Albert Speer

Awarded the NDR Culture Non-Fiction Prize – meticulously researched and compellingly narrated. In 1931, Albert Speer joined the NSDAP and became one of Hitler's closest confidants. In 1942, he became Minister of Armaments and organized the "total war" like a machinery of destruction. Nevertheless, after the war, he claimed he had never been a Nazi – a legend that the renowned contemporary historian Magnus Brechtken impressively deconstructs. Based on years of research and many previously unknown sources, he also describes how millions of Germans eagerly adopted Speer's fables of the supposedly apolitical technician to rationalize their own past, and how intellectuals like Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler supported this legend-making. The astonishing biography of a manipulative figure – and at the same time, a lesson in the German approach to its own history.