Dismantling the lies of Nazi Albert Speer

Selected for the 2024 “Le Monde” Literary Prize

For a long time, Jean-Noël Orengo did not “didn’t know” what he wrote with ” You are the Führer’s unhappy love”Today, he speaks to “Le Monde des livres” about this « roman » (this is how the cover presents it, generically), its fifth, as a “counter-fiction”or an example of “narrative and hybrid non-fiction” on Albert Speer (1905-1981). The latter was Hitler’s favorite architect and, from February 1942, his minister of armaments; sentenced to twenty years in prison at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, the former Nazi dignitary ended up becoming “A star of German guilt”explains Jean-Noël Orengo, notably thanks to his book of MemoirsIn the heart of III^e Reich (Fayard, 1971).

The writer, born in 1975, read it at the age of 25 and was captivated by this « figure romanesque » and by “the embodiment of the artist-powerful man couple” that Speer formed with Hitler, “like a terrible caricature of the tandem of Julius II and Michelangelo [au XVI^e siècle] ». This reading left him “troubled”Also, “without understanding why.” Over the years, as his mind regularly returned to the idea of ​​a novel about Speer, historians shed light on his unease: by pretending to confess, the architect never stopped lying. As early as the Nuremberg trials, he assured that he had not been aware of the policy of exterminating the Jews, with a force of conviction sufficient to avoid the death penalty. In 1971, two years after the original publication ofIn the heart of III^e Reichthe American Erich Goldhagen demonstrates the impossibility of this ignorance. Others will follow, but the “seduction” ” Speer’s version of events remains.

And then, “seven or eight years ago”Jean-Noël Orengo discovers Albert Speer. His fight with the truthby Gitta Sereny (Seuil, 1997). The British journalist and historian (1921-2012), born in Austria, attended the Nuremberg trials; in 1978, she interviewed Speer at length, with whom she later became friends; she waited almost fifteen years after his death before writing her book. The latter is for Orengo “a great gesture” in what it shows “the story of a relationship between a historian and her living object of study, the prodigious simultaneity of two generally disjointed times: the lived time of historical passions and the subsequent time of historians and their narration.” When he gets down to it, later, “during confinement”to his project on Speer, “the extraordinary character that is Sereny, this Jewish woman who was determined to confront evil and who became friends with her subject” his “give the thread”. It allows him to put his finger on the nesting of fictions that is Albert Speer, and on the idea thatIn the heart of III^e Reich is a “radical autofiction before its time: its aim is not to reveal the truth, but to hide it ».

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