title: Albert Speer: Conversations with Hitler's Architect
author:  Joachim C. Fest 
description: "Of all the biographers and writers on the Third Reich, JoachimFest was not only good at his craft, but also had the good fortuneto be invited to act, as her describes it, as 'interrogatingeditor' for the best selling autobiography of Albert Speer. What hehas done is to create the literary equivalent of a fly-on-the-walldocumentary." <br /><b><i>The Spokesman</i></b>
zlib_text: J
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  THE
  FINAL
  VERDICT
  OACHIM FEST
  I
  thor
  of HITLER
  
  $30.00
  iimm
  By the celebrated historian antTSu
  Hitler, a fascinating portrait of one of the
  most intriguing men in Nazi Germany
  LBERT SPEER
  s a great enigma,
  ftocre architect when
  Itler came to power in 1933, he was
  m designing the Third Reich's most important
  buildings, developing grandiose plans to turn
  i
  Berlin into "Cermania, capital of the world," and
  stage-managing the Nazi Party's Nuremberg
  rallies. In 1942 Hitler appointed him Armaments
  Minister and he quadrupled production, an aston-
  ishing achievement that kept the German Army in
  the field and prolonged the war.
  i
  Yet Speer's life was full of contradictions. The
  only member of the Nazi elite with whom Hitler
  developed more than a purely functional relation-
  ship (he has even been called "Hitler's unrequited
  love"), Speer was always an outsider in Hitler's
  inner circle. He saw himself as an artist, above the
  crass power struggles of the roughnecks around
  him, but his enormous