Description

An electrifying novel about the Nazi who reinvented himself, Albert Speer

‘Which is the most seductive, truth or fiction?’

This is the story of Albert Speer: The protege. The ‘good Nazi’. The star. The mythmaker.

In 1969 Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, claiming to have known nothing about the Final Solution, he declares himself ‘collectively responsible, but not individually guilty’.

It is one of the greatest lies in history.

Jean-Noel Orengo’s electrifying novel is the story of a man who saved his skin through the countless fictions he created about himself. A man with a talent for survival, who dazzled those around him with his monuments to power and then, escaping death, reinvented himself as a bestselling author. A man once described as the Fuhrer’s unrequited love.

It is a story of power and ambition, self-interest and self-deceit – and what happens in a war over the truth.

Publisher Review

Portraying Speer’s trajectory from urban planner to minister for armaments (and, eventually, jail after the Nuremberg trials), it unfolds as a chillingly ordinary workplace drama. . . Orengo’s highly effective storytelling technique mixes an elegant filleting of secondary sources with crisp reflections of truth and falsehood * Daily Mail * A wonderfully intelligent and radical portrait of Albert Speer. Fascinating, a triumph — William Boyd