Spandau: The Secret Diaries

Albert Speer – 1975

“December 3, 1963:  The monotony of my days can scarcely be conveyed in these notes.  The forever unchanging sameness of more than six thousand days cannot be recorded.  A great poet might possibly be able to express the numbing evenness, the emptiness and helplessness, in short the intangible horror of imprisonment.  Compared to what should be said, the diary remains nothing but a catalogue, usually of trivialities.”

Albert Speer was an idealistic German architect when he was seduced by Hitler and Third Reich in the 1930s and – thanks to his pragmatic nature – gradually rose to the rank of Armaments Minister, a post he held through the end of World War II.  At the Nuremberg trials, he was alone among the top surviving Nazi leadership in accepting personal responsibility for his actions and throwing himself at the mercy of the court.  Most of the former Reich leaders who were defiant ended up being executed, but Speer, with a few others, were sentenced to lengthy terms in Spandau prison.  Biographers and historians have due skepticism about Speer’s humility in court and in his writings and public statements, seeing him as a calculating opportunist who seized on a plan to not only save his life but rehabilitate his reputation.  Whether or not that is the case, (and it may not be necessary to come to a decision on the issue), Speer’s prison diaries are an overwhelmingly poignant portrait of a man’s struggles to remain sane and preserve some kind of human dignity under the harshest of circumstances and the heaviest guilt.  Forbidden to keep just such a diary, Speer squirreled away bits of newsprint and toilet paper to use for his notes.  He often had to destroy his growing memoirs when discovery was imminent; it’s truly remarkable than enough survived upon which to base two rather hefty books.  Speer came out of prison in 1966 and immediately started work on the highly insightful and dramatic Inside the Third Reich (1969).  Whereas that book, as an autobiography, is vulnerable to its hero’s need to portray himself in the best light possible, Spandau feels less like a whitewash job since Speer was so removed from the political and legal battles that made him famous.  Regardless of his inner feelings about the Holocaust or his level of honesty about the use of slave labor and other atrocities of which he must have been aware, his diaries reveal him to be a man of culture and sensitivity who – both when at the height of power and isolated for years with a handful of fellow prisoners – had to suppress and compromise his views in order to get along with brutes, sadists and demagogues.  According to Speer, none of the Nazi leadership had any appreciation for art, not even Hitler himself, who had abandoned a youthful career as a painter; which of course is borne out by Nazi Germany’s infamous expulsion of nearly all of its best artists, scientists and philosophers.  The tragedy of Speer’s life is that his failure to resist and reject the Nazis only helped them prosper and ultimately put him in prison for half of his adult life where all hope for a career in the arts was lost for good.  Speer describes how he and the other convicts interacted with each other, and the almost comical degree in which the prison was jointly managed, amid Cold War tensions, by British, American, Russian and French military police.  One of the most striking portraits in the book is that of Rudolf Hess, the former Deputy Fuhrer and confidante of Hitler who appears to have lost his senses at some point and made a solo flight to England during the war in an attempt to negotiate an armistice with Winston Churchill personally, and was subsequently kept locked up until his war crimes trial.  His eccentricity only worsened in captivity, and the other prisoners came to regard him as mad.  Hess was the only Nuremberg defendant to receive a life sentence, which meant that when Speer was freed in 1966, Hess remained alone in Spandau prison, still guarded by rotating sets of soldiers from the four Allied nations, until his death in 1987 at the age of 93.  Speer describes with severe introspection his bouts of depression and despondency at his predicament, alternately conscious of how much he deserves his punishment and adamant that no human being should suffer such cruelty.  Aside from his notes that document daily minutiae as well as bits of news that filter in from the outside world, there are also many drawings in the book, sometimes of fantastic landscapes and personal memories, and sometimes of grand architectural projects he might have built if he’d abandoned Hitler instead of helping him.  Speer spent his post-prison years writing and submitting to many interviews in which he condemned the crimes of the Third Reich.  His true motives then or during the war may never be known for certain, but Spandau: The Secret Diaries is nevertheless a powerful exposé on the best and worst of human nature, the strength of will required to avoid regressing into a feral mentality when cut off from society, the impossibility of atoning for truly evil deeds, and the punishment that awaits both individuals and nations when they thoughtlessly toss aside art and ethics in favor of political stridency.