Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2019/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

Albert Speer, the German Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942 to 1945, is a much mythologised figure. Until recently, he was regarded as near-genius and a "good Nazi" who had repented his crimes. Today, he's often regarded as a brutal and not particularly competent technocrat who should have been executed after the war. This biography by the British-Canadian historian Martin Kitchen adds more weight to the case against Speer.

Kitchen takes a dispassionate, but ultimately devastating, approach to his subject. The early chapters deal with Speer's career as a mediocre architect who succeeded due to his political connections. He then turns to Speer's role in the grotesque planned rebuilding of Berlin as Germania in which he demonstrates that as head of the authority in charge of the project Speer forced thousands of Jews out of their homes in the full knowledge that they would then be sent to their deaths. The assessment of Speer's role as Minister of Armaments and War Production is fair: Kitchen notes that Speer was generally successful in increasing production, but used misleading statistics to exaggerate this. Kitchen also makes Speer's central role in the Nazis' use of forced labour clear, and demonstrates both that he was well aware of the Holocaust and that his ministry played an important role in building the concentration camps. Importantly, Kitchen demolishes the claim that Speer prevented Hitler from destroying German industry in 1945 by demonstrating that the order to do so was largely being ignored and was soon rescinded by Hitler anyway. The coverage of Speer's post-war life is probably overly detailed, but succeeds in explaining how the myths he encouraged about his role in the war gained credence but later fell apart.

Despite these strengths, I found the book to be somewhat frustrating. While it weighs in at 370 pages, it felt a bit too short - lots of interesting topics are touched on but never properly discussed (for instance, Kitchen notes that Speer was essentially a dilettante of a minister, but the impact of this isn't fully explained, and the role of his ministry in the Holocaust should have been discussed in greater detail). Kitchen also makes the important point that Speer kept German industry churning out inferior or ill-conceived weapons as a means of keeping production statistics up, but doesn't really discuss this issue. Reducing the coverage of Speer's post-war life could have freed up some room to cover these issues, and resulted in a much stronger work. Nevertheless, this is a very useful addition to the literature on Nazi Germany's leadership and industrial war effort.

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Various military fiction and non-fiction works