Spandau

Albert Speer rose to become Adolf Hitler's personal architect and later directed the war economy of the Third Reich, which included overseeing the forced labor of foreign workers. After Nuremberg, where he was the only defendant to admit guilt, he was sentenced to prison and began a secret diary, mostly written on scraps of toilet paper. Two decades later, when his imprisonment ended, about 25,000 smuggled pages were waiting for him. He drew on these entries to write this book.

The memoir follows Speer through his years inside Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he served his sentence alongside other former Nazi leaders, including Rudolf Hess. The diary records daily routines, his efforts to make sense of his past, and the isolation of a prisoner whose life had once been bound up with the regime's most ambitious building projects.

Written as a firsthand account of a single, confined life, the book will appeal to readers interested in the Nazi era from the inside, in the personal experience of its senior figures, and in how a former insider reckoned with his own role.