Mephistopheles Remembered

By Keith R. Johnson

INSIDE THE THIRD REICH: MEMOIRS by Albert Speer. 596 pages. Macmillan. $12.50.

Like an ancient despot, Hitler meant to commemorate his schemes of grandeur with great avenues and overpowering buildings. In Berlin alone, he planned a three-mile-long street of splendor, with the centerpiece a domed hall that would hold 150,000 people. The man Hitler took into his intimate circle to create these edifices was a fledgling architect named Albert Speer.

At 28, Speer thought he saw in the Fuehrer an alternative to the Weimar Republic's decadence. In Hitler's monumental designs, he hoped to escape such dreary projects as garage annexes and a house for his in-laws. In these memoirs, drafted in Spandau Prison while he was serving a 20-year sentence for war crimes, Speer recalls: "For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles."

Bourgeois Banality. Speer was a strange figure among the crowd of beer-drinking gangsters who made up most of Hitler's inner councils. He came from a fastidious upper-middle-class background and joined the Nazi Party early in 1931, after hearing Hitler address a meeting of Berlin students and professors. The decision, Speer insists, was casual and apolitical. He knew little of Hitler's program and did not understand the seriousness of the Nazis' antiSemitism. Incredibly, during a dozen years of continual association with Hitler --first as architect-in-chief, then as wartime Minister of Armaments and War Production--Speer never read Mein Kampf from cover to cover.

Inside the Third Reich is likely to be the last, best first-person story of what took place at the power center as Hitler moved from political triumph to military disaster. While he was murdering Jews, ravaging Europe and destroying Germany, life at his court was a round of bickering intrigue, interminable monologues and atrocious boredom.

Hitler rose late in the morning and worked for only a few hours before settling into a lunch that often lasted until after 4 p.m. Everyone then trooped off to a teahouse for more food and drink. In the prewar years, only a few hours later came supper and films. Hitler's taste in movies ran to romantic schmalz and leggy revues; he could not abide Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, Speer notes dryly. When the films were over, everyone else was glassy-eyed with fatigue, but Hitler prattled on as beer, wine and sandwiches were handed around until 2 a.m. Speer writes: "When, I would ask myself, did he really work?"

Magnetic Power. The inefficiencies and inconsistencies of the modern world's most savagely totalitarian state were staggering. Hitler's satraps ran separate duchies of their own, and the supposedly all-powerful Fuhrer often found his orders circumvented by his lieutenants--even by Speer, who, as Armaments Minister in the waning months of war, quietly sabotaged Hitler's scorched-earth policy for territories about to be lost to the Allied armies. Hitler sometimes found his close associates absurd. When SS Chief Heinrich Himmler sought through archaeological excavations to demonstrate the early growth of German culture, Hitler scoffed: "All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture."

Hitler had special quirks and phobias.

He was partial to sentimental operettas like Die Fledermaus and The Merry Widow, and made pilgrimages to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. He scorned Herman Goring's zest for the hunt: "Today when anybody with a fat belly can safely shoot the animal down from a distance." Though he loved the Bavarian Alps, he found mountain climbers and skiers ridiculous. "If I had my way I'd forbid these sports, with all the accidents people have doing them," he once said. "But of course the mountain troops draw their recruits from such fools."

Speer offers a special insight into Hitler's strength and weakness. He sees the man as a gifted amateur: "He arrived at the core of matters too easily and therefore could not understand them with real thoroughness." At the outset of the war, Hitler surprised his enemies with tactics they did not expect. But, Speer adds with a professional's disdain, "as soon as setbacks occurred he suffered shipwreck, like most untrained people." Speer became the miracle man of German war production simply by unifying a system fragmented by the conflicting demands made upon it by Hitler's deputies. Yet Speer concedes that his efforts only delayed the inevitable outcome. Even with the "extreme concentration of all our resources," he says, Germany could not have had an atomic bomb before 1947. The Nazi war effort would have crumbled before then, since the last reserves of chromium--vital to the making of stainless steel--would have been gone by the end of 1945.

Beyond such details, Speer compels attention because the man does not avoid the question of personal guilt. At first, he writes, "political events did not concern me." As a good technocrat, he agreed to the use of forced labor in order to bolster armament production. After the plot to assassinate Hitler failed on July 20, 1944, Speer briefly toyed with ways to kill his Fuehrer. But, he admits, "I could never have confronted Hitler pistol in hand. Face to face, his magnetic power over me was too great up to the very last day."

No Apologies. That power persisted even when a trusted friend came to Speer in the summer of 1944 and spoke haltingly of a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, which he advised Speer never to visit. "I did not investigate," Speer recalls, "for I did not want to know what was happening there." The camp was Auschwitz. "Because I failed at that time," Speer writes, " Istill feel responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense." Speer does not defend himself by arguing that he did not know what was happening. "By entering Hitler's party, I had already, in essence, assumed a responsibility that led directly to the brutalities of forced labor, to the destruction of war and to the deaths of those millions of so-called undesirable stock--to the crushing of justice and the elevation of every evil."

Four years ago, Speer was released from Spandau, where only Rudolf Hess remains. Now 65, he lives in Heidelberg, a nearly forgotten figure who works as a management consultant and relaxes by walking in the country. When he writes that he will never be rid of his sin, he convinces, partly because he now has little to gain by such an admission. Speer is right when he says, "no apologies are possible."

. Keith R. Johnson

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