Originally published: New York : Knopf ; Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1995

Includes bibliographical references

Albert Speer was Hitler's architect before the Second World War. Through Hitler's great trust in him and Speer's own genius for organisation he became, effectively from 1942 overlord of the entire war economy, making him the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in Spandau Prison at the Nuremberg Trails, Speer attempted to progress from moral extinction to moral self-education. How he came to terms with his own acts and failures to act and his real culpability in Nazi war crimes are the questions at the centre of this book. The author had access to Speer, his family and friends and his private papers.

`A masterpiece . . . a contribution to the effort of recuperation of human dignity at the end of this atrocious century . . . This is the account Joan of Arc would have given if she had been charged with interrogating Faust' John Banville, Observer `A remarkable new biography - arguably the most important and certainly the most fascinating book about the Nazi era published in the last ten years . . . Gitta Sereny has written a masterpiece' Robert Harris, Sunday Times `An essential experience that conveys like no other book the qualities of the Nazi elite . . . restoring emotion to people we would prefer to regard as soulless machines' David Cesarini, Financial Times `A masterpiece of historical and inquisitorial technique, enables us to understand the ablest, most articulate, and most ambiguous of Hitler's ministers' Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year