Albert Speer presents Hitler with the model of the German pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1937. – Belga
He was Hitler’s favorite. He appreciated him so much that he made him his Minister of Armaments in 1942 and spent nights dreaming with him of the urban overhaul of Berlin and the scenography of the Nazi ideal. Albert Speer, the so-called Hitler’s architect, used stone to project the ideological madness of Nazism in megalomaniac projects like the new Reich Chancellery, decorated with sculptures by Arno Breker, another official artist, or the large parade squares transformed into “cathedrals of light” for large party rallies. Speer has always said he knows nothing about the Final Solution project and the existence of the extermination camps. This is what he defended at the Nuremberg trials, this is what he will defend throughout his life, after having served a twenty-year prison sentence. This is what he wrote in At the Heart of the Third Reich, an autobiography published in 1969, a big bestseller through which he did not hesitate to shape the material of a lie to extract a fiction which would become his truth.
The man who thought he was a fiction
From the 1970s, by increasing the number of meetings with Albert Speer, who had become a media star, the historian Gitta Sereny set out to deconstruct the ex-Nazi dignitary’s story of his non-guilty. It was Sereny’s work that pushed Orengo to begin writing “You are the Führer’s unhappy love”, a fascinating book which ventures well beyond the simple biographical novel to closely approach the intimate relationship that were talking to Hitler and his favorite employee. Named on the lists of Renaudot, the Académie française, Interallié and Goncourt, the book aims to expose the malignity and toxicity of a man who took himself for fiction to the point of advance in fake news of history.
In your book on Albert Speer, we see a man whose dishonesty goes so far as to stage his supposed honesty…
JEAN-NOËL ORENGO – That’s exactly it! At the Nuremberg Trials, Albert Speer said “I didn’t know about it, but I am collectively guilty”. He basically says “condemn me,” which saves his sanity. He is sentenced to twenty years in prison, while his deputy is sentenced to death. We want to know if he knew, but he knew since he participated in the project as Minister of Armaments, he is already guilty of that. In 1943, Himmler gave a speech to party members in which he explained that the Final Solution was underway, and who did he thank? He thanks Speer. When it was revealed in 1971, Speer said “I wasn’t there when I was let go”. Whether he was there or not, we don’t care. The important thing is that he is thanked.
He is one of those characters who rewrote history for their benefit…
Albert Speer is a master of narrative, he makes his post-war more interesting than his war because he rewrote the narrative and created an alternative reality which will impose itself as the truth, even when it is demonstrated during his lifetime that he lied. It’s a bit like what we experience every day: who tells us what? Who is the most attractive and who has the most flair?
Even if Hitler had a passion for architecture, how in 1942 did an architect become Minister of Armaments and War Production?
It is the love story – not in the sexual sense – which unites Hitler and Speer which leads to the latter becoming a minister. And Speer succeeds as Minister of Armaments because he is Hitler’s favorite. There is a relationship of fascination between the two men, between the man of power and the man of art. Hence the title of my book which is a real quote from a collaborator who, after leaving a meeting with Hitler and seeing how he behaves with Speer, will say to Speer: “Do you know what you are? ? You are the Führer’s unhappy love”.
A homoerotic relationship
Is this emotional dimension really defensible?
A psychiatrist will say that it is a homoerotic relationship and when we report the matter to Speer, he admits it. And this relationship lasts after the war, Speer lives only in the memory of his Führer… Both have a wife, unlike those around them, they are not runners. Speer was a very handsome man, Hitler was very popular with women, but they are harmless. They are fascinated by each other. Hitler did things with Speer that he did not do with anyone, neither with Goebbels, nor with Himmler with whom he was close, he spent entire nights with Speer discussing models!
Did he give shape to Hitler’s Nazi dream?
Yes, and I think he realized himself as an architect through Hitler. He will translate and sublimate Hitler’s vision. Before, he was an average architect of the time who, after meeting Hitler, fell into a dimension where all architectural rules were broken. We see it in the Germania project which plans the overhaul of Berlin, we see it in stone, but also in the Nuremberg congresses. All this Nazi iconography that we have in our collective unconscious, it was he who codified it – the spotlights, the columns of light, the exaltation of perspectives with stands… Obviously Speer had talent…
“Nazism is the system which carried the relationship between politics and aesthetics furthest.”
You mention another artist from Hitler’s inner circle, the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl who directed The Triumph of the Will on the Nuremberg Congress of 1934 and The Gods of the Stadium on the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936…
And when Leni Riefenstahl films the Nuremberg Congress, she is directing a production, a production imagined by Speer. The question is whether they could have done something else as well in a democratic framework or whether it was Nazism which revealed an evil talent which could only be realized there? Nazism is the system which carried the relationship between politics and aesthetics furthest.
If it had been possible, would you have sought to meet Albert Speer?
I would have tried to meet Albert Speer if I had wanted to write about him during his lifetime, but what made me want to write about him was Gitta Sereny who appears at the end of my novel . I wasn’t interested in writing a biography of a Nazi. His real story ends in 1945, then he becomes the historian of himself through his memoirs and his interventions in the media. At the same time, he is the subject of studies by historians including Gitta Sereny, the one who pushed the description of the ambiguity of the character furthest. I thought there was a book to be made if I could connect these two figures – Albert Speer writing about his life and her writing about Speer’s life. And if I intervene at the end of the book – something I’m not used to doing – it’s because I see a kind of transmission: from him to her, from her to me, and from me to readers.
In what state of mind did you emerge from this intellectual adventure?
I came away stunned, I don’t want to get into folklore but it’s stirring. When we read the description of hangings of children, the tortures, the medical experiments, when we read Himmler’s speech with a crazy inversion of values, these are terrible things. I don’t know how historians like Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s biographer who gets up with him every morning…
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