to his conditions. How he deals with the boredom and enforced isolation from the outside world, builds relationships with his guards, lives with endless petty and de-humanising rules, and manages to stay sane during years and years of monotonous captivity.

For Speer the key strategy was to organise his time in a disciplined way and to try as best he could to stay mentally and physically fit:

July 6th 1947

Raeder tells me I have a fortunate disposition; I am adjusting to imprisonment more easily than all the others. even now, he says, after two years I still give the impression of being half-way balanced, which is more than can be said for any of the others. My temperament may have something to do with it. But it may also come from my ability to organise my life on all planes; the moral aspect by accepting my guilt; the psychic aspect by rejecting almost all deceptive hopes of early release; the practical aspect of disciplining the routine of everyday life, that is, by planning even trivialities; from the cleaning of the cell to dividing time into spells of work and holiday. Writing down these thoughts is also part of it.

As a political prisoner, Speer had a reasonably privileged position at Spandau. He had his own cell (and hence a degree of privacy), access to a big selection of books from the Berlin public library, newspapers, a transistor radio, and most important a substantial garden area in which to cultivate plants and exercise each day for several hours. He tried hard to develop decent working relationships with his fellow prisoners, none of whom he particularly got on with personally at all, and the guards, who he often did quite like.

In the evenings he read a huge amount – both fiction and non-fiction – and each day he would walk several miles in loops around the garden. He took to imagining he was waking around Germany, then Europe and then the world, meticulously recording the number of kilometres he walked each day. He was careful to remain in control emotionally when members of his family visited for strictly rationed periods of time overseen by guards, and must have devoted a huge amount of time to writing. He also never stopped planning what he would do professionally after his release.

There were bad patches, of course, when he suspended writing the diary for a few weeks. But by and large he made the best of it and got through the twenty years in a pretty good shape.

The other aspect of the book which I found really interesting were the portraits of his fellow prisoners, most of whom coped with captivity much less well, never really accepting their guilt and viewing their imprisonment merely as victor’s justice. Rudolf Hess features most prominently because of his eccentricities and preparedness to fake both mental and physical ailments on a regular basis. At the end of course, having been sentenced to a full life term, Hess was the last of the seven still left in Spandau, condemned to live on totally alone there for a further twenty-one years after Speer’s release in 1966 until his death (probably by suicide) in 1987.

There is some repetition as there always is when personal diaries are published, but in all other respects Speer’s musings from behind his cell door are fascinating on all kinds of levels. You finish them wanting to know more about this mysterious man, why he chose the path he did and how much he really knew and was actively complicit in what went on in Nazi Germany.