Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and minister for armaments and war production, has of late been the focus of several historical studies and biographies. Despite these examinations, the late Joachim Fest believes that no one individual has been able to reach the depth of Speer's being and fully understand his reasoning and motivations. As Fest states, “I have always found much more unsettling the thought that a man [Speer] from his social and family background, having the moral standards with which he was brought up, could be so blindly captivated by a vicious regime boastful of its own barbarism” (p. 9). Indeed, in 1999 Fest even offered his own biographical analysis of Speer (Fest, Speer: The Final Verdict, translated by Ewald Osers and Alexandra Dring, Harcourt, 2001) in an attempt to grapple with his subject's National Socialist past. Central as a source to this biographical work, Fest turned to his own notes on Speer primarily drawn from his memoranda on his subject, written down in the late 1960s and early 1970s while Fest assisted Ullstein publisher, Wolf Jobst Siedler, as an “interrogating editor” to Speer as the latter composed his memoirs (Speer, Inside the Third Reich, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, Macmillan, 1970). According to Fest, these notes preserve recorded events that were “for whatever reason, omitted from his memoirs or included in a form that was either markedly different or, in a few cases, required further expansion” (p. 2). At this point Fest did not aim at writing a biography of Speer and therefore did not exhaust certain topics. Rather, his main goal was to encourage Speer to clarify and/or contextualize certain experiential historical details in his memoirs, especially those that the architect scantily addressed.

As a result, the Conversations then are the “author's notes” or annotations that recorded the discussions Fest had with Speer. As Fest concedes, they “do not reproduce Speer's statements verbatim or in the exact order in which he made them, but rather constitute a condensed record” (p. 5). Interspersed among these statements are actual quotations that Fest denotes with inverted commas. Fest acknowledges that as he first listened to Speer, he gradually “acquired a kind of ‘interpreter's memory,’ which enabled [him] to retain for a time quite long explanations as well as the linguistic peculiarities of an interlocutor who repeatedly took things back or strayed from the point” (p. 6). Such a revelation may make some historians' level of doubt rise; but perhaps Fest's own journalistic background validates such an explanation or at least gives it more weight.

It is noteworthy that following the publication of Fest's biography of Speer, which so clearly incorporates Fest's notes, one publishing house would not only make the effort to publish these notes but that another company (an English-language publisher) would also have them translated for broader publication. Perhaps the success of Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 film “Downfall” (Der Untergang) encouraged such a response. The film was based in part on Fest's Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo, Picador, 2005), which dealt with Hitler's final days, but included the character of Albert Speer in the dialogue. Fest himself admits that he had originally planned to deposit the notes in a German archive for researcher purposes. Similarly, he had even contemplated sharing his notes with Gitta Sereny to aid in her research for her own study of Speer (Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Knopf, 1995). However, an uncomfortable face-to-face encounter with Sereny, whom Fest vividly describes as incensed by his presence during a scheduled interview with Speer, led him to hold onto his notes and use them to write his own biographical account of Hitler's omnipresent architect.

In the notes of his conversations with Speer, Fest portrays his protagonist as a vain individual who continually worried about how the world would perceive him, despite his complicity in the crimes of National Socialism. As the publisher Siedler concluded, “Speer clearly wants to be first, even among sinners” (p. 171). Indeed, Fest noted that, for Speer, the image passed “down to posterity” was “a matter of life and death” (p. 11). Yet despite Fest's best efforts, his notes reveal that Speer continually avoided linking himself directly to the persecution of Jews and their murder in the Holocaust. For example, pushed by Fest to discuss his reaction to the Reichskristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938, Speer could recall only that he “passed by the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse” (p. 86). Speer met with anger and stubbornness such attempts to recall similar past experiences. It seemed he could remember only cursory details of catastrophic events. Despite repeated questioning, Speer also refused to admit that he had clear knowledge of the systematic murders taking place in the concentration and death camps. However, Speer did admit that the mood of the times had infected most of the leading Nazis with a social numbness that enabled them to attach “virtually no importance to life” (p. 148).

Though Speer was reluctant to address his knowledge and participation in the Holocaust, he willingly discussed his relationship with Hitler and the inner circle of National Socialist leadership. At first, Speer tried to help Fest understand how he could have been so attracted to Hitler. According to Fest, Speer confided: “I'd like to know which ambitious young man still under thirty would not have taken seriously such a mark of favor [receiving architectural contracts] from the most powerful man in the country. A world at my feet. . . . Who would not have felt dizzy at the thought! It was not long before I was head over heels in love with Hitler” (p. 19). Despite this “love,” Speer admitted that by March 1944 he had become aware of Hitler's weaknesses and ordinariness. Similarly, Speer offered Fest ample gossip about Hitler's mundane personal life. Still, throughout the notes, Speer never seemed to reveal that he didn't admire Hitler. For example, Speer insisted that “Hitler had wanted to go down in history more as a patron of the arts than as a military commander” (p. 26). Speer also argued with Fest that “the dominant picture of Hitler today is therefore completely distorted. . . . It derives mainly from the last few years of the war and represents him as a demonic monster. . . . In reality, Hitler was a mixture of energy and eerie enchantment” (p. 62). Ultimately, Speer refused to view Hitler as a monster. For example, he all but rejected the view that Hitler had anything to do with Minister of Armaments and Munitions Fritz Todt's death in a plane crash after the minister questioned Hitler's war strategy. Similarly, Speer saw Hitler's scorched-earth policy toward the end of the Third Reich as a negative consequence of the drugs he was receiving from Dr. Theo Morell. Speer even rhetorically asked why Hitler had never given him a potassium cyanide capsule that he had “so freely handed out on all sides.” If Speer knew Hitler's motives for such conduct he reasoned that “he would also have an answer to the question about ‘Hitler's real feelings’ for him” (p. 173). In the end Fest concludes that Speer's need to reflect upon this question, which seemed so problematic to him, revealed Speer's attachment to Hitler.

Throughout his notes, Fest shows that he continually pushed Speer to deal frankly with his past. Much too often this resulted in Speer's silence or retort, “My dear Herr Fest . . . you should not keep asking me such unanswerable questions” (p. 192). Rather than deal with every aspect of his past, especially those related to criminal activity, Fest portrayed Speer as a genuine escapist who actually believed he could fly to a place such as Greenland and hide out a short time until everyone had forgotten about the Nazis and his personal role in this criminal regime. As Fest recorded, even Hitler in February or March 1945 surprisingly told Speer to drop the fantasy and forget his plans to transform and beautify German cities. Despite such challenges, Fest's notes reveal that Speer never fully dealt publicly with the entirety of his past. Such coarsened dereliction invited Fest to reflect and ask: “Can someone like Speer understand at all what he has perpetrated?” (p. 189).

Fest's notes are unable to answer this question completely. However, they do reveal how challenging a task it was for Fest and Siedler to push Speer to battle with his own inner demons in an effort to get at the truth. It seemed Speer's oral evasions had become verbal equivalents of his own moral vacuity. Still, those who know little about Speer and Nazi Germany would be better served to read Fest's biography for a more satisfying chronological and narrative account of this period.