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Final Act. Speer became part of the Nazi inner circle and was invited to join Hitler at his eyrie near Obersalzberg in the Alps above Berchtesgaden. Visits there were a numbing ordeal. Long lunches were followed by short walks to Hitler's Alpine teahouse for tea and cookies. Hitler carefully avoided sweets. "Imagine me with a paunch," he would say. "It would be political suicide." The Führer was prone to fall asleep in the middle of his own monologues.
Speer evokes one memorable night at Obersalzberg. It was Aug. 23, 1939. Hitler had just received a telegram from Stalin agreeing to the nonaggression pact that set the stage for the invasion of Poland nine days later. An unusual polar light flooded the sky and, Speer writes, "the final act of the Götterdämmerung could not have been staged with greater effect. All our faces and hands cast off an unnatural red glow. Abruptly Hitler turned to one of his military adjutants and said: That looks like much blood. This time it won't come off without violence.' "
Broken Bridges. After Munitions Minister Fritz Todt was killed in a plane crash in February 1942, Speer was selected to succeed him. As Minister, he found himself constantly battling colleagues. Almost at war's end, SS Leader Heinrich Himmler was using scarce materials to build a country house for his mistress. Speer's plea for women workers was vetoed by Hitler, at Martin Bormann's suggestion, on the grounds that it would keep them from producing good Aryan offspring. Half a million Ukrainian girls were brought into Germany instead, to become servants in the homes of Nazi functionaries.
After Stalingrad, Hitler stayed up later and later as insomnia overcame him. Meals, which had once been merely lengthy, now became distasteful. Hitler, a vegetarian, insisted on describing the meat soup served to his tablemates as "corpse tea." Along with Eva Braun, Hitler said, his only true friend was his German shepherd Blondi. When the dog acted friendly toward other people, the Führer would angrily order it to heel.
Each setback in the war brought the same reaction from Hitler: "We can only go forward. The bridges behind us are broken." The Führer belabored his generals openly as "notorious liars as well as notorious cowards," and took charge of the war himself. He refused to allow Speer to build jet fighters to defend Germany against Allied aircraft, wanted jet bombers instead to attack the enemy. He persuaded Speer to develop the V-2 rocket. "It was probably one of the greatest errors I made," Speer writes. "We should have concentrated our efforts on the production of the ground-to-air missile."
That was not Speer's only error. One day a friend, confused and stuttering, advised Speer never to accept an invitation to visit a concentration camp in Upper Silesia. He had seen things there, he said, that he dared not describe. "I did not pursue the matter. I did not want to know what was happening there. He must have been talking about Auschwitz. From that moment on, I was inextricably involved in these crimes because, out of fear that I might discover something which would have forced me to certain steps, I shut my eyes. Because I failed then, I still today feel very personally responsible for Auschwitz."