Steeped in controversy and tainted by his legacy as Hitler's personal architect and close friend, Albert Speer is a difficult historical figure to portray and to pinpoint. Gitta Sereny explores the life and the mind of this complex man with brilliant insight, historical awareness, and sensitivity, as she examines the surprising moral conflicts that Speer faced later in his life, especially after the Nuremberg trials. As the only member of Hitler's inner circle to be spared from the death penalty, Speer had ample time before his death in 1981 to reflect on his role in Nazi atrocities. Although Speer ostensibly never killed a soul, nor did he outwardly perform any act of violence or hatred, he nevertheless supported and loved the man who ordered the brutal deaths of millions of Jews as well as Catholics, gypsies, and homosexuals. Fascinated by this period in history because of her first-hand experiences during the war as a Hungarian national, author Gitta Sereny satisfied her curiosity by attending the Nuremberg trials. It was there that she first saw the mysterious, behind-the-scenes figure of Albert Speer. It wasn't until years later that Sereny amassed the courage and material resources required to conduct a thorough investigation into this man's life and times. Sereny singled out Speer as a subject for this biography because of a combination of circumstance and the uniqueness of Speer's psychology. As one of the only Nazi bigwigs to later question the morality of Hitler's mission and to accept...

With Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, Sereny shows that an investigation into one man's psyche can perhaps lend insight into how Nazism grew into such an overwhelming, indomitable force in Germany and how Hitler was able to charm, influence, and control an entire nation.
One of the strengths of the biography is the quality of its source material: the author did not conduct her research in the confines of musty libraries but rather was able to live periodically with the Speer family in the Bavarian Alps. Her relationship with Albert and his wife Margarete became nothing short of intimate, as the couple divulge secrets, stories, and confessions about their past. Furthermore, over the course of an entire decade, Sereny obtained pertinent historical documents as well as personal anecdotes relevant to writing this 770-plus page tome. His Battle With Truth is filled with stories, documentary evidence, hard facts, and personal impressions that when pieced together form a fascinating mosaic of Albert Speer.

Sereny humanizes Speer in a way that most authors could not do, given the atrocities of wartime Germany and the natural inclination to shy away from seeming sympathetic in any way. Yet Sereny does not offer compassion or justification for Speer's role in Hitler's schemes. By humanizing Speer, Sereny enables her audience to view history more realistically, with more willingness to acknowledge that it was indeed human nature and human beings that comprised the Nazi party, and not alien men. To acknowledge that history can easily repeat itself without such an understanding, Sereny bravely delves into the nuances of Speer's humanity. The size of the book reflects the complexity of Sereney's research: her stance is remarkably neutral; she denounces the mass murder and systematic slaughter of innocent Jews while she strives to know how Hitler was able to amass the manpower required to build the concentration camps. She criticizes the blind faith with which men like Speer followed the Furer but still manages to keep herself out of her writing; she does not buckle under the pressure of writing about utter evil.

The purpose of this biography is not to offer another…