FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

ALBERT SPEER WAS Hitler’s architect and minister of armaments and war production. Two features distinguish him from the rest of the Nazi thugs. First, there was in Speer’s feelings for Hitler a core of disinterested affection, of warmth going beyond animal fascination. On April 23, 1945, with Berlin a sea of flames and all chances of safe exit almost forfeit, Speer returned to the capital to bid a personal farewell to the Führer. The blank coldness of Hitler’s response shattered him. Second, Speer kept alive within himself a modicum of sanity and moral sense, through the lunatic circus of the Reich and then during almost twenty years of incarceration in Spandau. It is these two elements—the spell exercised upon him by the person of Hitler and the resolve to emerge sane from two decades of live burial—which dominate Speer’s “Spandau: The Secret Diaries” (translated from the German, for Macmillan, by Richard and Clara Winston).

At the Nuremberg war trials, Albert Speer acknowledged that it was he who had been ultimately in charge of the use of the many millions of slave laborers in the arsenal of the Reich. He had been directly involved neither in the bestial mechanics of deportation that brought these wretched human beings from the occupied territories nor in the maltreatment and bored extermination that often followed. But the overlordship of manufacture and industrial mobilization had been his, and to this extent Speer admitted—indeed, expatiated on—his guilt. The sentence of twenty years’ imprisonment seemed, from the start, brutal, and was thought to reflect Soviet insistence. Almost immediately after Nuremberg, there were whisperings to the effect that the Russian authorities had no desire to see so brilliant an impresario of weaponry and materials procurement pass safely into Western hands.

Speer entered the prison of Spandau, in Berlin, on July 18, 1947; he left it at midnight sharp on September 30, 1966. Together with the time spent in the Nuremberg jail after his sentencing, this made for exactly twenty years. Speer served the second decade of his sentence in company with only two other men—Baldur von Schirach, the former Hitler Youth leader, and Rudolf Hess. Speer entered the echoing coffin of Spandau as a man of forty-two, at the summit of his powers, and after a meteoric career. He was released at sixty-one. But during his captivity he wrote: more than twenty thousand sheets of diary notes, authorized and clandestine letters, scraps of autobiography. He wrote on calendar leaves, cardboard lids, toilet paper (the traditional papyrus of the prisoner). And he succeeded in smuggling this prodigious hoard out of Spandau despite the vigilant scrutiny of American, Russian, British, and French guards. Speer smuggled out enough material for his first book, “Inside the Third Reich,” for this prison journal, and, if certain hints are right, for what may be a full-scale study of Hitler. How did he do it? Speer’s account is at once curiously circumstantial and elusive. He tells us that he must protect the identity of those who helped him. The main channel was one of the prison medical aides, who had himself, ironically, been a deportee in the Reich war machine. But there must have been other avenues. It is difficult to escape the impression that the authorities, particularly the three Western powers, must have known something of Speer’s voluminous commerce with the outside world and the future. Indeed, as early as October, 1948, the wife of a leading Jewish publisher in New York approached a member of Speer’s family with regard to his memoirs (the subtle indecency of the idea repelled Speer, if not the lady).

Hitler inhabits this book like a black mist. In Speer’s first years of captivity, he sought to recollect and set down methodically the history of his relationship to the Führer. Many of the vignettes are memorable. We see Hitler planning to make a world art center of his native town of Linz. We watch him during the years of his somnambular ascent to power, amid the crazed multitudes aching for his whirlwind passage in an open car, or in the intimate company of his bully boys—orating, mocking, pontificating, and lapsing, brusquely, into the silent vortex of his vision. There are extraordinary snapshots of Hitler in a domestic vein at Obersalzberg, laboring at unforced sociability amid minions, aides, camp followers whose lives hung on his breath. Speer records Hitler on literature (the man had a passion for Karl May, the German version of Fenimore Cooper), on sculpture, on the meaning of history. He calls to memory the moments of generosity shown by the Führer to early associates and backers, and tells of Hitler’s obsession with fire, with the tongue of name on the hearth and the fire storm over the city.

Speer knows that Hitler is closely meshed with the root of his, Speer’s, identity. November 20, 1952: “Whatever turn my life takes in the future, whenever my name is mentioned, people will think of Hitler. I shall never have an independent existence. And sometimes I see myself as a man of seventy, children long since adult and grandchildren growing up, and wherever I go people will not ask about me but about Hitler.” Three years earlier, Speer ponders the predestined logic of his encounter with the Master: “I regarded Hitler above all as the preserver of the world of the nineteenth century against that disturbing metropolitan world which I feared lay in the future of all of us. Viewed in that light, I might actually have been waiting for Hitler. Moreover—and this justifies him even more—he communicated to me a strength that raised me far above the limits of my potentialities. If this is so, then I cannot say he led me away from myself: on the contrary, through him I first found a heightened identity.”

In the endless tunnel of prison days, Speer tries to arrive at a clear picture of the man who built and smashed his life. If there was cruelty—though of an oddly abstract, indifferent kind—megalomania, a rasping vulgarity, self-pity, and falsehood beyond ordinary human scope, there was also the exact opposite. Speer knew Hitler as “a solicitous paterfamilias, a generous superior, amiable, self-controlled, proud, and capable of enthusiasm for beauty and greatness.” The last point haunts Speer. Hitler’s policies in the arts and architecture could spring from brutal myopia. But at other moments there were real flashes of insight, flights of invention and learning. The charisma of the man was a deep, cold thing, at once numbing and magnetic. And so was his naked intellectual edge in regard to political tactics, rhetorical command, and psychological penetration of the tired or corrupt shadow players who faced him at home and abroad. “He really came from another world. . . . The military men had all learned to deal with a wide variety of unusual situations. But they were totally unprepared to deal with this visionary.”

There is nothing new in any of this. Other testimony has made the nightmare image routine. But Speer does touch on matters of the first importance when he seeks to diagnose Hitler’s anti-Semitism. He recalls scarcely a single exchange on the question between the Führer and himself (in the nauseating miasma of Hitler’s table talk we find hardly a single allusion to the world of the concentration camps). Yet on combing more closely through the great drift of his remembrance, Speer comes to the conclusion that hatred for the Jews was the absolute, unwavering pivot of Hitler’s being. The entirety of Hitler’s politics and war plans “was merely camouflage for this real motivating factor.” Pondering Hitler’s testament, with its apocalyptic vision of Jewish war guilt and of the extermination of European Jewry, Speer comes to realize that this extermination signified more to Hitler than either victory or the survival of the German nation.

Rationalist historians have disputed the point. They have striven to find a “normal” economic-strategic framework for Hitler’s career. Speer is much nearer the truth. There is little sense to be made of the Hitler phenomenon—of his poisonous magic and enormity of self-destruction—if one does not focus stringently on the central motif of anti-Semitism. In some tenebrous manner, Hitler saw in the messianic coherence of the Jewish people, in their apartness, in the metaphor of their “chosenness,” an unalterable mocking counterpoise to his own most intimate drives. When he proclaimed that Nazism and Judaism could not coexist, that one or both must suffer annihilation in a final conflict, he was stating a crazy truth. Learning of the Eichmann trial and of the ever-increasing evidence of the Holocaust, Speer notes that his own desire for release from prison strikes him as “almost absurd.”

But the desire persisted, of course. This is the point of all prison literature: the hope against hope that more than seven thousand unchanging days will pass, that time can be given a meaning or a comforting shape across a vacuum of twenty winters. Speer’s suffocation was made worse, by repeated spurts of rumor. John McCloy, the United States High Commissioner for Germany, was pressing for mitigation or release; Adenauer was sympathetic; the British Foreign Office had approached the Russians. Surely the Cold War would lead to the evacuation of Spandau and to a more opportune view of Speer’s crimes. Why should the Western powers let the wizard of German armament rot when they themselves were remilitarizing Germany? But each hope proved false, and Speer came to endure, and to articulate, the conviction that he would have to serve his sentence to the last, nearly inconceivable midnight.

He kept sane by means classical in the records of entombment. He took intense, daily walks in the Spandau grounds, keeping an exact count of the distance. At the close, he had covered 31,936 kilometres. But this forced march was more than abstract exercise. Speer imagined himself hiking around the globe, from Europe, via the Middle East, to China, the Bering Strait, and then down through Mexico. As he tramped, he conjured in his mind’s eye what he knew of the relevant landscape, architecture, climate. “I am already deep in India,” runs a typical log, “and according to the plan will be in Benares in five months.” Then, there was the prison garden. From the spring of 1959 on, Speer devoted more and more time and energy to its cultivation. Each shrub, every flower bed became the object of tenacious design and care: “Spandau has become a meaning in itself. Long ago I had to organize my survival here. That is no longer necessary. The garden has taken full possession of me.”

Speer read indefatigably: history, philosophy, fiction, and, eerily, books touching on events in which he had himself played so drastic a part. Once he was allowed to see engineering and architectural journals, he labored to refresh his skills and keep in some kind of touch with the world changing outside. Speer drew: plans for family houses, much appreciated by his Russian jailers, silhouettes and contours of monuments now in rubble, and occasional strange allegoric scenes, strident with solitude. Above all, he wrote, thousands and thousands of pages. His reason hung by this stout thread.

Nevertheless, there were spells of despair and near-madness: at the end of the tenth year, when Admirals Dönitz and Raeder had been released after serving their time; in June, 1961, when fear of having mislaid one of his illegal letters brought on wild panic. When breakdown seemed imminent, Speer would allow himself a “sleep-cure,” a three-week indulgence in sleeping pills, securing solid nights and blurred days. But mostly he drew on his own formidable resilience. After a week in a punishment cell, sitting motionless for eleven hours in front of blank walls, Spoor emerged “as fresh as I was on the first day.”

The devices of the Allied authorities—acting, to he sure, in the name of outraged humanity—do not always make for pretty reading. After eleven years of imprisonment, Speer asked for canvas and oil paints. This dangerous request was refused. The prisoners were never addressed by their names—solely by the numbers they wore on their backs—for to call a man by his name is to honor him in his humanity. Family visits were kept few and brief. They were supposed to take place in the presence of Soviet, American, French, and British observers. Sixteen years passed before Speer, through a kindly oversight, was allowed an instant alone with his wife. In the event, he was too numb even to touch her hand. National stereotypes mark the different jailers and presiding officers (control of Spandau alternates on a monthly rota among the four occupying powers). The English are punctilious. The French display a certain easy panache. There is in American innocence and spontaneity a frequent edge of brutality. During each “Russian month,” the prison diet plummets. But the Soviet personnel is anxiously literate. While their Western colleagues thumb through detective stories or doze over crossword puzzles, the Russians at Spandau study chemistry, physics, and mathematics, or read Dickens, Jack London, and Tolstoy. According to shifts in the Cold War temperature, inter-Allied relations within the prison tauten or relax, and the prisoners are treated in consequence. During the Cuban missile crisis, the electric tension gives the prisoners a center of gravity. It is the Russian guard who brings news of peace.

It is snapshots like this, risible and tragic, which make these claustrophobic pages bearable. Speer has a trained eye. In Nuremberg, he passes by the cells of those of his colleagues who are waiting to be hanged: “As the rules prescribe, most of them are lying on their backs, hands on the blanket, heads turned toward the inside of the coil. A ghostly sight, all of them in their immobility; it looks as though they have already been laid on their biers.” In the winter of 1953, Prisoner No. 3, Hitler’s sometime foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, is allowed an armchair (the old man’s health was failing). Speer recognizes it as one that he had designed for the Berlin Chancellery, in 1938: “The damask upholstery is tattered, the sheen faded, the veneer scratched, but I still like the proportions, especially the curve of the rear legs.” The proud monstrosities that Speer had built for the Reich, the bright-red pillars and the marble porticoes of triumph, lie in oblivion. Two things remain: the memory of the impalpable “cathedral of ice” that Speer created by the use of a hundred and thirty searchlight beams at a Nuremberg party rally, and this chair.

As release comes nearer, Speer’s mind plays ominous tricks. He stop listening to the radio. He orders his family to cease all correspondence. Sharp dreams tell him that he will never return home, that his life unlived can never be made good. Three days to go: once more he weeds the garden so that everything will be left trim. He senses, as does every long-term prisoner, that his relationship to his prison has become “semierotic,” that, in some lunatic way, he no longer wants to leave the coffin he has mastered. On the last day, waiting for his and Schirach’s release, Speer adds ten kilometres to his global tour. The climax is a touch of terror and human desolation beyond the reach of fiction. Great heaps of coal are being unloaded in the prison courtyard. Speer stands next to Hess, watching: “Then Hess said, ‘So much coal. And from tomorrow on only for me.’ ” That was September 30, 1966. The crazed old hooligan, uninvolved in the worst of Nazi atrocities, because he had flown to Scotland, is in Spandau still, alone, guarded by four miniature armies and thirty-eight thousand cubic metres of walled space. The Western powers have long urged his release. The Soviet Union refuses, lest it lose the one military toehold it has in West Berlin. Our acquiescence in Russian blackmail on this point of inhumanity is past comment.

But once this is said, and once the force of Speer’s record and survival has been acknowledged, another point needs to be made. In Spandau there were books and music, family letters, and medical care. During three months out of four the food was excellent. There were hot baths, and a garden to tend. No man was flooded, none plunged in excrement or burned piecemeal to cinders. In short, twenty years in Spandau was a literal paradise compared to a single day in Belsen, Majdanek, Auschwitz, or any of a hundred of the outhouses of Hell built by the regime that Albert Speer served so brilliantly. It is the power, the pain of this book that one has to say this to oneself, if not to him (who now professes to know it). Yet even to say this is not enough. It is not merely compared with Belsen that Spandau is a rest cure: but compared with the Gulag, with the Soviet psychiatric penitentiaries, with the jails of Chile and the unspeakable death camps of Indonesia, Speer was only one of the master builders—if perhaps the most bitterly punished. The architecture of death flourishes still.