Playboy Interview: Albert Speer

a candid conversation with the best-selling author of "inside the third reich," hitler's closest confidant and second-in-command

At the stroke of midnight on September 30, 1966, the giant iron gates of Berlin's Spandau prison creaked open and a tall, silver-haired man walked uncertainly out into the glare of flashbulbs and TV floodlights. Prisoner number five of the four-power-administered penitentiary greeted his wife without visible emotion, shook hands cordially with the governor of the Spandau district and spoke briefly to the press, first in German and then in fluent French and English. "My sentence was just," he said quietly. "We were treated correctly and properly the whole time. I have no complaints." He turned and walked with his wife to a waiting car. Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's executive secretary, now 77, lay inside alone in his cell--Spandau's only remaining prisoner--as Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, friend and second-in-command throughout World War Two, sped off to freedom after 20 years' imprisonment.

There were many who felt that his sentence had been too lenient. It has been estimated that Speer, as Hitler's gifted minister of armaments and war production, was almost singlehandedly responsible for prolonging the Nazi war effort by almost two years. In the spring of 1944, the London Observer wrote, "Speer is ... more important for Germany today than Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels or the generals. They all have, in a way, become the ... auxiliaries of the man who actually directs the giant power machine."

After Germany's unconditional surrender, Speer was arrested by the Allies and tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, along with 21 other surviving Nazi leaders. He was charged with having brought more than 5,000,000 slave laborers to the Reich, "many of them under terrible conditions of cruelty and suffering." To the fury of his codefendants, the opposition of his own lawyer and the surprise of the judges, Speer accepted full responsibility for the most telling count against him: the forced-labor charges. On September 30, 1946, he was found not guilty on two counts of the indictment relating to conspiracy to initiate aggressive war, but was convicted on crimes-against-humanity charges, although the court took note of such extenuating circumstances as his efforts to provide better food, clothing and housing for the forced laborers and his defiance of Hitler in the last year of the war. Overriding Russian demands for the death penalty, the court sentenced Speer to 20 years' imprisonment and he was transported to Spandau prison.

He settled down to the harsh regimen of prison life with surprising adaptability; but as the years dragged on and his children grew older, Speer began to become concerned about their assessment of his role in the Third Reich. Would they despise him as a mass murderer--or would a sense of misplaced loyalty pervert their filial devotion into neo-Nazi political sympathies? Speer realized that he must somehow try to explain to them why and how he had become involved with Hitler and the Nazi movement, and in greater length and detail than he was permitted in his two single-page monthly letters. That need to explain--if not to justify--was the origin of his memoirs. As he wrote successive installments over the long years of imprisonment, Speer's own thinking was altered in subtle but pervasive ways. His only escape was through reading, and he began to pore over volumes of history, philosophy, theology, psychology and sociology. "In 1945, my book would have been different," he says now. "I was only technically educated. But in Spandau, I read Freud, Jung, Adler, Barth, Buber. I was another man in 1966 from the man I was in 1945."

When the gates of Spandau swung open to that other man in 1966, he had already written the first draft of his memoirs, over 2000 manuscript pages. Originally, he had designed them solely as a personal testament to his children but as the final form of the manuscript took shape in the year following his release, he came to feel that others besides his family could benefit from his experiences. He talked it over with each of his children, "since they would have to live with it," and delegated to them veto power over publication. But all agreed that Speer's memoirs should see print.

Upon publication in Germany, the book was an instant best seller and has already sold over 200,000 copies in the German edition. Rapidly translated into a dozen languages, "Inside the Third Reich" has soared to the top of the bestseller lists in the United States, England and western Europe and precipitated both lavish critical praise and bitter controversy. Writing in The Nation, Lincoln Kirstein predicted that "Inside the Third Reich" "may, in its somber logic, be the prose masterpiece from World War Two," and in a review in The Wall Street Journal, critic Frank Gannon suggested that, "At its deepest level," Speer's memoirs define "20th Century Western man's dilemma and potential in a way that Saint Augustine and Rousseau did for their own times when they wrote their confessions ... a staggering and monumental book." And Thomas Mann's son Golo, in a German review praising Speer's honesty in confronting his own guilt, declared: "Speer consecrated himself to self-accusation as he had consecrated himself to serving Hitler; such a man does not do things by halves."

But while no critics doubted the intensity of Speer's mea culpas, a few reviewers challenged their integrity. According to this view, Speer's acceptance of personal responsibility for the crimes of the Reich is more propaganda than penitence, a cynical device to disarm his critics and justify both himself and the majority of Germans who supported Hitler. In a devastating essay in The New York Review of Books, historian Geoffrey Barraclough not only cast doubt on the sincerity of Speer's repentance but also accused him of doctoring the statistics of his own ministry in order to put "the whole story of German war production in a falsely dramatic light." Barraclough warns against the growth of what he terms the "Speer legend," fostered by uncritical book reviewers and savants ignorant of the realities of the Third Reich. "The picture the Speer legend presents," he concludes, "both of Speer himself and of the regime he served, is a distorted picture."

To evaluate the origins and outlines of the Speer legend, and to probe the complexities and contradictions of Speer's own character, Playboy sent Eric Norden to interview the 66-year-old ex--Reich minister in his pleasant timbered villa on a wooded hill overlooking the Neckar River, three miles from the picturesque university town of Heidelberg. Norden writes of their meeting:

"Speer greeted me amiably and escorted me into the richly furnished living room of his spacious home. He was still handsome in a distinguished, company-director manner, and his beetling black eyebrows reminded me of the younger man I had seen in photographs strolling through occupied Paris with his friend and patron, Adolf Hitler. As we sat over Scotch and sodas by a roaring fire, snow began to fall lightly outside and his three-year-old Saint Bernard, Bello, snored contentedly at her master's feet as Speer's attractive wife, Margarethe, served us heaping plates of home-baked cakes and rich German pastries.

"The atmosphere was so relaxed and gemütlich that, for a moment, I forgot I was speaking to the man who throughout the Second World War had stood second in the Third Reich only to Adolf Hitler, the man whose organizational talents and energies had contributed immeasurably to the death and suffering of millions. He appeared just another upper-middle-class German fond of playing the country squire on his escapes from the board room. As we talked, two of his grandchildren, pig-tailed little Kinder of three and four, played noisily in an adjoining room, and Speer spread his hands helplessly and shrugged in the gesture of harassed but indulgent grandparents everywhere.

"For six weeks, I had studied this man, poring over his book and published interviews, as well as the voluminous reviews and polemical articles in the American and European press. But as I leaned forward to switch on the tape recorder, I felt no closer to the real man behind the public façade than I ever had. I had been frustrated throughout my research by a certain vague opacity, an insubstantiality, about Speer; and as we began talking, I experienced some of the same doubts I had had while reading his book and studying his published statements: As forthright as he appeared on the surface, there seemed to me to be a veil drawn between him and the truth.

"I suspected, as some reviewers had, that the litany of his self-recrimination was in itself an evasion of ultimate responsibility. Now, as I began the interview--which was to extend into almost ten days of relentless day-and-night question-and-answer sessions, ending with both Speer and myself on the brink of exhaustion--this uneasiness persisted, intensified at first by his curiously detached manner. As my interrogations proceeded late into that night and resumed over breakfast the next morning, I began to realize that what disturbed me most about Speer was his tranquillity, the way in which he could accuse himself of terrible crimes in the same tone he would use to offer me a piece of Apfel Torte.

"But as I listened to Speer recount the terrors and triumphs of the Third Reich in German and the fluent English he learned in Spandau, as I saw the patient concern with which he tried to express and explain himself and his era in the course of our tiring sessions, I realized that this interview and all his other confrontations with press and public were part of the burden he bore, part of his penance--way stations to a salvation he himself recognized as unattainable." Norden began the interview by asking Speer about the harsh judgment of his critics.

[Q] Playboy: Critical acclaim for Inside the Third Reich has not been universal. Rebecca West, dismissing the book as a cynical whitewash, brands you a "repulsive criminal," and historian Gudrun Tempel writes that "Speer may easily have been as brutal, as ruthlessly ambitious and almost as sick as Hitler ... one puts his book away with a greater fear of men like him than of any Hitler." How would you respond to such critics?

[A] Speer: Perhaps they are right. After what I have done, it is not for me to call them wrong. But I think many reviewers, including those who liked the book, miss the point when they place their emphasis on me as an individual. My guilt can never be erased, nor should it be, but that guilt is only the frame for a larger picture. I wrote the memoirs to describe and explain what happened from 1933 to 1945 and to warn people so that it will not happen again, in Germany or anywhere else. I suppose that in a personal sense, it was also an attempt to understand myself, to see how and why I could have been a part of such things. But so many people seem to expect me to offer justifications for what I did. I cannot. There is no apology or excuse I can ever make. The blood is on my hands. I have not tried to wash it off--only to see it.

[Q] Playboy: At Nuremberg, you accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. But did you then, and do you now, consider yourself personally responsible?

[A] Speer: Yes, for everything that happened. For the forced labor, obviously--that was directly under my jurisdiction. But I was also responsible for acts about which I knew nothing at the time they were committed, such as the atrocities against the Jews and the mass executions of Russian civilians and prisoners of war. There was no way, legally or morally, for me to evade this guilt. I took that position at the Nuremberg trial, although there was a great temptation to try to save my life by mitigating guilt, by offering excuses, by blaming others, by claiming I was only obeying orders. But whenever I wavered, I would think of the mass of evidence presented before the tribunal--the photographs and testimony and documents about what had happened. In particular, there was one photograph of a Jewish family going to its death, a husband with his wife and children being led to the gas chamber. I couldn't rid my mind of that photograph; I would see it in my cell at night. I see it still. It has made a desert of my life. But also, in a strange way, it freed me. When you finally comprehend that you have devoted 15 years of your life to building a graveyard, the only thing left is to accept responsibility for your actions. From that moment of recognition, I felt for the first time in my life a sense of inner calm.

[Q] Playboy: It's strange to hear such compassionate sentiment from the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who interrogated you at Nuremberg, conceded that you were a "civilized, sensitive, intelligent man," but said he failed to comprehend how you could "so long and so faithfully serve, at such close quarters, such vulgar tyranny." Do you have an answer?

[A] Speer: No. I have been living with the question for 25 years and I have found many reasons--but no adequate reply. Of course, for a while, I tried to soothe my conscience with pseudo truths, rationalizations that would make me look better to myself. I tried to persuade myself that, in a totalitarian system such as Nazi Germany, a man's isolation increases as his position rises and he is not aware of crimes committed by underlings. I would tell myself that, in this modern technological age, genocide becomes an assembly-line process, with the number of murdered rising even as the number of murderers decreases, that under such circumstances, it is easy to be ignorant. I argued that in such a system, the mania for secrecy is self-justifying and self-perpetuating and, therefore, I could not be blamed for not knowing what happened. In each of those arguments, there is a considerable measure of objective truth. But in the larger moral sense, they are all lies, evasions of my responsibility as a human being. If I was isolated, I determined the degree of my own isolation. If I was ignorant, I ensured my own ignorance. If I did not see, it was because I did not want to see.

[Q] Playboy: Trevor-Roper writes, "It is this remarkable contrast between perception and blindness, between sensitivity and insensitivity, between moral standards and moral neutrality, which makes Speer psychologically so interesting." And, to some critics, so frightening. What accounted for this moral schizophrenia?

[A] Speer: The answer is not pleasant for me to contemplate, because it is so banal. I was blinded by the glory and authority of my position, by the great plans I was making, the great events I helped to shape. It was a classic case of hubris, the affliction of the ancient Greeks. I stood at the pinnacle of power and I was intoxicated by the distant landscapes I saw--while all the time a charnel house reeked at my feet. My own pride and ambition made me an accomplice in the extermination of millions of human beings.

[Q] Playboy: An extermination you did nothing to prevent and--by successfully prolonging the war as armaments minister--actually assisted.

[A] Speer: I could not have prevented it short of assassinating Hitler before his "final solution" was under way, and at that time, I had neither the courage nor the vision to do so. But it was my duty to confront it, to assert my individual and collective responsibility for it. That was my greatest failure. From the very beginning, I should have seen where Hitler's hatred of the Jews would lead. But slowly, at first almost imperceptibly, I accommodated myself to his mania. When I first joined the party, I viewed Hitler's anti-Semitism with distaste but thought it was just a cheap propaganda weapon that he would abandon when he came to power. Once Hitler was in office and unleashed the full power of the state against the Jews--and the Socialists and the Communists and the Freemasons and the Jehovah's Witnesses--I just stood aside and said to myself that as long as I did not personally participate, it had nothing to do with me. I believe there is a saying in English--"We first endure, then pity, then embrace." My toleration of the anti-Semitic campaign made me responsible for it.

[Q] Playboy: You've said you weren't an anti-Semite when you joined the party and you write in your book that you had many Jewish friends in your school days. How could you tolerate their persecution?

[A] Speer: By depersonalizing them. The people who were deprived of their jobs, who were hounded from the professions, whose property was confiscated and who were finally dragged off to the concentration camps gradually became abstractions to me, not human beings with families and aspirations and worries and needs like anyone else. It shames me to admit that these people disappeared from my life and my thoughts as if they had never existed. If I had continued to see them as human beings, I could not have remained a Nazi. I did not hate them; I was indifferent to them. My crime was far worse because I was not an anti-Semite.

[Q] Playboy: You never had any qualms of conscience whatever about the treatment of the Jews?

[A] Speer: No. As the anti-Semitic campaign escalated, my conscience was progressively calloused and blunted. Of course, one's conscience does not just cease to exist overnight; it is slowly eroded over the years, eaten away day by day, anesthetized by a multiplicity of little crimes. Things that would have shocked and horrified me in 1934, such as the assassination of opposition leaders, the persecution of the Jews, the incarceration and torture of innocent men in concentration camps, I tolerated as unfortunate excesses in 1935; and things I couldn't have stomached in 1935 were palatable a few years later. This happened in one way or another to all of us in Germany. As the Nazi environment enveloped us, its evils grew invisible--because we were part of them.

[Q] Playboy: How could a man of your intelligence and sensibility allow himself to remain part of so evil a system, however gradually it enveloped you?

[A] Speer: There is, unfortunately, no necessary correlation between intelligence and decency; the genius and the moron are equally susceptible to corruption. Almost 200 years ago, Goethe wrote in Iphigenie auf Tauris that even "the best man" finally "becomes accustomed to cruelty" and "in the end makes a law of that which he despises." As far as sensibility is concerned, I would have been shocked and outraged if I had seen some hoodlum throw a brick through a Jewish store window in 1930. But on the day after Kristallnacht in 1938, the great pogrom in which dozens of synagogues and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were burned and looted, I strolled by the smoldering ruins of a Berlin synagogue, and my only reaction was to be aesthetically offended by the ruins' spilling over onto the Fasanenstrasse. That was all; I was bothered only by the litter. The memory of that day is one of the most painful of my life. What makes it worse is that on Kristallnacht, Hitler crossed a Rubicon; barbarous as his treatment of the Jews had been, I don't think even he had contemplated their physical extermination until then. More was shattered than glass that night.

[Q] Playboy: When was it finally decided to annihilate the Jews?

[A] Speer: I am sure Hitler had it in his mind since Kristallnacht, but I learned from evidence introduced at Nuremberg that the actual decision was made at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, once he knew the war was going to be total, with either absolute victory or absolute defeat at the end. I think that knowledge eliminated the last remaining political and diplomatic restraints and liberated his most terrible instincts. It wasn't a ministerial decision; most of Hitler's government associates, including me, never even knew about it till they were told at the end of the war. Himmler was placed in charge of the extermination program, and his henchmen Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner and Heydrich organized and implemented it. But even within the SS, relatively few people were involved--the top administrators, plus the actual concentration-camp commandants and guards and logistics and transport personnel. I know that many people outside Germany believe that everyone in the country knew of the extermination, but that just wasn't the case, as historians of the period will tell you.

[Q] Playboy: Since Hitler's power was absolute, why did he bother to keep his "final solution" secret--if, in fact, it was as secret as you indicate?

[A] Speer: It was. I think, in a sense, the last residue of humanity in Hitler prevented him from boasting about it to any but his most fanatic and degenerate followers; and then, too, on a more pragmatic level, it's possible he was afraid of the army's reaction if they had learned what was happening. His power was not completely absolute; in the final analysis, he was still dependent on the military. The generals were subservient to Hitler--until the July 20 plot, at any rate--but I doubt if the Wehrmacht could have stomached the horrors of Auschwitz. Despite all the crimes in which it tacitly acquiesced, the army still prided itself on possessing a military code of honor which would have prevented it from accepting the wholesale massacre of unarmed men, women and children. But they didn't know until it was too late--too late for the Jews, too late for all of us. In my own case, I did not know what was happening until 1945, when I learned with horror at Nuremberg precisely what monstrous acts our regime had been committing--a horror that has never left me.

[Q] Playboy: This is the point that has aroused the greatest suspicion among your critics about your integrity. They argue that you were a member of Hitler's inner circle, by your own admission the closest thing to a friend he ever had. You were intimately involved with all aspects of Nazi military and political strategy. How, they ask, can you expect people to believe that you remained ignorant until the end of the war of the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews--an extermination carried out all around you?

[A] Speer: I know this is difficult for many people to believe, but I think that if they really understood the machinations of the Nazi state, they would see how it could happen--and did. You must remember that pervasive interdepartmental rivalries and a fetish for secrecy affected every aspect of the Nazi state; both major policy decisions and relatively innocuous operations were shrouded in deception and evasion. Everything was compartmentalized; there was a bureaucracy even of murder.

[Q] Playboy: But even in a totalitarian state, crimes are committed by people--people with families and friends and neighbors who must have been aware of their activities. The extermination of the Jews was on a huge scale, the most massive genocide in the history of man. How could it have been kept secret?

[A] Speer: Before this century, it would have been impossible. But no longer. This is the true horror of the technological age--that a handful of men, in utmost secrecy, have the power by virtually the push of a button to dispatch millions to their deaths. In my own case, there is no way I can avoid responsibility for the extermination of the Jews. I was as much their executioner as Himmler, because they were carried past me to their deaths and I did not see. It is surprisingly easy to blind your moral eyes. I was like a man following a trail of bloodstained footprints through the snow without realizing someone had been injured.

[Q] Playboy: But in your capacity as minister of armaments, you traveled all over Germany and the occupied territories, inspecting industrial and military facilities. Do you mean to say that you never came across a concentration camp?

[A] Speer: Of course I knew there were camps; everyone knew that. It was what was going on in them we did not know. Beatings, perhaps even torture, we knew the Gestapo to be capable of; but systematic mass slaughter--no, in our worst dreams, we could not conceive the reality of that.

[Q] Playboy: You were in regular contact with Himmler and his top aides, and yet they never let anything slip and you never attempted to question them?

[A] Speer: No. I had a chance to find out in the summer of 1944, when I was visited by one of my old friends, Karl Hanke, the gauleiter, or district governor, of Lower Silesia. Hanke was a fanatic Nazi, but he had some lingering human instincts; I remember that he had come back from the Polish and French fronts and spoken with sympathy and concern about the dead and wounded and maimed on both sides. On this occasion, he came into my office and just slumped down into my green-leather armchair and was silent for a long time. There was a strange expression on his face, and when he finally began to speak, he was quite unlike his normal hearty self. He told me he had just visited a concentration camp in Upper Silesia and he urged me in a faltering voice never, under any circumstances whatsoever, to accept an invitation to inspect that camp. He had seen horrible things there, things he was not allowed to discuss--things he could not bring himself to discuss. I had never seen Hanke in such a state.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do?

[A] Speer: Nothing. There he was, sitting in my office, hinting at things that it was my duty as a minister of the Reich to discover--not to mention my duty as a human being. But I did not question him. I did not question Himmler. I did not question Hitler. I did not speak with any of my friends or acquaintances in the government or party who might have known something: I did not investigate: I did nothing. Hanke, of course, was speaking of Auschwitz. From that point on, I had irrevocably condemned myself. My moral contamination was complete. That moment was very much in my mind when I accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Reich at Nuremberg. It has never left me. Because of my failure at that moment, my utter moral abdication, I still feel directly responsible for Auschwitz in a completely personal sense.

[Q] Playboy: The sins you admit were all of omission--not acting on Kristallnacht, not eliciting the truth about Auschwitz from Hanke. But what would you have done if you had known that 6,000,000 Jewish men, women and children were being exterminated?

[A] Speer: This is a crucial question, and one I have asked myself many times. The answer does not help me to sleep at night. I might have resigned from the government; of that much, at least, I was capable even then. But would I have fought, protested, tried to stop the slaughter, risked my life? In all honesty, I must say I doubt it. Looking back over the decades at the man I was then, I can expect no moral courage from him.

[Q] Playboy: If Hitler had admitted to you that he was annihilating the Jews, what would you have said to him?

[A] Speer: That, too, I have asked myself, and the answer is equally dispiriting. I would have said, "You are killing them? That is insane! I need them to work in our factories." That would have been, I am afraid, my first reaction at the time.

[Q] Playboy: No moral outrage? No revulsion?

[A] Speer: The man who left Spandau was not the same man who entered. That other Speer--I hate to think of him as me, but he is me, of course, my Doppelgänger--would have thought only in terms of efficiency and the war effort. The killing of the Jews would have seemed to me a waste. A crime, perhaps, if I had thought about it abstractly, but first and foremost a waste. I had no thought other than oiling the war machine. Even with blood.

[Q] Playboy: One historian has written that you loved machines more than people. Was he right?

[A] Speer: Yes. That is why I could serve Hitler so long and so faithfully and so blindly. Sometimes I think, in despair, if only I could go back to the beginning and change it all, become a professor of architecture in some small university town. But I can never escape the consequences of that betrayal of my conscience.

[Q] Playboy: What were your original motivations for joining the Nazi Party?

[A] Speer: They were not in themselves base. I sincerely believed that the Nazis offered the only salvation for a Germany torn by social and economic chaos and that it was thus my duty to assist them to come to power. You must remember the conditions in Germany following World War One: inflation followed by deflation and massive unemployment, great human suffering and despair, decadence and moral decay, the apparent disintegration of all our traditional institutions and values. It seemed that the democratic system had hopelessly failed to provide answers for the problems of the nation, and people with a social conscience tended to gravitate to the extremes of either right or left. Some became Nazis, others Communists--often for the very same reasons. The sound and constructive thing would have been to try working within the system to solve the economic crisis. But to the idealistic and impetuous young, that seemed sterile and ineffectual.

[Q] Playboy: When were you first attracted to the Nazis?

[A] Speer: I started out essentially nonpolitical. By the mid-1920s, many people had become politically exhausted, drained and disillusioned, like the hippies of today, with whom I can sympathize. We felt the complex and mechanized world around us was insane, its values distorted and at odds with the realities of the human condition. Such disenchantment can sometimes generate a despairing nihilism, and there are some disturbing parallels between my own time and today. As conditions grew worse and worse, escapism succumbed to political activism and the polarization of left and right grew. Friends, even families, divided on political lines and, increasingly, the center became an untenable position. The political battles of the outside world raged in microcosm throughout the universities.

[A] In 1925, I began my studies at the Institute of Technology in Berlin and became a student of the great architect Professor Heinrich Tessenow, who belonged to the "Ring" school of architects, along with Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. In the summer of 1927, I received my architect's license and began teaching at the Institute. On my salary, I was able to marry the girl I had loved since my childhood and we honeymooned in the Mecklenburg lake district; my wife and I launched our boats in Spandau, 100 yards or so from the prison in which I would spend 20 years of my life. At the Institute, I became Professor Tessenow's assistant.

[A] The Nazis, meanwhile, grew in influence and took control of the school parliament. But at that time, I still could not make up my mind politically. Conditions had become so bad in Germany that I felt drastic measures were required to restructure the entire social and economic system--but I did not know how to translate this disaffection into concrete political action. Then, toward the end of 1930, some of the Nazi students in Tessenow's seminars invited me to attend a rally, where Hitler would address the students of both the Institute and Berlin University. I had hitherto rather halfheartedly resisted their attempts to convert me to National Socialism, but I wanted to hear their leader, so I attended.

[Q] Playboy: Was this the first time you had seen Hitler in person?

[A] Speer: Yes; till then, I had tended to view him as a vulgar, rabble-rousing fanatic in a comic-opera Brownshirt uniform. But that meeting in a dirty, ill-lit beer hall drastically altered my image of him. He entered wearing a well-cut blue suit and after the tumultuous ovation died down, he spoke earnestly, persuasively, almost shyly. His manner was completely sincere, more like a dedicated professor delivering a lecture than a screaming demagog.

[A] Within a few minutes, he had the entire audience in his grip--and by no means was everyone there his supporter. Soon his low-key manner disappeared, his voice rose to a hypnotic pitch and there was a palpable aura of tension and excitement in the hall, a crackling emotional voltage, the kind of supercharged atmosphere I'd encountered before only at dramatic sporting events. Hitler's dynamic presence filled the room, his voice swelled, his eyes transfixed the audience. It was not so much what he said--I hardly remembered afterward--but the mood he cast over the entire hall: It had an almost orgiastic quality.

[A] Hitler always said that the masses are essentially feminine, and his aggressiveness and charisma elicited an almost masochistic surrender and submission in his audience--a form of psychic rape. I believe there may be a tendency of man, perhaps rooted in Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, to surrender himself to the yoke of a stronger personality, and this was certainly true of Hitler's mass meetings. He didn't convince his audiences; he conquered them.

[Q] Playboy: Yourself included.

[A] Speer: Yes. I left that meeting quite overwhelmed. Here, at last, it appeared to me, were hope for the future, imaginative new concepts, new goals to be achieved, a new beginning. Hitler, I thought then, could save Germany, end unemployment, rebuild the economy, rectify the injustices of Versailles, check the Communist threat, give our people a new mission and purpose. The very simplicity with which he approached complex problems both perplexed and impressed me, as did the magic of his rhetoric. I did not translate my ideas into action for several weeks, but my mind was made up that very night. In January 1931, I became member number 474,481 in the National Socialist Party.

[Q] Playboy: What were your duties as a member of the party?

[A] Speer: In the beginning, they were quite light. I was not an ideological firebrand, and I devoted a relatively small percentage of my time to politics. My main preoccupations were my family and my career. In 1932, a reduction in university salaries led me to resign my assistant professorship and we moved to Mannheim, where I set up practice as an architect. My career ambitions stagnated rather rapidly, however. And then commissions began coming from a totally unexpected source--the party.

[Q] Playboy: What brought you to the attention of the Nazi hierarchy?

[A] Speer: While I was in Berlin, I was a courier for the party and, in that capacity, I met Karl Hanke, whom I mentioned earlier; he was then a minor party functionary. When he learned I was an architect, he gave me the modest assignment of redecorating his district headquarters. A few other small commissions followed, but when I left Berlin for Mannheim, Hanke and I lost touch. Then, on January 30, 1933, Von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor in the hope that a strengthened and unified right-wing government might quiet labor and left-wing dissent and stabilize the economy.

[A] In March 1933, immediately after national elections had strengthened Hitler's hand, I received a call from Hanke, asking me to come to Berlin right away, where he introduced me to Dr. Goebbels, a small man with intense, flashing eyes and a pronounced limp from his clubfoot. Goebbels commissioned me to rebuild and redecorate his propaganda ministry, instructing me to begin at once. I left Goebbels and walked through Berlin, thrilled at the prospect of my first major commission. The atmosphere in the city was excited, exhilarating. Everyone realized that Germany had reached her hour of decision. People gathered on street corners to discuss the Führer's latest moves; strangers exchanged Nazi salutes and comradely "Heil Hitlers," storm troopers and military bands paraded through the streets; people proudly flew the swastika flag from their windows.

[A] While all this was going on, of course, the Gestapo and the SS were already poring over their dossiers, preparing to settle accounts for the long years of struggle. Hundreds of thousands of people must have trembled behind shuttered windows and locked doors, waiting to pay the price for their political convictions or racial descent. But of that dark side of events I saw nothing. I knew only that Germany was experiencing a new beginning, and that I was part of it.

[Q] Playboy: Was Goebbels your patron from that point on?

[A] Speer: No, he was shortly replaced by Hitler himself. Once again, Karl Hanke played a pivotal role in my life. He had now risen to the influential position of Goebbels' ministerial secretary, and one day, as I sat in his elegant new office, I noticed on his desk a sketch of decorations for a forthcoming night rally at Tempelhof Field. I was appalled by those drawings. "They look like the decorations for some rifle-club meeting," I told Hanke. He just tossed me the designs and said, "If you can do better, do it." I rushed home and worked through the evening, designing a huge platform backed by three tremendous swastika banners stretched across wooden struts, each one taller than a ten-story building, all illuminated by giant air-raid searchlights. The design was snapped up the next day and I learned that Hitler was delighted with it.

[A] I was subsequently called to Nuremberg, where plans were under way for the next party rally--a particularly important one, because it would mark the first anniversary of the party's coming to power. I designed a free-form giant eagle with a 100-foot wingspread to dominate the Zeppelin Field. The local party leader arranged for me to submit my plans to Rudolf Hess. Hitler's secretary; but when I entered Hess's office with my folio of sketches under one arm, he cut me off before I could speak. "Only the Führer himself can decide this kind of thing," he said, then picked up a telephone and spoke briefly. He hung up and turned to me. "The Führer is in his apartment. I'll have you driven over there." A chauffeur drove me to a middle-class apartment house and led me two flights up and into an anteroom piled with cheap mementos and presents sent to Hitler by his worshipful female followers. An adjutant entered, opened an adjacent door casually and told me to go in. I entered, my knees trembling, and stood before Adolf Hitler, the leader of my country and my party, the man I had admired from afar for three years. He was sitting in an armchair in his shirt sleeves, cleaning a revolver.

[A] "Put the drawings here," he said abruptly, pointing to a table in front of him, barely looking at me. He placed the dismantled gun onto the table and examined my designs closely, but with no comment. My heartbeat seemed to ring in my ears; surely he can hear it, I thought. And then, still without so much as glancing at me, he shoved the sketches back across the table. "Agreed," he said curtly and turned back to his revolver. I left the room in confusion, my pulse racing. I had met my destiny. Looking back, it was significant that he should have been cleaning a gun at the time.

[Q] Playboy: Was that the beginning of your career as Hitler's architect?

[A] Speer: Yes. From that point on, our futures would be linked, but I hardly suspected it at the time. At first, there were no particularly dramatic commissions, although he sent a couple of rush assignments my way, such as redecorating his private office and building modern barracks for workers on his new autobahn. There was nothing grandiose about such assignments, but in the course of completing them, I continued to see Hitler and he often invited me to lunch or dinner with him and his most trusted associates. Imperceptibly, I found myself becoming part of his inner circle.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think he singled you out for such special attention?

[A] Speer: Hitler acted intuitively, whether in choosing associates or determining state policy, and I often thought he night be projecting onto me his own unrealized youthful architectural ambitions. But I am not a mind reader and, to this day, I'm not entirely sure why he related to me so warmly. But whatever the reasons, it was a heady experience for someone of my age to travel in the company of Adolf Hitler. Such a relationship, of course, also ensured my professional success; with the absolute dictator of the German Reich as your patron, there was not likely to be a shortage of commissions.

[A] At that time, the major commissions continued to go to Professor Troost, Hitler's chief architect. But then, on January 21, 1934, after a brief illness, Troost died. Hitler was deeply affected by the loss, and it confirmed his congenital superstition. In October 1933, Troost had laid the cornerstone for the House of German Art, and when he came to strike the traditional hammer blows, the silver hammer broke in two in his hand. On the day of Troost's death, Hitler said to me, visibly moved: "When that hammer shattered, it was an evil omen. The architect was destined to the." I suddenly realized that the silver hammer was now in my hands. I was 28 years old.

[Q] Playboy: Did Hitler appoint you as Troost's successor?

[A] Speer: Not officially, since he employed other architects on a variety of projects, but that's what it amounted to. Shortly after Troost's death, Hitler gave me my first important commission, to replace the jerry-built bleachers on Zeppelin Field, the site of the mass party rallies, with a permanent and more impressive structure. Hitler was delighted with my designs. He placed great emphasis on the Nuremberg rallies, and he considered my stadium a fitting site for those huge demonstrations.

[Q] Playboy: You are generally credited--or blamed--for creating the decor and stage settings that made the mass party rallies so chillingly effective. Do you accept the responsibility for those demagogic mass rallies?

[A] Speer: Oh, yes, although in those days, I did not really understand the larger implications of we the rallies; I was part of the machine by then and no longer questioned its operation. In any case, it was a grueling job. I was responsible for virtually every aspect of these marathon meetings, from building maintenance to lighting and stage setting. My most arduous task was the "choreography" of the rally, drilling the thousands of party members who appeared in parades and paramilitary processions.

[A] We had a particularly vexing problem with the Amtswalter, the lower and middle party functionaries whose new-found power had gone to their bellies as well as to their heads; the sight of several thousand beer paunches wobbling across the parade ground was hardly awe-inspiring. So I designed the rallies so that the Amtswalter would cross the Zeppelin Field in darkness, through a sea of thousands of Nazi banners. I divided the flag-bearers into ten massive columns, forming lanes through which they could march to the speakers' platform. Spotlights illuminated the massed banners, as well as the huge eagle crowning the stadium; and to highlight the effect, I asked Hitler to requisition 130 anti-aircraft searchlights--virtually all the Luftwaffe had at the time. I positioned these around the field at 40-foot intervals, their beams slashing into the night sky, visible up to 25,000 feet, at which point they dissolved into a luminous glow.

[A] The dramatic effect was breath-taking, beyond anything I had anticipated. The floodlit stadium gave the impression of a giant hall ringed by titanic gleaming white pillars, with an occasional cloud floating surrealistically through the majestic wall of light, like a translucent anemone drifting through the sea. British ambassador Neville Henderson wrote later that the effect was like being in a cathedral of ice.

[Q] Playboy: Nuremberg was perhaps history's most impressive example of propaganda through scenic display. Countless young and impressionable Germans must have been first enraptured and then converted by your pageantry--the same young men who a few years later fought and died in Hitler's war. How can you rhapsodize about the beauty of your light shows when their cumulative effect was to lead a generation to its death?

[A] Speer: At the time, I gave no thought to such considerations; I rarely even concerned myself about politics, save in the most perfunctory fashion. I deluded myself that I was an artist and that, as Hitler's architect, I was above politics, whether I was directing party rallies or designing government buildings. This is folly, of course. I was a technician, but a technician of death. It took me many years to see that, however. From the day Troost died in 1934 to the last days of the war, I was completely engrossed in my work and totally under Hitler's domination. He became the center of my life, to the exclusion of my family, my children and my own individuality. I was part of the Nazi juggernaut as it gained momentum and gave no more thought to it than a fish does to the water in which it swims.

[A] I could easily have seen if I had really wanted to, of course, because by 1934, the true nature of the Nazi system had already been indelibly stamped on Germany by two events: On June 30, 1934, in the so-called Roehm Putsch, Hitler bloodily purged the party of his archrival Ernst Roehm and Roehm's radical Brown-shirt followers, along with prominent conservative opposition leaders; and on August second, President von Hindenburg died, clearing the way for Hitler's assumption of absolute dictatorial control.

[A] I was close to Hitler throughout this period, and the emerging pattern should have been clear to me, particularly after the Roehm Putsch, when the Nazis murdered several hundred people, at the very least. Perhaps to justify himself, Hitler stressed the homosexuality of Roehm and his circle and the perverted atmosphere of his headquarters: "In one room, we found two naked boys!" But Roehm's death and the deaths of all the others--old party comrades and conservative democrats alike--had no effect on him whatsoever. To Hitler, the June 30 purge was just a difficult but necessary political move.

[Q] Playboy: Did the bloodiness of the purge repel you?

[A] Speer: No, I hate to admit it did not. Right after the purge, I was assigned to renovate the vice-chancellor's office in Berlin. When I entered Vice-Chancellor Von Papen's office, I saw a large circle of dried blood on the floor of one room where his aide, Herbert von Bose, had been shot to death by the SS. I instantly averted my eyes and from that moment on, I stayed away from the room. But that was the only effect the incident had on me; it was as if I'd drawn a curtain inside my mind, blocking the incident off. All I was concerned with in those days was my ambition to excel as Hitler's architect.

[Q] Playboy: Your ambitions seemed to grow proportionately with the crimes committed by your benefactors.

[A] Speer: Yes, I suppose so. I think from the very beginning Hitler was preparing to entrust me with tasks he had dreamed of undertaking ever since his adolescence. The first time he met my wife, at a state reception, he told her solemnly: "Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for 4000 years." Even then, I had no idea of the megalomaniac scale of his plans, nor of what they heralded for Germany and the rest of Europe.

[Q] Playboy: When did Hitler first broach these plans?

[A] Speer: In the summer of 1936, he called me into his office and abruptly gave me the greatest assignment of my career: Together, we were going to rebuild Berlin as a worthy capital of the Third Reich. The designs for his new Berlin were truly staggering and my execution of them, I was convinced, could make me one of the most famous architects of history. Hitler envisioned a gigantic new capital, renamed Germania, to be simultaneously the seat of his empire and a memorial forever enshrining his memory. The heart of the existing city would be leveled and replaced by a three-mile boulevard, the Prachtallee, or Avenue of Splendor, twice the width and three times the length of the Champs Elysées, stretching from the Brandenburg Gate to the vital center of the whole complex, the Kuppelhalle, a gigantic domed assembly hall four times the size of the Capitol building in Washington, with a capacity of 180,000 people.

[A] Leading to the assembly hall would be a huge triumphal arch 400 feet high, dwarfing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, to be surrounded by a tremendous stadium holding 400,000 people, plus a massive soldiers' hall to house the high command of the Wehrmacht, new headquarters for the foreign ministry, the party and the Luftwaffe, a new parliament building for his rubber-stamp Reichstag and a Cyclopean fortified Führer's palace, occupying 22,000,000 square feet, with vast reception halls, sprawling gardens and a dining hall capable of accommodating several thousand people.

[A] Beside Hitler's projected palace complex, even the largest such edifice in history, Nero's fabled Golden House, occupying 11,000,000 square feet, dwindled into insignificance. Hitler believed that as centuries passed, his huge domed assembly hall would acquire great holy significance and become a hallowed shrine as important to National Socialism as St. Peter's in Rome is to Roman Catholicism. Such cultism was at the root of the entire plan. He envisioned his new capital as an eternal altar to his greatness and a means of perpetuating his ideology. Like the ancient Pharaohs, he planned to use stone to ensure his own immortality. Germania would not be a city but a sarcophagus.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any lingering regrets that those plans never came to fruition?

[A] Speer: I must admit that, despite their absurdity and madness, I still find it difficult to completely free myself of the power they exerted over me for so many years. Intellectually, I can now despise them--but on a deeper level, they still have a hold on me. Perhaps, apart from everything else, that is one reason why I so deeply hate Hitler: He not only enabled me to destroy my conscience, he also drained and perverted the creative energies of my youth.

[A] But even though those plans still have a visceral fascination for me, I am grateful that they never came into being, because I can see now, as I never could then, that they were profoundly immoral in conception. Their proportions were alien, inhuman, reflecting the coldness and inhumanity of the Nazi system. "I am building for eternity," Hitler used to tell me, and that was true. But he was never building for people. The size and scale of his monuments were a prophetic symbol of his plans for world domination, and the giant metropolis he envisaged could only serve as the heart of a conquered and enslaved empire. One day in the summer of 1939, we were standing together over the wooden models when Hitler pointed down at the gold German eagle with a swastika in its talons, which would crown the top of the Kuppelhalle dome. "That has to be changed," he said intensely. On his instructions, I altered the design so that the eagle held a globe clutched in its claws. Two months later, World War Two broke out.

[Q] Playboy: When did Hitler first confide his plans for war to you?

[A] Speer: Well, he never said in so many words, "Speer, I am planning a world war." But this was clear from his designs for Berlin; and over the years, he never troubled to hide his plans for conquest from his circle of intimates. But I don't think Hitler ever envisioned a general war; he thought the West was so decadent that he could achieve his territorial aspirations piecemeal, seizing one nation at a time, virtually without opposition, until he controlled all of Europe. This had been his intention ever since his remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, in clear violation of the Treaty of Locarno, when England and France proved weak and irresolute.

[A] And from that point, too, a subtle change took place in him; he must have understood what an intense drama his life had become, realized that in the game he was playing, the stakes were the life or death of entire nations and the destiny of the world. A few months after his victory in the Rhineland, I was sitting with Hitler in his Berchtesgaden house at twilight, watching the sun fall behind the mountain peaks. He looked out the window silently for some time and then said to me softly, "There are two possibilities for me: to win through with all my plans--or to fail. If I win, I shall be one of the greatest men in history. If I fail, I shall be condemned, despised, damned." Before I could say anything, he rose abruptly and left, apparently embarrassed to have revealed his innermost thoughts and doubts in such a manner.

[Q] Playboy: What was his life style at Berchtesgaden?

[A] Speer: Relatively modest. This was, after all, his escape from Berlin, and he dispensed with the power and pomp of his official role. His associates, like Goering and Martin Bormann, were always trying to outdo one another with splendid showpiece homes, but Hitler lived unostentatiously in his small house, the Berghof, a typical country lodge decorated in the comfortable ersatz-peasant style cherished by the petit bourgeois. The lunches and dinners he hosted were informal affairs, with simple, hearty food--no gourmet fare such as graced the tables of Goering and the other Nazi potentates.

[Q] Playboy: We've read that Hitler was a vegetarian.

[A] Speer: He was, in addition to neither drinking nor smoking. He had a special vegetarian chef prepare his dishes. He loved animals and thought their wholesale slaughter for our tables was cruel and barbaric--the same man who could order millions to their deaths without a flicker of pity! But he wasn't a fanatic about his vegetarianism and didn't try to impose his tastes on the rest of us, although he would occasionally chide us as "carrion eaters."

[A] After dinner, the company always followed Hitler into the salon, which had been fitted out as a film-projection room. Until the war, when the practice was discontinued. Hitler always saw one or two movies every evening, generally romantic films, historic spectaculars and light musical comedies, particularly those with a lot of leggy chorus girls. Hitler suffered from insomnia and would not let us go until two or three in the morning, when we would finally stagger gratefully off to our own beds to get enough sleep to face another day of stultifying boredom.

[Q] Playboy: Hitler didn't seem to maintain a very heavy work schedule.

[A] Speer: No, his schedule, in Berlin as well as on the Obersalzberg, was so chaotic that it was a miracle he could cope with any of his pressing affairs as head of state. The only really systematic thing about Hitler's regimen was the way he squandered his time. Of course, this was a key to Hitler's character--he was always a bohemian and his artistic temperament was incompatible with planned, disciplined work.

[A] He was a gifted amateur and this dilettantism was both his strength and his weakness. He had never mastered any profession; he was completely self-taught, unfettered by the rigors of a formal specialized education, and his sharp natural intelligence sometimes discovered short cuts and original solutions to problems that a specialist would never have seen. And however dilatory his work patterns, Hitler had the gift of an almost hypnotic power over people. This attracted not only impressionable fanatics but also talented administrators and, in the beginning, at least, he knew how to delegate authority to such able men.

[Q] Playboy: Would any of Hitler's associates dare tell him to his face when he was mistaken?

[A] Speer: Seldom, if ever. And this was one of the great weaknesses of Hitler's regime. I believe this is a danger confronting every man who holds power, whether he is the head of a company or the ruler of a nation. The competition for favor breeds servility and hypocrisy. The leader finds himself cut off from all constructive criticism or discussion of new policies and surrounded by a coterie of spineless toadies.

[Q] Playboy: Was there much infighting among Hitler's entourage?

[A] Speer: Hitler's circle was like a Byzantine court, seething with intrigue and jealousy and betrayal. The Third Reich was less a monolithic state than a network of mutually warring bureaucracies, with Hitler's satraps staking out their own independent spheres of influence and then unscrupulously seeking to extend them--often at the expense of the national interest.

[Q] Playboy: Were Hitler's courtiers corrupt as well as ambitious?

[A] Speer: Most of them would have made their American contemporary Al Capone look like a benign philanthropist. From the moment they assumed power and got their hands on the state treasury, they lined their own pockets, amassing personal fortunes, profiteering from government contracts, building huge palaces and country villas with public funds, indulging in a lavish life style more suited to the Borgias than to self-styled revolutionaries. The rot was all-pervasive: like a fish, the Nazi government decayed from the head down.

[Q] Playboy: Which Nazi leader was the most corrupt?

[A] Speer: I would have to accord that dubious accolade to Goering. He was a thief on the grand scale, looting the museums and art collections of Europe for his own private hoards, requisitioning state funds to build luxurious homes, expropriating state land for his vast hunting preserves, extorting huge bribes from leading industrialists to support his estates and palaces and the hundreds of servants who staffed them. To give the devil his due, Goering had great personal charm, and also a very keen intellect. He could be a most engaging bandit. In a sense, he was born out of his time--he was a true condottiere, a soldier of fortune, totally amoral, with no ideology beyond personal advancement. His state secretary told me at Nuremberg, "Goering was the last of the Renaissance princes," and he was right.

[Q] Playboy: Were you on good personal terms with Goering?

[A] Speer: Yes, we got along quite well. He frequently invited me out to Karinhall, his grand hunting estate north of Berlin, where he lived like a feudal lord. I remember driving out one night in 1942 after a phone call from Goering asking me to come immediately on a matter of urgent national interest. When I arrived, he greeted me, his corpulent body draped in an emerald-velvet dressing gown with a giant ruby brooch pinned to the satin lapel, his face covered by a thick patina of rouge, his fingernails lacquered a bright red. He told me he had a brilliant idea: In view of the desperate steel shortage, why didn't we build our locomotives out of concrete? I just stared at him. Of course, he went on eagerly, extracting a handful of uncut diamonds and rubies from his pocket and rolling them nervously through his fingers, concrete locomotives obviously wouldn't last as long as steel ones, but we could compensate for this by manufacturing more of them. I looked at him for a moment, sighed and said nothing. He kept elaborating on this new brain storm as he escorted me around Karinhall, expansively pointing out the latest artworks he had "liberated" from occupied France, Italy, the Netherlands and Russia, and he was still rambling on about it when I pleaded pressing business and left.

[A] Goering loved to revel in his illicit riches and it was a ritual with him to show his guests through his cellars, where some of the world's most priceless art treasures were stored. But it was the money and power his collection represented that thrilled him, not its beauty, and he derived the same pleasure from showing guests his huge stock of confiscated French soaps and perfumes or his vulgarly impressive hoards of diamonds, rubies and emeralds, worth millions of dollars. By the end of the war, Goering must have been the richest man in Germany. Perhaps that's why he thought up the weird idea of concrete locomotives--to carry more of his loot! Of course, by that time, Goering was no longer completely rational; his mental and physical energies had been sapped by his addiction to heroin.

[Q] Playboy: He was a drug addict, too?

[A] Speer: Yes, he'd been addicted since the Twenties. But his deterioration was gradual. When the Nazis first came to power, he demonstrated great energy and ability; but by the beginning of the war, his drug habit dominated him completely and he began to lose his grip. After his Luftwaffe had been cleared from English skies in the Battle of Britain, he became completely incapacitated by drugs, stagnating in a near-comatose state of narcotic stupor. Every once in a while, he would burst out of his torpor with an impressive display of euphoric energy, but it never lasted long. As the bad news got worse, Goering retreated more and more into his drug-induced womb, bestirring himself only to engage in an intrigue against his perennial rival, Martin Bormann.

[Q] Playboy: There have been reports that not only Bormann but Hitler as well survived the war and escaped to South America. Do you believe either of them could still be alive?

[A] Speer: Well, I haven't received any postcards. Hitler certainly did not escape; the proofs of his death are irrefutable. The facts surrounding Bormann's fate are less certain, but I tend to be a bit skeptical about reports of his survival; he seems to surface and then disappear in Paraguay or Brazil with the same regularity as sightings of the Loch Ness monster. Of course, I suppose it is possible that in those chaotic last days, he could have made his way out of Berlin and found passage to South America or the Middle East or some other distant refuge. But even if he had, I doubt strongly that he would be alive today; he would have drunk himself to death years ago. Bormann was as addicted to alcohol as Goering was to drugs. When I knew him, he had the look of a man suffering from liver disease, and I think he had only a few years of life left, in any case. If he had reached South America, the hot climate and the isolation would doubtless have accelerated his drinking and finished him off even earlier.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of man was Bormann?

[A] Speer: He was the most coarse and brutal and ruthless member of the Nazi hierarchy--and, believe me, that took some doing. Personally, he was violent and crude, without any culture or refinement. By nature, he was an underling, but he was also a bully and treated his subordinates like animals, with sadistic contempt for their sensibilities. He was either at your feet or at your throat, the worst type of peasant, with the worst type of peasant cunning; he knew how to fool people into believing he was an insignificant and trustworthy aide of the Führer, while all the time he was shrewdly building up his own private empire.

[Q] Playboy: What was the source of his power?

[A] Speer: First and foremost, his perpetual proximity to Hitler; he was with Hitler everywhere from the time he rose in the morning to the time he went to bed at night. As Hitler's secretary, he was in charge of the daily appointments calendar, and this meant that he and he alone could decide who Hitler would or would not see, and as his power grew, it became virtually impossible for any civilian to obtain an audience with Hitler without Bormann's acquiescence--for which there was often a price to pay. By the time of the war, the great majority of ministers, gauleiters and Reichsleiters could reach the Führer only through Bormann, and eventually, they just entrusted their programs and problems to him, hoping he would present them to Hitler. I don't think Hitler ever realized the full extent of the power he was delegating to his secretary, but gradually, at first imperceptibly, the crafty Bormann became de facto chief of state. Of course, he had his enemies and rivals, including Goebbels--although toward the end, Goebbels formed an alliance of convenience with him.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of man was Goebbels?

[A] Speer: He was a very capable and intelligent man, a dedicated worker and gifted administrator, a very well organized and systematic thinker, with a great gift for abstracting problems from their context, examining them clearly and incisively and arriving at sound and objective judgments. He was the kind of man who would have made his mark even in a normal society. He towered over the mental pygmies in Hitler's entourage; he was one of the few men in the inner circle with a university education and was thus openly contemptuous toward most of his associates, whom he correctly regarded as his intellectual inferiors. Despite the fanatic rhetoric of his speeches, he had a cold, calculating mind and was quite sophisticated and cultivated. He was a bit of a martinet and had a waspish tongue, but we tended to respect each other and got along well.

[Q] Playboy: Was Goebbels as corrupt as the other Nazi leaders?

[A] Speer: I'd place him in the middle rank of corruption, not as bad as Goering and Himmler, worse than some others. He wasn't averse to using his position for personal advancement, building palaces and lavish country homes and inflating his bank account. But even though Goebbels did feather his own nest, I suspect that material benefits were not a dominant motivating factor in his life. At heart, he was an ideologue, a dedicated Nazi, although more dear-thinking than most. He belonged to the radical wing of the party and wanted to sweep away the existing order and replace it with a socialist utopia. This could have been due to reformist idealism, but deep down, I think he may have been something of a nihilist. During the war, he often said that the greatest mistake we had made was not joining up with Stalin and the Communists to jointly crush the West, and he pointed out the similarities between our ideologies; he used to say that ex-Communists made the best Nazis. He was not personally ambitious or power hungry, in the sense that Bormann was, and intellectually, he was a revolutionary ascetic, not a greedy hedonist like Goering. Goebbels was more interested in using his exalted position to blackmail girls into his bed than to transport gold into his vaults.

[Q] Playboy: Goebbels, too, was a womanizer?

[A] Speer: That's something of an understatement. As minister of propaganda, he was czar of the German motion-picture industry and theater, and his casting couch must have been the envy of the Hollywood directors of that day. Most of the leading German actresses owed their careers to Goebbels, and he was not altruistic about repayment.

[Q] Playboy: Did Hitler disapprove of Goebbels' private life?

[A] Speer: Not as long as it didn't create a public scandal. In his own way, of course, Hitler exploited women as callously as Goebbels did.

[Q] Playboy: Are you referring to his relationship with Eva Braun?

[A] Speer: Yes. He treated her very badly. He never publicly acknowledged their relationship and went to absurd lengths to disguise it, even within his own circle of intimates. When she accompanied Hitler on trips or public appearances, she was never allowed to be seen in the motorcade or in close proximity to Hitler; and at Berchtesgaden, she was banished from the Führer's presence whenever official guests arrived. On these occasions, Hitler exiled her to her small room on the second floor, with a connecting door to his own bedroom, where she would sit in sad isolation while the festivities carried on downstairs. Why Hitler kept up this transparent pretext, I don't know. Everyone knew she was his mistress. He never displayed any consideration for her feelings and was consistently callous toward her in public. This was painful to witness, because she was obviously devoted to him and easily hurt by his indifference.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of person was she?

[A] Speer: Neither a dim-witted slut nor a scheming Madame Pompadour, but a sweet, gentle and quiet woman. She was completely apolitical and never attempted to intervene in affairs of state or influence any of Hitler's decisions. She loved sports, particularly skiing, and had a pleasant, unmalicious sense of humor; she teasingly referred to herself as "Mother of the Country." She came from a simple lower-middle-class Munich family, and neither she nor her parents ever seemed to benefit financially from her relationship with Hitler. His only gifts to her were birthday and Christmas presents of rather tasteless costume jewelry, and she lived on a frugal allowance doled out begrudgingly by Bormann. She alone of Hitler's inner circle remained unspoiled and unpretentious to the end. She was a sad, lonely person, the one member of that entourage who did not deserve her doom.

[Q] Playboy: Why did Hitler treat her so shabbily throughout their relationship?

[A] Speer: I think there were several reasons. He used to discuss the question of marriage at the dinner table, while Eva sat next to him, her eyes lowered. "I could never marry," he would say with total insensitivity. "Think of the problems if I had children! In the end, they would try to make my son my successor, and the chances are slim for someone like me to have a capable son. That is almost always how it goes in such cases." He always cited the example of Goethe's son, who was a cretin, to explain his distrust of a hereditary succession. On other occasions, he would expound on his cynical disregard for women in general, just as if Eva were not there: "A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman. Imagine if, on top of everything else, I had a woman who interfered with my work!" Eva's face would remain expressionless; only her eyes betrayed her pain. There was never any outward manifestation of tenderness or regard for her in his manner.

[Q] Playboy: There were stories that Hitler was a homosexual. Do you think there was any truth in them?

[A] Speer: I think that was just wartime propaganda, rather like the stories that he was of Jewish ancestry or chewed the carpets in epileptic fits or was a syphilitic. No, Hitler was sexually normal; his perversion was of the soul, not of the body. But I don't believe he was capable of real love. Perhaps once in his life he may have been. As a young man, he had an incestuous affair with his niece, Geli Raubal, whom he drove to suicide. But as long as I knew Hitler, there was an ultimate coldness about him; on a deep level, he was devoid of all feelings of empathy and tenderness. He was an inhuman being.

[Q] Playboy: And yet you said at Nuremberg, "If Hitler had ever had a friend, I would have been that friend."

[A] Speer: Yes, but the operative word there is if. I think at times that Hitler longed for the kind of human contact he could never achieve. I sensed this occasionally at Berchtesgaden, when I sat with him at teatime before his open fireplace; on these occasions, he would strive so hard to create a gemütlich atmosphere, serving cake to his secretaries with exaggerated gallantry, attempting to strike an easy and relaxed conversational tone with his guests, trying to play the friendly host. I felt a pang of pity for him on these occasions; he was like a ghost pretending he was alive, trying desperately to convince himself that he was, after all, a normal human being with normal feelings. But even Hitler's will could not fill that vacuum deep inside him, that pervasive quality of intangibility, of insubstantiality. I have never met anyone else in my life with whom I felt this sense of something vital missing, this impression that at the core of his being there was just a deadness. It is true that I probably came nearer to seeing this inner self than anyone else in his entourage. The only times I saw him behave with genuine vivacity and pleasure and spontaneity were when we were together, poring over architectural plans or inspecting his cherished scale models of the Berlin of the future. On such occasions, he came as close as he ever could to being human. One of my friends, after witnessing one of our work sessions, said of our relationship: "Do you know what you are? You are Hitler's unrequited love."

[Q] Playboy: Could there have been an element of latent homosexuality in Hitler's relationship with you?

[A] Speer: Not in any conventional psychological sense. It was something deeper and darker. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud discusses the eternal struggle between the life and death urges within man; and in Hitler, the death force held almost uncontested sway. But it's possible that, at times, he struggled unconsciously against his own evil, and the last vestiges of his humanity reached out in search of the life principle. At such times, he may have sensed in me a reincarnation of the vanished hopes of his youth. But whatever our remarkable relationship was, it was not friendship. Our rapport lasted only as long as I was his architect; once I entered his government as minister of armaments, everything began to change. The war was the real turning point in our relationship.

[Q] Playboy: Were you with Hitler the day the war began?

[A] Speer: No, at that time, I was still excluded from high-level military-strategy meetings. For weeks before he gave the order to invade Poland, the atmosphere at headquarters had been tense, and whenever I saw Hitler, he appeared withdrawn and distracted. This was the most desperate gamble of his life, of course; for the first time, it seemed possible that his territorial acquisitions would have to be sealed in blood. But he still hoped the Western powers would cave in without a fight, as they had over the Rhineland and Austria and Czechoslovakia.

[Q] Playboy: Previously, as at Munich, Hitler had succeeded by a clever diplomatic game of bluff and deception. Why did he finally decide to risk world war?

[A] Speer: There were several factors involved. Hitler gave long and careful consideration to the risks involved. He was convinced that a showdown over Poland was inevitable, and he wanted it to occur while the military balance of power was preponderantly in our favor. He still hoped to keep Britain and France from intervening, even after they had guaranteed Poland's borders. He'd learned the lesson of Munich too well; when England and France allowed him to carve up Czechoslovakia and incorporate the German-speaking Sudeten territories into the Reich, he became convinced he could extract any concessions from them. He knew he was right when, six months later, he invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia and blatantly absorbed the entire country, with no opposition from the appeasers in London and Paris.

[A] But some kind of rapprochement with the Russians was a vital prerequisite to his Polish gamble. On August 21, 1939, I learned that Ribbentrop was in Moscow for some delicate negotiations with Stalin and Molotov. That night at dinner, a wire was handed to Hitler. He read it, stared vacantly out the window for a moment and then flushed a deep red. He slammed both fists on the table so hard that glasses rattled, and he cried out in an emotion-choked voice: "I have them! I have them!" His composure returned and he slumped back into his chair without elaborating. None of us dared to ask him any questions and the meal resumed in silence. Shortly after dinner, Hitler assembled his guests and told us: "We are going to conclude a nonaggression pact with Russia. Here, read this. A telegram from Stalin." He handed around the message he'd received at the table, which tersely informed him of Stalin's agreement to the terms of the proposed treaty. Hitler was euphoric, convinced that nothing now stood in the way of his mastery of Europe.

[A] Around three in the morning, Hitler and I stood on the Berghof terrace, witnessing a rare and beautiful natural phenomenon. Northern lights of a remarkable intensity crackled across the night sky in a shimmering explosion of colors, bathing the mountains in a strange red glow. Our hands and faces were illuminated by this flickering red light, like cold flame, and there was something about the display that suddenly chilled me. Hitler stared out across the valley at the scarlet slopes of the Untersberg, then down at the red light dancing over his hands. He said abruptly: "Looks like a great deal of blood. This time we won't bring it off without violence." Even Hitler couldn't foresee how much blood.

[Q] Playboy: Did he have any second thoughts after the British and French declarations of war?

[A] Speer: When he received the news, he was stunned. But he soon pulled himself together and managed to convince himself that England and France had been forced to declare war for appearances' sake, so as not to seem to be deserting their ally, Poland. This optimism persisted even after the war began in earnest, first in the air and then on the ground--and was vastly fortified by our victory over France in 1940, which seemed to us to sound the death knell for the Allies. It also further convinced Hitler of his godlike powers.

[Q] Playboy: When was the decision made to violate the treaty with Stalin and invade Russia?

[A] Speer: Hitler had always intended to expand to the East, to seek Lebensraum for Germany in Russia; you can see this quite explicitly stated in Mein Kampf. This was his grand strategy; but in tactics, he was quite flexible and pragmatic, and I think that when he signed the Nazi-Soviet pact, he did not envision a showdown with Russia for several years, until he had absorbed Poland and, if necessary, brought England and France to their knees. But the scope and speed of his victories in the West made him overconfident and undermined his old resolve never to fight a war on two fronts. Russia's earlier poor showing in the Russo-Finnish War, and the outdated and deficient state of Soviet equipment, led him to a fatal underestimation of Soviet military strength.

[A] He knew that the Russians had signed their pact with us mainly to buy time; our alliance was a marriage of convenience from the start, and the break was just a question of timing. On June 21, 1941, Hitler took me into his chancellery salon in Berlin after supper and played a few bars from Liszt's Les Préludes on the phonograph. "You'll hear that often in the near future," he smiled, "because it's going to be our victory fanfare for the Russian campaign." The next day, Operation Barbarossa, the German onslaught against Russia, began.

[Q] Playboy: What was your own role in the war effort at that time?

[A] Speer: In the late summer of 1939, Hitler, who still liked to think of himself as grand patron of the arts, had personally exempted all artists--actors, painters, musicians, sculptors and architects--from military conscription. He ordered the army to send the draft records of all artists to him and he just tore them up and threw them away. But I felt it was my duty to contribute something to the war effort, so I visited General Fromm of the army's high command and volunteered my services and those of my team of engineers and workers. Our most important military task was the development of a new twin-motored medium-range Junkers dive bomber for the Luftwaffe. Toward the end of 1941, I visited the Junkers general manager, Herr Koppenberg, at their plant in Dessau to synchronize our construction with his production plans. He took me into a room, locked the door behind him and showed me a comparative graph of projected German and American bomber production over the following three years. The figures were overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. I asked him how Goering and Hitler had reacted to these unnerving statistics. "That's just it," he whispered, "they won't believe them."

[Q] Playboy: Were none of Hitler's ministers realists?

[A] Speer: Not many. One man who tried to throw cold water on the leadership's delusions of omnipotence was Dr. Fritz Todt, the minister of armaments and munitions, with whom I worked closely in my capacity as chief of armaments construction. He believed that our troops were neither physically nor psychologically prepared for the rigors of the Eastern front, the arctic weather and the ferocity and determination of the Russians, who even in retreat took a heavy toll of our men. Todt derided the official optimism about the Russian campaign as willful self-delusion and predicted that the German people would soon learn the terrible truth.

[Q] Playboy: What effect did Todt's pessimism have on you?

[A] Speer: At first, I could hardly believe what he was saying. The desperate situation he depicted was completely at variance with the rosy propaganda bulletins on the radio and with the glowing press accounts of our inexorable advances. Even at Hitler's headquarters, there was no atmosphere of crisis; everyone talked about Russia as if the war were already won and concentrated on the conquest of England as our next major task. This was typical. Even at the time of Pearl Harbor, Hitler and his aides brushed off with disinterest the news of America's entry into the war; after all, as the Führer said so often, the Americans were a mongrel race, sapped of creative vitality, poor and cowardly soldiers who could never tip the balance against us. In any case, it was argued, by the time the Americans got their creaky war economy into gear, we would already be the masters of Europe, with the swastika flying from the Kremlin to the Houses of Parliament. So the picture Todt painted was alien to everything I had been taught to believe about the progress of the war. Goebbels had deceived himself and his associates; it was a classic case of the blind leading the blind.

[Q] Playboy: How long did you yourself remain blind to the realities of the military situation?

[A] Speer: Not for long; events were soon to open my eyes in the most brutal fashion. At the end of January 1942, I learned that Sepp Dietrich, formerly commander of Hitler's personal guard and now leading an SS Panzer corps on the Eastern front, was scheduled to fly to Dnepropetrovsk in the southern Ukraine, where my staff had made its headquarters for railroad reconstruction work. I was anxious to check firsthand on their progress, particularly after Todt's disturbing report, so I asked Dietrich to take me along. I will never forget that trip; it was my first foretaste of the end. As we flew over Russia, a vast empty landscape of devastation stretched out before me--desolate snow-covered fields with no signs of life other than the burned-out remnants of farms and railroad installations, the few roads empty save for an occasional gutted vehicle strewn along the roadside like the bones of some prehistoric animal. There was a terrible silence over everything, the silence of death, broken only by the sound of our motors and the rattle of sleet-driven snow on the fuselage. As I looked down on this endless lunar landscape, I knew what it must be like for a soldier struggling across it on foot, cut off from supplies, blinded by the snow and numbed by frostbite. I thought of Napoleon's terrible march from Moscow and I suddenly realized that the same disaster could befall us.

[A] When we landed at Dnepropetrovsk, I was deeply relieved to see again some evidences of organized human activity. But even there, conditions were harsh; my crew of technicians was quartered in an abandoned railroad sleeping car, kept from freezing only by an occasional puff of steam running through the heating coils from an attached locomotive. Most of the city was in rubble and our makeshift headquarters was in an icy dining car. I soon discovered that the rail situation was even worse than we had feared. In their retreat, the Russians had adopted a scorched-earth policy, destroying all stations, repair sheds, switching yards, signal systems and water tanks. As we desperately tried to mobilize our slender and overextended resources to effect at least emergency repairs, the great blizzards of the Russian winter descended on us. All highway as well as rail traffic was brought to a standstill and our crude airstrip was snowed in, cutting us off from the outside world. As the weather continued to deteriorate, our situation grew graver by the hour. We learned that a Soviet tank corps had penetrated our defenses and was rapidly approaching Dnepropetrovsk. There was only a small Wehrmacht contingent in the city to hold them off, so my technicians and I anxiously foraged around for weapons to defend ourselves. We came up with nothing but a few old rifles and an antique artillery piece without shells. So we broke open our remaining supply of liquor and spent the evening drinking with Sepp Dietrich and some of his men.

[Q] Playboy: How was their morale?

[A] Speer: Very low, except for Dietrich, who, as a professional military man, would never show any outward manifestation of concern. During that evening of socializing, the soldiers poured out many of their fears and anxieties. As we sat through the night, listening to the booming of Russian artillery in the distance, songs were sung--sad and despairing songs echoing the men's loneliness and homesickness and the bleak horror of a death on the barren Russian steppes. These were the soldiers' favorite songs, not any of the familiar martial melodies, and they expressed more than a thousand words. As I sang with them, I thought what a different world this was from Berlin, where right now the night clubs and restaurants, as yet unfettered by austerity decrees, were full, the laughter high, the music gay, the champagne bubbling--a Berlin so many of these men around me would never see again.

[A] For the moment, however, we were spared when the Russian offensive inexplicably turned back in one of those critical blunders both sides were guilty of throughout the war; and the next day, the weather cleared enough for me to fly back to Germany. I had one final impression before entering the plane. I was forced to wait on the airstrip in freezing cold for several hours while Soviet POWs strove to clear the snow and ice from the runway, and, at one point, several Russians in padded jackets surrounded me and gesticulated animatedly. They spoke no German and I no Russian, but finally, one scooped up some snow and rubbed my face with it. I realized he was warning me of frostbite. Another of the Russians reached into the filthy, tattered remnants of his Red army uniform and handed me a clean, folded white handkerchief to wipe my face. Later, that image stuck in my mind: Here was one of a race we were determined to turn into helots, a people whom we already regarded with utter contempt and indifference as little more than pack animals, giving me what was probably the last of his personal possessions--and for no reason other than that I was a fellow human being threatened by the elements.

[A] Though, once again, I did not draw the proper conclusions from this incident, it remained with me. But soon the plane took off and the Russian workers were left behind--ants on the snow-swept waste. Within hours, I would be at the "Wolf's Lair," the Führer's command headquarters in Rastenburg, back in the "real world" of pomp and power and glory--and inhumanity. As I arrived, Todt emerged from a conference with Hitler, appearing exhausted and depressed. He sat with me, drinking a glass of wine, glumly reticent, and then excused himself for a few hours' sleep. He was flying back to Berlin, he said, and asked me if I'd like to accompany him. I accepted eagerly, glad to avoid the grueling train journey, and agreed to meet him at the airport later.

[A] But when my own meeting with Hitler ended, it was after three o'clock in the morning and I was totally exhausted, mentally and physically. I sent Todt a message that I could not fly with him to Berlin and was assigned a small bedroom where I could get some sleep. I was awakened the next morning by the harsh ringing of the telephone. I picked it up groggily and Dr. Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, came on the line, his voice charged with excitement: "Todt's plane has just crashed and he has been killed." He hung up and I sat there numbly for several minutes while the news sank in.

[Q] Playboy: Did you expect Hitler to appoint you as Todt's successor?

[A] Speer: That was the last thought in my mind. Todt's position was, after Hitler himself, the most important in the Reich. I expected that a small proportion of Todt's construction tasks would be shifted to me, but I never even dreamed that I would become his successor. I assumed that his duties would be transferred to other ministers, with the bulk of his work probably falling to Goering. This was what I expected when Hitler summoned me to his office at one o'clock in the afternoon on the day of Todt's death. Unlike our meeting of the previous evening, he greeted me formally, in his capacity as chief of state, and his manner was businesslike. He replied to my expression of condolences and then said abruptly: "Herr Speer, I appoint you successor to Minister Todt in all his capacities."

[A] I was rooted to the ground, unable to speak. I could not believe I was hearing right. "I've selected you for the whole task. I have confidence in you. I know you will manage it." I stood there in silence, unable to think of anything to say, and Hitler ignored me, coolly returning to his paperwork. When I left, he had no personal word for me, none of the friendly goodbyes I'd grown accustomed to. I'd had my first taste of our new relationship. I was no longer his personal friend and architect but an underling in his government. But at the time, I did not recognize the significance of this change in Hitler's manner. As I left his office, my thoughts were reeling in confusion--and some apprehension. I had been transformed from an architect to the number-two man in the government, with complete responsibility for the efficient functioning of our war effort. I had been entrusted, in effect, with the destiny of the entire nation.

[Q] Playboy: By all accounts, your successes, at least in the early days, were quite phenomenal.

[A] Speer: Yes, once we had restructured the war economy under a central planning control and mobilized our industrial reserves and resources, the production results were remarkable. Within six months of my appointment, production had soared in every area under our control. In the period from February to August 1942, production increased by a ratio of 27 percent for guns and 25 percent for tanks, while ammunition output rose by 97 percent. Our armaments production in that half year rose by 59.6 percent. By 1943, our factories were producing seven times the weapons produced in 1942 and over five times the amount of ammunition; our total munitions production rose from 540,000 tons in 1941 to 2,558,000 tons in 1943. Even as the Allied air onslaught grew in ferocity, our production figures continued to skyrocket. The Allies were quite amazed by the way our arms industry kept going almost to the end.

[A] When I was arrested after the war, General Frederick L. Anderson, commander of the U. S. Eighth Air Force, visited me in my cell and talked to me for some time about the way our arms industry had continued functioning despite his bomber attacks. He told some reporters afterward, "Had I known what this man was achieving, I would have sent out the entire American Eighth Air Force merely to put him underground." So it is true that we had some startling successes. But they only served to delay the inevitable. The forces arrayed against us were too overwhelming for even the most brilliant industrial planning to overcome.

[Q] Playboy: But you did succeed in delaying the inevitable; without your efforts, according to some historians, Hitler might have had to admit defeat as early as 1942 or 1943. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides died in that period, and yet you still speak of your achievements with apparent pride.

[A] Speer: I am not proud of my role in prolonging the war--just the opposite. It would have been far better for Germany and the world if the collapse had come in 1943, when the human sacrifice would have been far less and many victims would have been spared. So, in that sense, my successes were really failures--crimes, in fact. But, of course, in those years, I did not think in ethical or humanitarian terms. All I was interested in was increasing our war production.

[Q] Playboy: And yet there is still that note of pride in your voice when you discuss these technical achievements.

[A] Speer: I cannot help feeling stirrings of pride. This is my weakness--a human weakness, perhaps. Those were the days of my youth, and I achieved things which many people predicted were impossible, and I suppose my ego still takes pleasure in those accomplishments. Then I think of all the cities destroyed, the soldiers killed, the Jews butchered between 1943 and 1945--and my pride turns to sickness. But I will not be a hypocrite and say the pride is not there. Intellectually, I have accepted that it is wrong to be proud of such things, but emotionally, I still feel a surge of pride when I think of the obstacles I overcame and the goals we achieved. I would be dishonest if I said otherwise.

[Q] Playboy: Despite your efforts, when did the tide of war begin to turn against you?

[A] Speer: The final and irrevocable turning point was Stalingrad, although things had begun to go badly even before that. Hitler never expected a prolonged war and, therefore, he had never prepared for one. The moment his series of blitzkrieg victories ceased and the struggle began to drag out, we encountered shortages of strategic raw materials, particularly fuel, that, seriously hampered our war machine. It really was a miracle that we were able to keep going as long as we did, considering the huge drains on our resources and manpower. These problems were manifested particularly acutely in my own armaments-production work.

[A] Because of our manpower shortages, I recognized the prime importance of employing German women in industry. This had been done with considerable effect in the First World War and was already standard procedure in the Allied nations, but Hitler would not hear of it, nor would the responsible officer for manpower, gauleiter Fritz Sauckel. This was a crucial error. If from the beginning we had followed the Allies' lead, we could have had over 1,000,000 German women working in our factories, freeing 1,000,000 men for the army. But the refusal to entertain my proposals had a more sinister result. It was a major contributing factor to our program of forced labor from the occupied territories--which led to my own conviction at Nuremberg and 20 years in prison.

[Q] Playboy: When did the slave-labor policy begin?

[A] Speer: As early as November 1941, Hitler told me when I stressed our manpower problems, "The area working directly for us embraces more than 250,000,000 people [and] we will succeed in involving every one of these millions in the labor process." Hitler ordered Sauckel to recruit labor from the occupied countries, by force, if necessary, and Sauckel enthusiastically agreed, promising to provide millions of workers for our factories. Sauckel went ahead with brutal procurement of forced labor, and millions of foreign laborers, Soviet Pows and concentration-camp inmates were sent to work in my armaments factories, often under the most appalling conditions.

[Q] Playboy: Are you shifting blame for the slave-labor program to Sauckel?

[A] Speer: No, Despite my initial reservations, I was Sauckel's wholehearted collaborator on the forced-labor program, and I share his guilt. I will not split legalistic hairs to lessen my own responsibility. Sauckel was technically in charge of the entire program, but our roles were rather like the captain of the slave ship and the slaveowner who buys his cargo. Who is more, or less, guilty? At that time, I thought only about the efficient functioning of our economy, and I was deeply grateful to Sauckel for each worker he sent me. When it appeared that we might fall behind schedule in our armaments production, I pressed Sauckel to provide me with more workers; and when we failed to fulfill quotas, I often shifted the blame to him. When Hitler instructed Himmler to provide concentration-camp inmates for the plants, I welcomed them, as I did Russian prisoners of war. I treated these millions of people as no more than servomechanisms for our machines of war, and that is both a legal and a moral crime.

[Q] Playboy: If only for reasons of economic efficiency, you could have improved the barbaric conditions under which these men worked and lived--and died.

[A] Speer: I actually did try to improve conditions. In fact, this was one of the reasons the judges at Nuremberg gave for reducing the severity of my sentence. But even when I did do the right thing, it was for all the wrong reasons. I saw the conditions under which these prisoners worked on several occasions and it is burned into my memory--and my conscience. In December 1943, I inspected a huge rocket-production complex built in air-raid-proof caves in the desolate Harz Mountain range. The foreign workers there had been provided by the SS, which was then my rival in manpower procurement, and I remember vividly walking through those bleak, echoing caverns where thousands of slave laborers worked on V-2 assembly lines.

[A] These men went about their work like zombies, and as I passed among them, they looked at and through me blankly with drowned eyes and mechanically plucked their blue prison caps from their shaven skulls until I had passed by them. They walked and worked like men swimming under water, immersed in their private horrors. They were skeletal, undernourished and brutally treated. I learned that sanitary facilities were virtually nonexistent, disease was everywhere and the mortality rate was tremendous; the men were forced to sleep in the wet, chilly caves and they died like flies from dysentery, tuberculosis and pneumonia. After I left the caves, which reeked with human illness, I almost vomited, and I had to down several stiff brandies before I could carry on. I knew that we were ruthlessly exploiting slave labor, but I had not been prepared for this sickening human reality.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do about it?

[A] Speer: I immediately dispatched the labor force to build a large barracks camp on a nearby hill to quarter the workers and instructed the overseers to improve sanitary and health conditions and improve their diet. I sent Dr. Poschmann, the medical supervisor for my ministry, to inspect the site and see that all hygienic precautions were taken and that henceforth the men would be well fed, clothed and housed and provided with civilian doctors stationed at the camp. Whenever I tried to improve living and working conditions for foreign laborers, of course, I was faced with stiff opposition from the SS, whose declared policy was to treat these men as no more than beasts of burden. But don't get me wrong; I took such measures only for reasons of maximizing efficiency and production. As I said to Hitler so often, what good to our war effort is a sick or dead worker? I helped these men rather as one would keep livestock well fed, not out of any sympathy for their plight as human beings.

[Q] Playboy: In a review of your book, Will Frischauer writes, "I have come across nothing quite as repugnant as the tears Speer sheds" for your slave laborers. How would you answer him?

[A] Speer: What can I say to him? My behavior on this question was repugnant and there is no way I can convince anyone of the sincerity of my guilt. It is something I must live with. I suppose, to be honest, that the tears I shed are for myself as well as for my victims, for the man I could have been but was not, for a conscience I so easily destroyed.

[Q] Playboy: How many slave laborers died in your factories?

[A] Speer: There are no precise figures, but thousands must have perished from disease, malnutrition and, in some cases, the brutality of SS guards. And, of course, the casualty figures among both forced laborers and German workers mounted with the increasing tempo of Allied air attacks on our industrial installations. By the end of the war, our factories were taking a tremendous pounding from the air.

[Q] Playboy: How effective was the air war against Germany?

[A] Speer: Much less effective than it could have been. The Allies didn't know it, but they had victory within their reach in 1943. In August of that year, they began a series of devastatingly effective bombing raids on our ball-bearing factories, which were pivotal to all our armaments production. By paralyzing this crucial nerve center, they could have completely wiped out our armaments production. Ball bearings were vital and irreplaceable components of every major weapon from tanks to planes, and a few more Allied raids would have crippled our arms production; the war would have been effectively over.

[A] And then, to our utter astonishment and tremendous relief, the Allied raids abruptly terminated and we were able to rebuild the damaged factories, although they never again achieved their full industrial capacity. I learned after the war that the Allies had assumed that our totalitarian system was so efficient that we had dispersed our ball-bearing plants across the countryside in camouflaged sites and in bombproof caverns and bunkers. They were, of course, completely wrong. The Allies failed to grasp the effectiveness of their strategic bombing and, instead, switched to a policy of vast air raids all across the country and saturation bombing of major civilian centers. This killed many people, but it did not seriously damage the economy.

[Q] Playboy: Some observers, such as playwright Rolf Hochhuth, have charged that the Allied "terror bombings" of such German cities as Dresden were immoral and inhumane and actually constituted a war crime in themselves. Do you agree with them?

[A] Speer: I think you have a saying in English about the pot calling the kettle black, so after all my own sins, I am not going to accuse others; if my own hands were clean, perhaps I could do otherwise. All I can say is that these raids certainly did not achieve their stated objective of shortening the war. There is no doubt that the air attacks were terrifying, but their final result was to engender more hatred than fear among the survivors.

[A] I was in my ministry in Berlin when the Royal Air Force began its great bomber offensive against the city on November 22, 1943. We were in the midst of a staff conference when the air-raid siren sounded; and when I was informed that a huge fleet of Allied bombers had reached Potsdam, I adjourned the meeting and drove to a flak tower in the vicinity, where I intended to witness the attack from the platform, as I had done previously. I had just reached the top when direct hits nearby forced me to take refuge inside; the heavy concussions were shaking the thick concrete tower like a leaf. All around me staggered dazed and bleeding anti-aircraft gunners; the terrific air pressure from the detonations of the bombs had flung them against the walls and down the stairs like rag dolls. For 20 minutes, we huddled together in the tower while bombs rained down on the city and we were choked by a haze of cement dust from the crumbling walls.

[A] As the sound of the exploding bombs began to recede from our immediate vicinity, I reeled out onto the observation tower and looked out over the besieged city. Berlin appeared to be one giant inferno. Fierce conflagrations raged everywhere and there was a sinister, seductive quality of beauty about the terrible scene; if one could forget the death and suffering in the streets below, it was quite visually entrancing. The night sky was shattered by the explosion of countless parachute flares, which the Berliners dubbed "Christmas trees," casting a fitful illumination over the burning city. Anti-aircraft shells exploded in bursts of flame amid the roiling black smoke, and the sky was slashed by searchlights, like gigantic swords in some medieval duel. Occasionally, an enemy bomber would be trapped in a probing searchlight and I would watch as it struggled to escape the cone of light like a moth trying to wriggle free of its pin, until the anti-aircraft gunners zeroed in on it and the bomber dissolved in a blossom of flame, its debris plummeting to earth, lost in the sea of fire that was sweeping the city.

[A] The spectacle was strangely choreographed and somehow unreal. It was only when the raid was over and I ventured forth into the streets that its apocalyptic splendor dissolved into the screaming and sobbing of the maimed and bereaved and the grim finality of death. I got hold of my staff car and drove to the sections of the city where key factories were situated, driving over streets thick with rubble, past rows of flaming buildings. Dispossessed families stood or sat before their burning homes, pathetic bundles of salvaged possessions piled around them. The air was filled with suffocating clouds of soot and smoke and the sound of crackling fire was everywhere, as if some giant carnivore were rending the city in its jaws. A huge pall of smoke hovered over Berlin, extending up to 20,000 feet in height, and even when day came, everything remained as dark as night. There was a Walpurgisnacht atmosphere about the city, heightened by the near-hysterical laughter and gaiety of people dazed and stunned by the disaster and unable to comprehend its full dimensions. From that point on, Berlin was subjected to relentless and devastating Allied air attack, until, at the end of the war, the city was reduced to rubble.

[Q] Playboy: How did Hitler react to the systematic destruction of his cities?

[A] Speer: With a weird, somnambulistic indifference. As reverses accumulated, beginning with the totally unexpected disaster at Stalingrad, Hitler's state of (continued on page 168) Playboy Interview (continued from page 96) mind began to change, and he withdrew. Increasingly, he sought solace in his delusions of omnipotence and, as Stalingrad was followed by the Allied landings in Africa, the collapse of the Afrika Korps and the steady deterioration of the Eastern front, he progressively blocked himself off from reality. This was particularly true of the air war; as it intensified, Hitler remained in his own dreamworld and, to the end, refused to perceive the enormity of the devastation.

[Q] Playboy: How could he ignore the results of the bombing all around him?

[A] Speer: By closing his eyes to it. In late July 1942, the Allies launched their large-scale bombing offensive with a week-long aerial onslaught on Hamburg. The results were catastrophic. The initial raid knocked out the city's water system, so that the fire department was helpless throughout the subsequent attacks. Giant fires roared out of control, generating huge cyclonic fire storms that sucked oxygen from the air and suffocated thousands in their basements or air-raid bunkers, while others were incinerated in the streets, where the asphalt bubbled into lava.

[A] I clearly recall how gauleiter Kaufmann telegraphed Hitler desperately, imploring him to visit the crippled city to lift popular morale. Hitler curtly refused. Finally, Kaufmann begged him to at least receive a delegation of the heroic fire-fighting crews, but Hitler turned down even this simple request and refused to have the disaster mentioned in his presence. Not once throughout the war did Hitler make a morale-building visit to a bombed city.

[Q] Playboy: Was he afraid to face the consequences of his own miscalculations?

[A] Speer: That may have been part of it. At first, I tried to tell myself that the devastation of the cities moved Hitler so deeply that he could not bear to confront it; but gradually, I came to suspect that he had no real feeling for the human victims of his blunders, that he could not stand visible confirmation of his failures. From the moment the war began, Hitler shut himself off from his own people, among whom he had once moved with relative impunity--a fact that had contributed to his immense prewar popularity. I recall one evening in the middle of the war, when we were traveling with Hitler on his private railroad train to his headquarters at Rastenburg. We enjoyed a late and lavish meal in his elegant rosewood-paneled dining car, the linen and silverware glistening, the wine in delicate cut-glass goblets. As we ate, our train slowed down and crawled past a freight train halted on a side track. From one open cattle car, wounded German soldiers from the Eastern front--starved, their uniforms in tatters--stared across the few yards to our dining-car window. Hitler recoiled as he saw these injured men regarding us expressionlessly and, without even a wave of his hand in their direction, he sharply ordered an adjutant to lower the window shades.

[A] As we resumed the meal in silence, our train picked up speed and left behind the men who were fighting and dying for Hitler's cause. That encounter was symptomatic of his attitude whenever the question of military or civilian casualties was raised in his presence. I don't know to what extent such blindness was a defensive reaction, or if he actually succeeded in deluding himself. But as the war progressed, Hitler not only ignored the suffering of his populace but made vital military decisions without any consideration of realistic technical and tactical limitations--decisions that determined the destiny of millions of people.

[Q] Playboy: Would you rate Hitler low as a military strategist?

[A] Speer: Abysmally low. He never developed a comprehensive strategic plan for the war; he deliberately encouraged wasteful and time-consuming parallel projects by different branches of the services; his planning of our air war against England and our own air defenses was confused and chaotic; he never gave adequate emphasis to U-boat production; he completely misunderstood the tactical and strategic realities of the Eastern front; and he lacked the determination and foresight to mobilize the home front for total war. His decisions were impulsive, often muddled, sometimes irrational and consistently lacking in the very professional military expertise he professed to possess in such abundance. If the Allied Chiefs of Staff only knew it, they had no greater unwitting ally in Germany than Adolf Hitler.

[Q] Playboy: If Hitler was as hopelessly inept as you paint him and his military decisions so consistently counterproductive, why did the German general staff accept his leadership so unquestioningly?

[A] Speer: I don't intend to completely underestimate Hitler when I speak of his blunders after 1942. He made some brilliant and highly successful decisions, which by their very boldness and unorthodoxy almost carried us to victory in 1940. The tragedy was that these initial successes imbued Hitler with an aura of military genius--and every time the Chiefs of Staff stood up to him, he would say, "Ah, but remember how you argued against me over Poland, or France," and they would fall back in disarray. I think a very important contributing factor to his most disastrous decisions was his obsession with offensive action. This may have been a carryover from the bitter frustration of his own experiences as a corporal in the trenches of World War One. Whatever its origin, the consequences for our men at the front were terrifying. Hitler simply refused to permit them to retreat, even when faced with the most hopeless odds.

[A] On the Eastern front in particular, this mad stubbornness resulted in the needless squandering of hundreds of thousands of lives. When large pockets of troops were cut off and isolated by the advancing Red army, he summarily rejected even the most desperate pleas for their evacuation. "Let them bleed to death," he said coldly. He believed that once a soldier had tasted defeat, he was unworthy for future conflict. In fact, Hitler often behaved as if he equated defeat, or even tactical retreat, with treason. As a result, he callously wrote off the lives of countless soldiers. This total disregard for both sound military strategy and the lives of his soldiers grew worse as the war progressed, and Hitler's personal as well as political decline became irreversible.

[Q] Playboy: Was there a corresponding mental deterioration in Hitler as the war turned against him?

[A] Speer: Yes, without any doubt. The Hitler of the last three years of the war was a pale shadow of the dynamic peacetime leader of the Thirties. The deterioration first manifested itself in 1942 and grew progressively worse until the end. The keen cutting edge of his intellect seemed blunted; intellectually he was sluggish and torpid; he was permanently irritable and on edge. Where once he had arrived at decisions swiftly and firmly, he now had to drag them painfully from his fatigued mind. Every time I saw him in those days, he seemed to have grown more withdrawn and taciturn. I will say to Hitler's credit that he had fantastic powers of self-control when he was willing to exercise them; and throughout the war, he did force himself to accept a strictly disciplined work schedule. But this was contrary to his character and it imposed severe strains upon him--strains that were reflected in the erratic quality of his judgments.

[A] The military men around Hitler had been accustomed to intense daily work since their youth, and they could not grasp the extent to which Hitler suffered from overwork. It was only years later, when I was imprisoned at Spandau, that I really understood what it must be like to live every day under such intense psychological pressure. Looking back on Hitler's physical environment in his military bunkers in Berlin and Rastenburg, I realized how similar the atmosphere was to a prison--immense concrete walls (continued on page 190) Playboy Interview (continued from page 168) and ceilings, harsh electric light instead of daylight, iron doors and iron grilles over the few windows. Even Hitler's brief strolls through the barbed-wire perimeters, surrounded by armed guards and police dogs, resembled a convict's exercise in the jail yard. Hitler had turned all of Europe into a prison, but he was its leading prisoner.

[Q] Playboy: How sound was Hitler's health in other respects? It's been said that he was a hypochondriac.

[A] Speer: I know that Hitler himself was deeply worried about his health for as long as I knew him; but whether this was hypochondria or there was something seriously wrong I never discovered, because he was never specific about the nature of his troubles. As early as 1935, he would complain to me of intense gastric and cardiac pains, as well as of his perpetual insomnia. More and more, throughout the Thirties, he brooded over the possibility of his early death. This is certainly one reason why he pushed forward both his domestic plans and his foreign policies at such a relentless pace.

[Q] Playboy: Did he consult any doctors about his condition?

[A] Speer: His personal physician, Dr. Brandt, was a young and talented surgeon, but Hitler would not allow him to take the tests required to determine what, if anything, was ailing him. Hitler finally agreed to see Dr. Theodor Morell, a Berlin physician then much in vogue among film stars and café society, for a consultation, and came back singing his praises to the skies. From that point on, he placed absolute faith in Morell and the doctor soon became a regular member of Hitler's circle, much to Dr. Brandt's disgust.

[Q] Playboy: What was Morell's diagnosis?

[A] Speer: We were never told explicitly; Hitler was always precise about his symptoms, vague about their causes. After his first visit, he said Morell had discovered he was suffering from what Morell described as "complete exhaustion of the intestinal flora." He submitted Hitler to a prolonged treatment of injections of vitamins, hormones, dextrose and phosphorus. The key to Morell's treatment was capsules of intestinal bacteria he called "multiflor," which were, he told us proudly, "raised from the best stock of a Bulgarian peasant." Brandt inquired among specialists as to the efficacy of Morell's arcane methods and was told that the treatment was dangerous and untested and could cause addiction. The injections were regularly increased and chemical and biological agents obtained from human feces, plants and the genitals and intestines of animals filled Hitler's blood stream. Until the end of the war, when Hitler was a total physical wreck, he continued to rely on Morell. I've often wondered what cumulative effect his injections had on Hitler's mental and physical faculties. Hitler was never normal, but toward the end, he was in many ways deranged.

[Q] Playboy: What were the symptoms?

[A] Speer: At first, a personal despondency, an inner despair that occasionally flashed into the open, and a morbid preoccupation with his own death. Between the spring of 1942 and the summer of 1943. he occasionally spoke pessimistically in private about his reverses and expressed personal dejection. In the fall of 1943, he said to me several times, in tones of utter despair, "Speer, one of these days, I'll have only two friends left, Fräulein Braun and my dog." This was the only one of his prophecies that was borne out by events.

[Q] Playboy: Did he ever confide to you that he feared the war was lost?

[A] Speer: Never. As a matter of fact, a remarkable transformation came over him during this period. Even as our military situation grew progressively worse, he expressed an unshakable confidence in absolute victory. Of course, after the Allied demand for unconditional surrender in January 1943, Hitler knew his back was to the wall and he was fighting with all the tenacity of a cornered rat. He used to say to me: "There is no turning back. We can only move forward. We have burned our bridges." Whether or not he believed his own predictions, they were vital to sustaining the enthusiasm and loyalty of his military and political subordinates. But I think he believed that Providence would never fail him. If there ever was an element of insanity in Hitler, it was this abiding faith in his own divine mission. He was essentially a religious man. but his worship had been perverted into self-adulation, and on the altar of his will he was prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions. Perhaps the most frightening thing about Hitler is that he never once recognized his own evil.

[Q] Playboy: By the summer of 1944, some of Hitler's generals moved to overthrow him and negotiate a peace settlement with the Allies. What were the origins of the July 20 conspiracy?

[A] Speer: The repeated military disasters had finally shattered Hitler's aura of all-conquering military genius in the eyes of many generals and colonels and they at last had come to recognize the criminal folly of pursuing a lost cause. Added to these officers' despair at the success of the Allied landings and air offensive, the juggernaut advances of the Red army and our desperately deteriorating fuel situation, there must also have been a bitter recollection of Hitler's humiliating treatment of them over the years, the vicious tongue-lashings, the contemptuous disparagement of their personal courage and military expertise, the endless capricious demotions and humiliations, as well as his cruel squandering of their soldiers in hopeless last-ditch stands.

[A] By mid-1944, many senior officers of the Wehrmacht had finally broken with their deeply ingrained tradition of unquestioning loyalty to their commander. Among the leaders of the rebels were General Friedrich Olbricht; Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner; General Friedrich Fromm, chief of Army Armaments; General Erich Fellgiebel, chief of the Signal Corps; General Fritz Lindemann, aide to the Wehrmacht chief of staff; and General Helmut Stieff, chief of the organizational section in the army high command; as well as a number of operational commanders on the Western front, including Field Marshal Rommel, who was less directly implicated but sympathetic to the aims of the conspirators. The means of assassination was to be a powerful bomb secreted in the briefcase of one of the leading conspirators, Fromm's chief of staff, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a dedicated and idealistic army career officer from an old aristocratic Prussian family who had lost an eye, his right hand and two fingers of his left hand on the Russian front. Von Stauffenberg was a regular participant in Hitler's conferences at Rastenburg and it was his mission to plant the bomb near the Führer.

[A] The code name for the coup was Operation Valkyrie, a contingency plan first devised by the general staff in 1942 as a counterinsurgency measure and the cover under which the conspirators now intended to seize power in Germany. In the spring of 1944, Hitler personally authorized the military to initiate Valkyrie if the situation ever arose, giving the army command executive control of the Reich during the crisis and subordinating the party and the gauleiters to a strictly advisory capacity. He did this automatically, thinking he was only signing another routine contingency plan--not his own death warrant. Under the plan, all the generals had to do was proclaim an emergency--as Hitler's assassination would undoubtedly have been--and assume full powers. Unfortunately for Germany and the rest of Europe, the operation was tragically bungled from the very beginning.

[Q] Playboy: What went wrong?

[A] Speer: I can trace the events for you, since I was a ringside observer of the tragedy. On July 17, 1944, Von Stauffenberg telephoned me to relay Fromm's request that I lunch with him on July 20 at the Armed Forces High Command Headquarters on the Bendlerstrasse. I was forced to decline and Von Stauffenberg seemed very upset that I could not come. My refusal saved my position in the government and probably my life, for Bendlerstrasse was the headquarters of the conspiracy and Fromm wanted me under his control that day, in order to assure my participation in the new military government.

[A] On the morning of July 20, I delivered a speech to businessmen at the propaganda ministry and then adjourned to Goebbels' office. Abruptly, a small loud-speaker blared: "An urgent call from headquarters for the minister. Dr. Dietrich is on the phone." Goebbels flipped a switch on his desk. "Transfer it here." He picked up the telephone. "Dr. Dietrich? Yes? ... What! An attempt to assassinate the Führer? Just now? ... The Führer is alive, you say? Anything more known yet?" Dietrich rang off. He had little time to chat--Operation Valkyrie was in full swing. But by only wounding Hitler, the conspirators had made a fatal mistake. Though the news of the assassination attempt stunned me, Goebbels did not appear unduly shaken; Dietrich had assured him that Hitler was not seriously injured, and the attempt on his life appeared at first to have been perpetrated by a foreign agent.

[A] After lunch, I was meeting with Ambassador Clodius of the Foreign Office on the Romanian oil situation when Goebbels telephoned me. His voice was markedly different from that morning; now it was hoarse and agitated. "Can you interrupt your work at once? Come over here! It's extremely urgent! No, I can't tell you anything on the telephone." I immediately broke off my conference and rushed to Goebbels' private residence. His first words to me were: "I've just had word from headquarters that a military Putsch is going on throughout the Reich. In this situation, I'd like to have you with me." An attempt to kill Hitler, a military coup--it was too much to take immediately.

[Q] Playboy: By this time, you must have realized that Hitler's leadership was militarily and politically disastrous. Did you secretly welcome the attempt to remove him?

[A] Speer: At the time, I was still too much under Hitler's spell to approve the attempted coup. But, in any case, events were moving so fast that I had little time for introspection or political speculation. Shortly after my arrival at Goebbels' residence, I heard the roar of armored vehicles in the streets below and, as I looked out the windows, I saw heavily armed troops moving into position around the building, halting all traffic and setting up machine-gun nests facing the entrance. I called Goebbels over to the window and he looked out in silence for a moment, then went into his bedroom and returned with a small box, from which he extracted several potassium-cyanide pills and slipped them into his jacket pocket. "Just in case!" he said tensely.

[A] Goebbels sweated over the telephone, talking to party officials and regional military commanders, trying to make sense out of the confused situation; troops were marching from Potsdam to Berlin and provincial garrisons were being mobilized to move on the city. The situation looked grim, but Goebbels found some hope in the fact that his telephone calls were still getting through and the rebels had not yet seized the radio stations and broadcasted their intentions. It was here, of course, that the conspirators made their crucial blunders. Even with Hitler still alive, they could have won the day with swift and resolute action. A handful of men was all that was required to arrest Goebbels and other top Nazi officials, and it would have been child's play to cut off communications from Hitler's headquarters to prevent him from rallying his loyal supporters for a counterattack. But, incredibly, the Bendlerstrasse conspirators, stunned by their failure to kill Hitler, did none of this but, instead, dithered around army headquarters, anxiously awaiting news of Hitler's condition. But even with this procrastination, the outcome was in doubt for many long hours.

[Q] Playboy: What finally turned the tide against the generals?

[A] Speer: Their own irresolution. I was witness to the precise military turning point. I was with Goebbels at the height of the anxiety, when the coup could have gone either way. He received an urgent call from Schach, the deputy gauleiter of Berlin, who informed him that the commander of the battalion surrounding government offices was Major Otto Ernst Remer, an officer of impeccable Nazi credentials. Goebbels decided to try to talk to Remer and sway him to his side. He summoned the young major to his office and he arrived within the hour. Goebbels was outwardly composed, but I could feel his anxiety; on this conversation might hang not only the fate of the Third Reich but his own life as well.

[A] He opened by reminding Major Remer that he had sworn an oath of personal loyalty to the Führer and that as a man of honor, he was bound by it. Remer responded by reaffirming loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi cause. But, he said, Hitler had been assassinated and, as a result, his primary military allegiance had shifted to his commanding officer, Major General von Haase. Goebbels was expecting this and he answered in resounding tones: "The Führer is alive!" Remer appeared shocked and uncertain and Goebbels quickly followed up his advantage: "I spoke to him a few minutes ago. An ambitious little clique of generals has begun this military Putsch. A filthy trick. The filthiest trick in history." Remer appeared vastly relieved to hear that Hitler lived; he had apparently never understood the implications of his strange order to cordon off government headquarters and he now regarded us with a happy but bewildered expression. Goebbels assured Remer that this was his own moment of destiny: He and he alone could now decide the fate of Germany.

[A] It was clear from the change in Remer, the way he visibly straightened as Goebbels spoke, that the wily propaganda minister had won. But, to be on the safe side, Goebbels played his trump: "I am going to talk to the Führer now and you can speak with him, too." Goebbels had arranged in advance of the meeting for a direct line to Rastenburg, and Hitler was contacted within a few seconds. Remer inadvertently snapped to attention and clicked his heels as Hitler's voice came over the line. "Ja wohl, mein Führer," he repeated over and over again as Hitler issued his instructions. Goebbels then retrieved the phone and Hitler told him that he had replaced General von Haase with Remer, who was now in charge of all military efforts in Berlin. He was to receive his orders directly from Goebbels. Within a few moments, the uprising had been decided. The generals had lost and Hitler had won.

[A] He treated them without mercy. During a visit to Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters in August, I chanced to see a pile of interrogation reports on the map table in Hitler's bunker. As I thumbed idly through them, a sheaf of photographs fell from between the pages and I picked one up, but put it down quickly; it was a photograph of Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, dressed in convict garb, a broad yellow stripe running down his trousers. He was swinging from a gibbet. That night, a color film of the execution of 20-odd conspirators was shown to Hitler and his guests in the projection room. Each man had been hung on a meathook and slowly strangled to death with piano wire, the pressure being periodically released to intensify his death agonies. Hitler loved the film and had it shown over and over again; it became one of his favorite entertainments. I could not bear the prospect of attending and pleaded overwork as my excuse. That night I saw a stream of people, laughing and in high spirits, arrive for the screening, mainly SS officials and party functionaries. Not one officer of the Wehrmacht accompanied them to gloat over the murder of their comrades in arms. I could easily have been among those victims; my name was on a list of the rebels' proposed cabinet ministers--followed by a question mark that no doubt saved me from execution.

[Q] Playboy: Did Hitler question you about the presence of your name on the list?

[A] Speer: No, oddly enough, he never mentioned it and I was not anxious to raise the subject. When we talked about the coup at all, it was only for him to reiterate his view that the whole affair had been a stroke of providence for him. But although his initial coolness to me disappeared after a few days or so, the coup and its bloody aftermath had unsettled me and further shaken my faith in Hitler's leadership. Events to come would soon erode that faith even further and eventually destroy it. I had a foretaste of the events that were to finally turn me irrevocably against him a few days after the Putsch, during one of Hitler's interminable tirades about the generals. Suddenly he paused, and then said deliberately, "If the German nation is now defeated in this struggle, it has been too weak. That will mean it has not withstood the test of history and was destined for nothing but doom." I was soon to learn that this was more threat than prophecy.

[Q] Playboy: How did you react to it?

[A] Speer: At first, I didn't realize how deadly serious Hitler was. It was not until the end of 1944 that I recognized the full criminal implications of his scorched-earth policy. I realized then that if Hitler was to go down to defeat, he was determined, like Samson, to carry the entire nation with him. He desired total catastrophe, a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung that would prove a genocidal funeral pyre to mark his departure from the stage of history. To accomplish this, he instructed my ministry to effectively annihilate German industry, transportation, communications and food production. Had I obeyed, the entire industrial and productive infrastructure of our nation would have been destroyed and millions of Germans would have perished of starvation in the immediate postwar period. Fortunately, I was able, with the aid of the remaining sane men in the government, to sabotage this criminal policy. But it was not easy and the fight was touch and go. I had to travel the length and breadth of Germany, rallying army officers, civilian administrators and even some responsible gauleiters to my cause. Together with the help of the leaders of German industry, we were able to vitiate this scorched-earth policy not only in Germany but also in France, the Netherlands, Norway and other occupied countries.

[Q] Playboy: Did Hitler learn of your insubordination?

[A] Speer: Yes, he did. After I succeeded in sabotaging the scorched-earth policy in the vital Ruhr industrial area, I returned to Berlin. The roads were jammed with hapless refugees and retreating soldiers and, everywhere along the way, villagers were digging up their gardens to bury the family silverware and other valuables. Late on the night of March 27, I finally reached Berlin, where I was summoned to the Führer's tomblike bunker beneath the chancellery. He received me coldly, without shaking hands or smiling, and did not respond to my greeting. "Bormann has given me a report on your conference with the Ruhr gauleiters," he told me. "You pressed them not to carry out my orders and declared that the war is lost. Are you aware of what must follow from that?" I was, and I could feel the sweat springing out on my brow as I stood there, unable to speak.

[A] The penalty for such treasonous insubordination was death, with or without the formality of a trial. I stood there numbly, waiting for Hitler to issue the orders for my arrest. But suddenly his mood seemed to change and he stared off into the distance for a moment, as if lost in a remote memory. When he resumed speaking, his voice was warmer, gentler: "If you were not my architect, I would take the measures that are called for in such a case."

[A] His words had just reprieved me from a certain death sentence, but some obscure stirring of rebellion forced me to reply rashly: "Take the measures you think necessary and grant no consideration to me as an individual." But he ignored my remark and stood silent, deep in thought. Finally, he said softly: "You are overworked and ill. I have therefore decided that you are to go on leave at once. Someone else will run your ministry as your deputy." Hitler was offering me an easy way out of the situation, but it would have been cowardice to accept it, for I then would have been impotent to preserve our industrial capacity from his orders.

[A] So I remained obdurate: "I cannot keep the responsibility of a minister while another man is acting in my name." Hitler suddenly slumped into his chair and there was another long pause. Finally, he looked up at me and said in more normal tones, "Speer, if you can convince yourself that the war is not lost, you can continue to run your office." This was the crux of the matter; all I had to do was to pay lip service to his fantasies and my position would be restored. For practical considerations, I should have had no hesitation about doing so; but something stopped me. After all the years of accepting this man's delusions, of becoming part of them, of participating in the sycophancy and hypocrisy of his circle, I felt that I now owed both him and myself a measure of honesty, however belated. "You know I cannot be convinced of that," I said quietly but firmly. "The war is lost."

[A] Instead of flaring up at this, Hitler embarked on a series of rambling recollections of the past crises he had overcome. As I continued to regard him steadily, he faltered and broke off, and then spoke in an almost begging tone: "If you would believe that the war can still be won, if you could at least have faith in that, all would be well." Somehow, the sight of Hitler pleading was pitiable and more compelling than his autocratic demands. In the past, I would doubtless have surrendered to such an appeal, but the thought of his scorched-earth plans stiffened my resistance. My voice strident, I replied: "I cannot, with the best will in the world. I do not want to be one of the swine of your entourage who tell you they believe in victory without believing in it."

[A] Hitler did not answer me. For a while, he mused silently; then he launched into another monolog. After all, he said, Frederick the Great had been delivered from defeat in the darkest days of the Seven Years' War, and history could repeat itself. "One must believe that all will turn out well," he muttered desperately. "Do you still hope for a successful continuance of the war, or is your faith shattered?" I could sense that he was exerting all the magnetism of his will to pull me back under his control, but I was able to resist his spell. Finally, he whispered brokenly: "If you could at least hope that we have not lost! You must certainly be able to hope--that would be enough to satisfy me." He looked at me imploringly, but my silence told him my answer. There was an uncomfortable pause, and then Hitler jumped to his feet and dismissed me with his old curtness: "You have 24 hours to think over your answer! Tomorrow, let me know whether you hope that the war can still be won." He turned his back on me and I left, shaken by the duel of wills.

[Q] Playboy: How did you respond to his ultimatum?

[A] Speer: I spent a sleepless night. It was vital that I resume some of my lost authority, because otherwise it would be far more difficult to sabotage his plans. Yet something deep within me rebelled at an ultimate act of hypocrisy. Toward midnight the next day, I drove along the rubble-strewn Wilhelmstrasse to the chancellery, still not sure what I was going to tell Hitler. He met me at the door to his office and stood facing me. He seemed strangely uncertain and there was an expression of anxiety on his face. "Well?" he asked me tensely. I stood silent for a few seconds, unable to answer him, my thoughts confused. And then, impulsively, I blurted out: "Mein Führer, I stand unreservedly behind you." I had not committed myself to a belief in victory, but this expression of personal loyalty satisfied Hitler and seemed to move him. Tears sprang into his eyes and he shook my hand with trembling fingers, something he had not done for some time. His relief was so strong that it shook me, and I felt a surge of pity and affection for him.

[A] Once again, our old relationship asserted itself; but with an almost physical effort, I shook it off and managed to exploit the situation to my advantage: "If I stand unreservedly behind you, then you must entrust me with the implementation of your demolition decree." He nodded and allowed me to draw up a fresh document for his signature. He would not retreat on the destruction of industry and transport and I knew better by now than to try to change the major provisions of the decree. But I succeeded in undermining its application by slipping in a few key clauses providing that "Implementation will be undertaken solely by the agencies and organs of the ministry of armaments and war production, and the minister of armaments and war production may, with my authorization, issue instructions for implementation." I also inserted a sentence which was to prove of vital importance in preventing the total destruction of large areas of industry: "The same effect can be achieved with industrial installations by crippling them." I added a proviso that the total demolition of key plants would be authorized only by me. Hitler signed the decree without protest. I had regained my lost powers and was once more czar of the scorched-earth policy. No program ever had a director more devoted to its sabotage.

[Q] Playboy: Hitler seems to have displayed remarkable tolerance toward you. Did he ever become aware of the full extent of your opposition to him?

[A] Speer: My rivals at court, such as Himmler and Bormann, would have been all too glad to inform him, if they had discovered it; but in those chaotic final days of the war, it was possible for the first time to defy the Führer with relative impunity. While I was playing my dangerous double game, I operated on the sound principle of staying as close to Hitler as I could. By remaining in regular contact with him, I was able to defuse any rumors or planted suspicions.

[Q] Playboy: What was Hitler's mood in the last months of the war?

[A] Speer: He remained capable to the end of deluding himself and those around him that victory was still possible, even as Soviet tanks were rumbling through the outskirts of Berlin. I remember one instance of this very clearly. On April 12, 1945, I took a brief respite from work to attend the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Fürtwangler. On the occasion of this final concert, arranged by my ministry, we all sat in our overcoats in the unheated Philharmonic Hall, cold winds blowing in through the shattered windows. Electricity was normally canceled at that time of the day, but I had the current kept on for the performance and, as the leaders of the Reich pulled up in their Mercedes before the brightly lit concert hall, the war-weary Berliners passing by must have thought us all mad. But, somehow, this performance seemed a fitting finale for the Philharmonic, as well as for the Third Reich. I had ordered selections from Wagner's Götterdämmerung, followed by Beethoven's violin concerto and concluding with Bruckner's Romantic Symphony. As I sat shivering in the hall, I wondered how many weeks--or days--any of us had left to live; at that time, we all expected short shrift from the victorious Allies, and there was a brisk trade in cyanide capsules.

[A] After the concert, I was urgently summoned to Hitler's bunker, where the Führer rushed up to me in a state of excitement the moment I arrived, waving a newspaper clipping under my nose. "Here, read it!" he shouted, the words rushing over each other. "Here! You never wanted to believe it! Here it is! Here we have the miracle I always predicted! Who was right? The war isn't lost! Read it! Roosevelt is dead!" He was euphoric, racing around the bunker, buttonholing his courtiers and regaling them with the great news, and Goebbels and others expressed similar delight at the glad tidings. Hitler was convinced that Roosevelt's death was the work of divine providence, that at last the promised turning point was in sight. Now he was sure the Allies would fall out among themselves, the Americans would begin fighting the Russians and they would have to enlist Nazi Germany against the Bolshevik hordes; just as Frederick the Great was saved at the last moment by the death of the czarina, history had now turned the tide for Hitler. Later on, he calmed down somewhat and slumped back into his armchair, exhausted by his frenzy of jubilation, looking vastly relieved. I didn't know whether to pity or despise such escapist fantasies: I suppose they were at least therapeutic--a means of staving off the reality of impending defeat and almost certain death.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel any personal sympathy for Hitler at this point?

[A] Speer: Again, I could not help but experience pangs of pity for him, although I knew he was the author of all our misfortunes and directly responsible for the devastation of our country and for the death of millions on both sides. If it had not been for the scorched-earth policy, I would certainly have felt far more sympathy for his condition, but his vicious determination to carry the nation with him to destruction had severed my old bonds of loyalty and affection. It was then that I plotted his assassination.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you decide on such drastic action?

[A] Speer: I realized that if Hitler were removed from the leadership of the Reich, our people might still have a chance of survival and postwar regeneration. After much soul-searching throughout a night early in 1945, I came to the decision that I must kill Adolf Hitler.

[Q] Playboy: But isn't it true that you never actually lifted a finger against him?

[A] Speer: Yes, my assassination plot never got beyond the planning stage, and that is one reason I refused to use it as a defense point in Nuremberg and prefer to play it down today. In any case, my plan was never of the same caliber as that of the July 20 plotters; I had no alternative government in mind; I merely wished to eliminate Hitler before he could cause more death and destruction.

[Q] Playboy: How did you intend to assassinate him?

[A] Speer: While strolling through the chancellery gardens, I had observed the ventilation shaft of Hitler's bunker. Hidden by a small shrub was the air-intake opening, which passed air into the bunker through a purifying filter system. In my armaments work, I had developed a close association with Dieter Stahl, the head of munitions production, and we had once discussed a new nerve gas called Tabun, which was highly lethal--so lethal and so virulent that the filtration process could not reduce its potency.

[A] I knew that Stahl was no friend of the regime, as I once had to intervene with gauleiter Sturtz of Brandenburg to save him from arrest by the Gestapo for "defeatist" remarks; and in mid-February, I asked him about Tabun as we sat in our air-raid shelter during a heavy raid on Berlin. He must have been bewildered by my request, but he replied frankly, detailing the effectiveness of the gas. Suddenly, as the explosion of bombs rattled in the background, I blurted out: "It is the only way to bring the war to an end. I want to try to conduct the gas into the chancellery bunker." Stahl received this treasonous news calmly and, with no change in his voice or expression, promised to obtain samples of the gas for me.

[A] Unfortunately, he soon discovered that Tabun had to be fired by a detonating shell, as it became operational only after an explosion, which was useless in this case, since the blast would have wrecked the air ducts needed to conduct the gas throughout the bunker. Stahl, however, promised to get hold of a stock of ordinary poison gas, which could do the job equally well. I then spoke with Henschel, the bunker's chief engineer, and suggested a complete overhaul of the filtration system to improve the freshness of air in the bunker. To my gratification, he responded swiftly and dismantled the filters, leaving the bunker defenseless to traditional poison gases.

[A] But a few days later, while Stahl was still engaged in requisitioning the gas, our whole scheme fell apart when I reconnoitered the chancellery garden and discovered that the old ventilation shaft had been replaced on Hitler's orders by a ten-foot-high chimney, which made the air intake inaccessible to anyone on ground level. SS guards with submachine guns now patrolled the garden, too, and the walls were illuminated by searchlights. For a moment, I panicked and thought my plot had been discovered, but it turned out to have been a coincidence; Hitler had been reminiscing about his own temporary blinding by poison gas in the First World War and had decided to order precautions against an enemy gas attack. As a result, my assassination attempt came to nothing.

[Q] Playboy: It has a rather halfhearted ring to it, in any case.

[A] Speer: At the time, it seemed like a desperate and courageous act; but looked at in hindsight, the whole episode does now appear somewhat absurd. Actually, I was far more relieved than upset when it was frustrated. I don't think I would have been able to go through with it.

[Q] Playboy: You were alone with Hitler on many occasions and you carried a side-arm. Would you have been incapable of shooting him?

[A] Speer: That would have required far too much courage. I could never have confronted Hitler with a pistol. I was intellectually free of his thralldom at this point, but not emotionally. Looking back on it, I am glad that circumstances aborted the plot. Even if I had finally been able to summon up the fortitude to kill Hitler, it would have added just one more stain to my conscience. My plot was actually the culmination of the moral degradation to which my association with the regime had led me; for years I had lived among mass murderers and criminals without ever giving a thought to it. I had been corrupted by my own pride and ambition, and now I was allowing my detestation of Hitler's policies to lead me to one more crime. Hitler deserved to die--but not by my hand.

[Q] Playboy: When did you last see him alive?

[A] Speer: Our final meeting clearly expressed my ambivalent emotions. I eagerly anticipated his death, yet I simultaneously mourned his last pathetic hours of life. Once Hitler's scorched-earth orders had been thwarted and he could cause no more wanton waste of human lives, my feelings of pity for his plight grew in intensity. This was certainly naive, perhaps even indecent, in view of his crimes, but I had shared too much with him for too long to resist this final emotion. My war work was over; our armaments industry had been wiped out of existence and there was nothing more I could do to affect the course of the war one way or another. Yet I could not rest. It was as if Hitler's will was a palpable force, calling out to me from the rubble of Berlin to the estate near Wilsnack where I paced back and forth in my room. Something of me was still possessed by Hitler, and I knew I must see it to the grave.

[A] I flew to Berlin on April 22. As I approached Hitler's bunker, I was quite aware that his capricious nature might have turned against me since our last meeting, perhaps on the basis of fresh evidence of my sabotage of the scorched-earth policy, and I knew it was quite possible that I was going to my death. Hitler had just executed Eva Braun's brother-in-law for attempting to take his family to safety outside Berlin; the poor devil had been machine-gunned in the chancellery garden. A similar fate might well await me, yet I was strangely calm and not at all unnerved. This was not courage but more a sense of fatalism, of predestination. The thought crossed my mind that if Hitler executed me for refusing to destroy German industry, it might redound to the credit of my family and soften their lot in the postwar years. I suppose I was also somewhat numb and drained by the cumulative strain of the last months; I no longer really cared if I lived or died.

[A] I arrived at the chancellery in late afternoon, after a tortuous ride through the rubble-littered streets. Most of Berlin was in ruins as the result of aerial bombardment and the recent pounding by Soviet heavy artillery. When I was ushered into Hitler's office, his manner was cool, reflecting none of the warmth elicited by my avowal of support several weeks before. He was now obviously keeping his emotions under tight rein. "What do you think?" he asked me. "Should I stay here or fly to Berchtesgaden? Jodl has told me that tomorrow is the last chance for that." I knew that, no matter what he did, his life was numbered in weeks, and I suggested he remain in Berlin rather than prolong the agony on the Obersalzberg for a few more days. I told him, "It seems to me better, if it must be, that you end your life here in the capital as the Führer rather than in your weekend house." Hitler just nodded wearily and, for once, there was no more talk about the tide turning. I had the strange sensation that I was facing a walking corpse; he was devoid of any spark of life, listless, drained.

[A] He spoke of his death without great interest: "I, too, have resolved to stay here. I only wanted to hear your view once more." He added, in an empty voice: "I shall not fight personally. There is always the danger that I would only be wounded and fall into the hands of the Russians alive. I don't want my enemies to disgrace my body, either. I've given orders that I be cremated." He looked off into space for a moment and when he resumed, his voice was quiet: "Fräulein Braun wants to depart this life with me, and I'll shoot Blondi [his Alsatian dog] beforehand. Believe me, Speer, it is easy for me to end my life. A brief moment and I'm freed of everything, liberated from this painful existence." I did not know what to say. I had the sensation that his vital core was already dead, that whatever demon had possessed him for most of his life had now departed, perhaps glutted on the blood and suffering it had wreaked, leaving Hitler's physical shell behind. But as I looked into those dead eyes, I felt that over the years, a part of me had died, too; my soul, perhaps.

[A] In any case, I was suddenly possessed by an overwhelming sense of remorse, whether for Hitler, for myself or for all the unknown victims of our mutual madness, I do not know. In a shaking voice, I heard myself admitting to him that I had sabotaged his scorched-earth orders. His eyes briefly filled with tears, but he said nothing. Somehow, it was desperately important to me to make some flicker of human contact with Hitler, even in this lifeless state. I stammered that I was willing to stay in Berlin and share his fate, but he did not react; perhaps he knew I did not really mean it. Sometimes I wonder if he had known all along of my defiance of his demolition orders and had allowed me, for incomprehensible reasons of his own, to obstruct his policies. It was one of the mysteries of his strange personality that I will never unravel. But there is no doubt that he had hundreds shot for far less.

[Q] Playboy: What would you have done if Hitler had taken you up on your offer to stay in Berlin to the end?

[A] Speer: I don't know. It was an irrational and impetuous thing to say, as even in those dark hours I was not suicidally inclined. But I was so swept with conflicting emotions that I was almost incapable of rational thinking. Fortunately, our conversation was interrupted by General Krebs, who delivered the daily situation report to Hitler. I did not see Hitler again for the next few hours, but around midnight, Eva Braun dispatched an SS orderly to invite me to her spare but pleasantly furnished room in the bunker. She was strangely gay and relaxed. "How about a bottle of champagne for our farewell?" she said lightly. "And some sweets? I'm sure you haven't eaten for a long time." I was moved by her thoughtfulness, and we settled down to a late-night snack of Moet et Chandon and cakes. The very normality of the atmosphere was abnormal under the circumstances. She told me, "You know, it was good that you came back once more. The Führer had assumed you would be working against him. But your visit has proved the opposite to him, hasn't it?" I could not answer her. "Anyhow," she went on, "he liked what you said to him today. He has made up his mind to stay here, and I am staying with him. And you know the rest, too, of course."

[A] I wish there was something I could have said to her, some argument I could have advanced to save her young life, but of course there was no way I could influence her. "He wanted to send me back to Munich," she continued, "but I refused; I've come to end it here." Eva Braun, Hitler's much-maligned mistress, was the only person in the bunker with a capacity for compassion; she asked me sadly, "Why do so many more people have to be killed? It's all for nothing. ..." Her words echoed in my mind as we said our goodbyes, Eva maintaining her poignant serenity.

[A] It was three o'clock in the morning when I left her room, but Hitler was still up and I saw him to say goodbye. He stood before me, aged, shrunken, trembling, a human shadow. I was both deeply affected by our last meeting and strangely bewildered. Was this wraith the man I had believed in, revered, loved, hated for so long, the almighty Führer to whom I had devoted all my physical and mental powers for the past 15 years? As he said farewell, he was cold and indifferent. He shook my hand perfunctorily and said, "So, you're leaving? Good. Auf Wiedersehen." Nothing else--no expression of good wishes, neither thanks nor recrimination, no sentiment whatsoever. Suddenly, I realized I would never see this mysterious man again, and life without him to either love or hate suddenly seemed a dismaying prospect. In both loyal service and bitter opposition, he had become my universe. Shaken, I mumbled some promise to return, but he knew it was our final meeting and, without emotion, turned his back on me. For the last time, I had been dismissed from the Führer's presence.

[A] Dazed and exhausted by the events of the day, I left the bunker and walked through the deserted chancellery, its gutted windows gaping like the eye sockets of some stone skeleton. A spectral silence hung over the city: The normal street noises of Berlin were gone and the only sounds were the muted explosions of distant Soviet shells. Years ago, I had built this chancellery at the peak of my powers and ambition, burning with pride in my accomplishment. Now I left it in ruins, along with the better part of my life. I flew out of Berlin that night and returned to my family in Schleswig-Holstein.

[A] Several days later, on May 1, 1945, the radio announced the news of Hitler's death. I had just moved into a small room at the headquarters of Admiral Doenitz, who had been appointed head of a new provisional government by Hitler in the last days of his life, and as I unpacked my suitcase, I discovered a silver-framed photograph of himself that Hitler had given me on my 40th birthday. Suddenly, as if a dam had burst inside me, I began weeping uncontrollably. My relationship with Hitler was finally over, but only his death had shattered the spell. His fatal, compelling magic was at last overcome; the flames that consumed his body also freed my soul. But I have not been able to forget the fires of the ovens at Auschwitz, the burning cities, the charred corpses of our millions of victims. Nothing, not even Hitler's death, has freed me of that.

[Q] Playboy: When did the Allies take you into custody?

[A] Speer: Not until several weeks after Hitler's death. I and my fellow ministers in Doenitz' provisional government remained at liberty while the Allies consolidated their military and civil control.

[Q] Playboy: Was it hard for you to accept your fall to common prisoner?

[A] Speer: Strangely enough, and to my own considerable surprise at the time, it wasn't at all difficult, and I adapted myself psychologically to the situation quite quickly. Of course, for 12 years, I had accepted the strict discipline of a totalitarian state and, in a very real if unrecognized sense, I had been a prisoner throughout the days of the Third Reich, albeit one who had sentenced himself. But now, spared the burdens of decision making, I felt very little beyond an intense desire for sleep. The mental and physical exhaustion of the preceding months and years had finally caught up with me, and there is no doubt that for the first few weeks of imprisonment, my mental faculties slackened. I was imprisoned first at Mondorf, then at Kransberg, and in September 1945, I was transferred to Nuremberg, where I was to face charges of war crimes before the International Military Tribunal.

[Q] Playboy: Did you fear for your life?

[A] Speer: Yes, to be honest, I did. Once I overcame my initial despair, which had brought me temporarily to the verge of suicide, I wanted very much to go on living. My thoughts were with my wife and my six children, with whom I had spent so little time over the past five years. But the months of solitude had given me time to think about my role in the war and my guilt for its terrible human toll. I knew it was quite possible, perhaps even likely, that I would hang, and I naturally feared the prospect. But I also knew that I must pay for what I was beginning to recognize as my major crimes, and it was at this time that I formulated the position I would adopt at the trial: that I must regard my own life as insignificant and assume direct personal responsibility for the collective crimes of the government of which I had been a part. My very able lawyer, Dr. Hans Flächsner, argued intensely against this line, contending that, unlike most of the other defendants, I stood a strong chance of acquittal if I would mitigate my guilt and shift the responsibility for the forced-labor program to Sauckel and others. Legally, he was quite correct, I am sure; but morally, I was unable to accept his advice. I had slowly come to the realization that I was guilty; and for the sake of my family, my country and even myself, I knew I must not try to evade that guilt.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you never pleaded guilty.

[A] Speer: Not explicitly, no. If I had done so on a capital charge, the trial would have been only a formality and the judges would have had no choice but to deliver a death sentence. But in my testimony, I clearly and unequivocally accepted my responsibility for the crimes of the regime, including the specific crime of recruiting forced labor, which was the major charge against me. I expressed these sentiments before the trial began in a series of letters to my wife and parents. I wrote my wife before the trial: "I must regard my life as concluded. Only then can I shape its finale in the way I consider necessary. I am duty-bound to face this tribunal. I cannot put up a cheap defense here. I believe you will understand, for in the end, you and the children would feel shame if I forgot that many millions of Germans fell for a false ideal." It was not always easy to hold to that position when my life swung in the balance, but fortunately, I never backed down from it, even at the gravest moments of private despair.

[Q] Playboy: How did your codefendants regard your acceptance of responsibility for the crimes of the Reich?

[A] Speer: Some of them thought I was mad, and others misunderstood and thought that I was somehow trying to shift the blame onto them. Goering called me a "second Brutus" who had betrayed his oath to the Führer, and others were equally bitter. I told the court, "In political life, there is a responsibility for a man's own sector. For that he is, of course, fully responsible. But beyond that, there is a collective responsibility when he has been one of the leaders. Who else is to be held responsible for the course of events, if not the closest associates around the chief of state? Even in an authoritarian system, this collective responsibility of the leaders must exist; there can be no attempting to withdraw from the collective responsibility after the catastrophe. ... I have this obligation all the more since the chief of government has withdrawn from his responsibility to the German people and to the world." These statements alienated me even further from the majority of my codefendants, but I refused to temper them in private or in the witness box. It was as if I was purging myself.

[A] Flächsner wanted me to play down my coresponsibility with Sauckel for the forced-labor program; but again. I told the court that I shared full guilt with Sauckel. This dismayed my attorney, but it liberated me; with each confession, I felt freer. But I was still deeply depressed throughout the trial. The overwhelming evidence of the atrocities in the concentration camps preyed on my mind, preventing me from sleeping; images of the doomed Jews, especially the women and children, kept recurring in my mind. All this, I thought, was done by a government which I strove with all my energy to keep in power. Four years of tireless effort, and in the end, all that was left in my mind was a mother holding her baby in her arms as she entered the gas chamber. I felt defiled, as if my life had turned to ashes in my mouth. I used to think: What will my own children think of me when they grow up and learn of these crimes for which their father shared responsibility? They will view me as a monster. I sometimes viewed myself as harshly.

[Q] Playboy: You were sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment, primarily for your role in the forced-labor program. Do you regard that sentence as fair?

[A] Speer: I most definitely do--eminently fair and just. After what had happened, any penalty would have been just--even a death sentence, although I wanted to live as much as any man. A few weeks after my sentence, I wrote in my diary, "There are things for which one is guilty even if one might offer excuses--simply because the scale of the crimes is so overwhelming that by comparison, any human excuse pales to insignificance." I believed that then and I believe it now.

[Q] Playboy: Some historians have contended that the Nuremberg trial was an act of revenge by the victors on the vanquished and that its establishment of ex post facto crimes was juridically invalid. How do you feel about such criticism?

[A] Speer: I disagree most emphatically. The principles of international jurisprudence established at Nuremberg are, in my opinion, among the most heartening and noble developments of the 20th Century. They established a moral basis on which to judge the actions of great powers, a principle of vital importance in a world of rockets and hydrogen bombs. I sincerely believe the principles of Nuremberg are of enduring value to humanity.

[Q] Playboy: Critics of American involvement in Indochina contend that the U. S. Government is in violation of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and is guilty of both crimes against humanity and crimes of aggressive warfare. Do you agree with them?

[A] Speer: I will not comment directly on the rights and wrongs of Vietnam or any contemporary war, because my own guilt for the horrors of World War Two is much too great to allow me to smugly sit back and pass judgment on others. But I would comment indirectly by saying that the lessons of Nazi Germany and World War Two apply to all nations and all wars. The main reason I wrote my memoirs was not to rehash history but to hold the past up to present and future generations as a mirror in which they may behold similar seeds of destruction in themselves. The crimes of the Third Reich are essentially modern crimes, made possible by 20th Century technology, which holds within it both great promise and great danger for human values.

[A] In my closing speech at the Nuremberg trial, I tried to approach the root of this problem. Speaking as the leading representative of a technocracy which had ruthlessly perverted the tools of technology into instruments of mass destruction. I told the tribunal, "Hitler's dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. ... By means of such instruments of technology as the radio and public-address systems, 80,000,000 persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype and radio made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs, where, because of their high authority, they were executed uncritically."

[A] I told the tribunal that, in my opinion, nuclear weapons and chemical-bacteriological warfare further compounded the problem: "The more technological the world becomes, the greater is the danger. As the former minister in charge of a highly developed armaments economy, it is my last duty to state: A new great war will end with the destruction of human culture and civilization. There is nothing to stop unleashed technology and science from completing its work of destroying man, which it has so terribly begun in this war. The nightmare shared by many people that someday the nations of the world may be dominated by technology--that nightmare was very nearly made a reality under Hitler's authoritarian system. Every country in the world today faces the danger of being terrorized by technology, but in a modern dictatorship, this seems to me to be unavoidable. Therefore, the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the human being as a counterpoise to technology." I concluded, "Consequently, this trial must contribute to laying down the ground rules for life in human society. What does my own fate signify, after all that has happened and in comparison with so important a goal?"

[Q] Playboy: You paid for your crimes with 20 years' imprisonment. Do you believe you have atoned for your guilt?

[A] Speer: No, I don't. I don't believe there can be any atonement in this lifetime for sins of such huge dimension. But I also sincerely believe that I am a much different man today than I was in 1945. In the isolation of imprisonment, I learned to look inside myself, to study my own weaknesses and strengths; and for the first time in my life, I had the leisure and opportunity to read and absorb works of philosophy and theology. Perhaps equally important to my own moral development, I was guarded at Spandau for 20 years by citizens of the four Allied powers against whom I had mobilized Hitler's war effort, and through them I was able to discover the direct human results of my armaments efforts. Many of them had lost close relatives in the course of the war, particularly the Soviet guards, every one of whom had lost a wife or child or father or mother; a few of them had seen their entire families perish in the holocaust. But despite this, despite the fact that I had produced the bullets and bombs that killed and maimed their loved ones and devastated their country, not one of the Russians blamed me directly for their bereavement--as, in fact, they would have had every right to do. Throughout those years of imprisonment, these simple soldiers treated me with warmth and friendship and consideration. At my moments of deepest despair, when I felt I would never be reunited with my own wife or children again, they always had a word of comfort for me, a reassuring smile, a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.

[A] Unless someone has been in prison for a prolonged period, he will not comprehend the importance of such understanding human contact. Their kindness and humanity transcended ideology and nationalism and recrimination; we met not as political enemies or conquerors and conquered but as human beings. If I had to draw one single lesson from the horrors of World War Two, it would be not to depersonalize your enemy. Once this happens--whether it is a case of Nazi and Jew, Communist and capitalist or black and white--the greatest crimes are not only feasible but inevitable. The ideological differences that divide mankind today are, when seen in historical perspective, as transient and evanescent as the religious quarrels of the 16th and 17th centuries; the difference is that in the 20th Century, man has the power to totally destroy the race or nation he views as the enemy.

[A] In 1947, I wrote in my cell at Spandau, "The catastrophe of this war has proved the sensitivity of the system of modern civilization evolved in the course of centuries. Now we know that we do not live in an earthquake-proof structure. The build-up of negative impulses, each reinforcing the other, can inexorably shake to pieces the complicated apparatus of the modern world. There is no halting this process by will alone. The danger is that the automatism of progress will depersonalize man further and withdraw more and more of his self-responsibility." It is this vast gulf between our technological potential and our moral development that makes this age both so challenging and so terrifying. We now have the power to reach the stars--and to destroy our own planet.

[A] If Adolf Hitler had possessed a button that would destroy the entire world, he would have pushed it at the end. Today, there are such buttons in the war rooms of all the great powers. None of the world's leaders is a Hitler, but the hatreds and fears on which Hitler thrived still persist, and the potential for mass destruction is even greater today. In the 1970s, an executioner never has to see his victims, whether they number in the hundreds or the thousands or the millions. This was the nightmare of Nazi Germany, the first modern state to mechanize murder. It is also the nightmare of a world of H-bombs and high-altitude jet bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles and chemical-bacteriological warfare. In such a world, terrorized by technology, we are all in Auschwitz.

[A] I know that these instruments of death are in the hands of sane men, often decent men, but there were sane and decent men in Nazi Germany and they did not avert the greatest bloodbath in recorded history. The automated juggernaut of modern mass destruction can all too easily achieve a momentum of its own, carrying the world to total annihilation. Once the beast is loosed, it can travel in only one direction. The descent into hell can be an exhilarating ride, but it is a one-way trip. I know I have been there. I still am.