For the postwar western public he was the most accessible, the most sympathetic of the leaders of the Third Reich. Albert Speer, with his boyish good looks, his disarming honesty, his penchant for self-examination and his clear competence immediately won the respect of his allied interrogators in May 1945, captivated the court at Nuremberg in 1946 and vaulted to celebrity status with the enormous success of his memoirs and prison diaries during the 1960s and 1970s. 1 Through his own writings, the statements and publications of friends and, in the U.S.A., a two-part television motion picture, Speer has come to be seen as a tragic hero by the broad public and, until his death in 1981, as an inexhaustible source of information on the Nazi hierarchy and the results of allied bombing. For some, he has even served as the model of the technocrat manipulated for evil ends by a murderous dictator.* Since the war, only one serious detractor has appeared to denigrate the Speer 'myth', Matthias Schmidt. As part of a general debunking effort, Schmidt argues that Speer was one of the last in Hitler's entourage to lose faith in victory, indeed that he doggedly struggled on into the second week of April 1945. 3 What is the image that Speer propagated? Are his writings to be trusted or should one accept Schmidt's critique? When did Speer actually lose faith in victory and begin to question Hitler's leadership? In exploring the latter problem, the two precediing issues may be illuminated as well. Beginning during his interrogations by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in May 1945, through the Nuremberg proceedings in 1946, and in his four books published after his release from Spandau in 1966, Speer consistently projected himself as the most reasonable of the Third Reich's elite. He portrayed himself as reserved, though informal, never fully committed to the regime, let alone National Socialism. He was, in his estimation, a technocrat. He contended that he was among the first to recognize that victory was impossible and, shortly thereafter, that defeat was inevitable. 4 He described how, despite severe qualms, he came to recognize Hitler's
