Matthias Schmidt (born 1952) is a German historian and author who first revealed in a university dissertation and then in the book, Albert Speer: The End of a Myth, the role that Albert Speer had played in the Holocaust. [1] [2]
Schmidt earned his doctorate at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute for Historical Research at the Free University of Berlin. In 1980 he was given privileged access to the personal chronicle (diary) of Albert Speer that had hitherto been held privately by Rudolf Wolters, the long time friend and collaborator of Speer. After Speer's death Schmidt published a dissertation and then a book that for the first time detailed Speer's expulsion of the Jews from their Berlin homes and accused Speer of lying about his involvement in the Holocaust. [3] [4] [5]
Schmidt wrote Albert Speer: The End of a Myth. The book was reviewed by Henry A. Turner Jr. in The New York Times . Turner wrote "By demolishing Speer's carefully tailored image of himself, Matthias Schmidt has contributed to setting the record straight" and "Through some resourceful research, he has compiled an impressive catalogue of discrepancies between Speer's postwar versions of his career and the documented record, which Mr. Schmidt has augmented with some hitherto unused materials". [1] A review in Kirkus said "from records in the possession of Speer's closest associate, and other researches, German historian Schmidt (Free Univ. of Berlin) sets forth Speer's verifiable role in the Nazi hierarchy and his literary strategems to conceal it. The documentation is damning, the account stinging." [5]
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer was a German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and led Amt Rosenberg, an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941–1945). After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He was sentenced to death and executed on 16 October 1946.
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust denial involves making one or more of the following false statements:
Inside the Third Reich is a memoir written by Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments from 1942 to 1945, serving as Adolf Hitler's main architect before this period. It is considered to be one of the most detailed descriptions of the inner workings and leadership of Nazi Germany but is controversial because of Speer's lack of discussion of Nazi atrocities and questions regarding his degree of awareness or involvement with them. First published in 1969, it appeared in English translation in 1970.
Gitta Sereny, CBE was an Austrian-British biographer, historian, and investigative journalist who came to be known for her interviews and profiles of infamous figures, including Mary Bell, who was convicted in 1968 of killing two children when she herself was a child, and Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp.
Joachim Clemens Fest was a German historian, journalist, critic and editor who was best known for his writings and public commentary on Nazi Germany, including a biography of Adolf Hitler and books about Albert Speer and German resistance to Nazism. He was a leading figure in the debate among German historians about the Nazi era.
Hermann Adolf Reinhold Rauschning was a German politician and author, adherent of the Conservative Revolution movement who briefly joined the Nazi movement before breaking with it. He was the President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig from 1933 to 1934. In 1934, he renounced Nazi Party membership and in 1936 emigrated from Germany. He eventually settled in the United States and began openly denouncing Nazism. Rauschning is chiefly known for his book Gespräche mit Hitler in which he claimed to have had many meetings and conversations with Adolf Hitler.
The Destruction of the European Jews is a 1961 book by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus, until the book appeared, little information about the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany had "reached the wider public" in both the West and the East, and even in pertinent scholarly studies it was "scarcely mentioned or only mentioned in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war".
Rudolf Wolters was a German architect and government official, known for his longtime association with fellow architect and Third Reich official Albert Speer. A friend and subordinate of Speer, Wolters received the many papers which were smuggled out of Spandau Prison for Speer while he was imprisoned there, and kept them for him until Speer was released in 1966. After Speer's release, the friendship slowly collapsed, Wolters objecting strongly to Speer's blaming of Hitler and other Nazis for the Holocaust and World War II, and they saw nothing of each other in the decade before Speer's death in 1981.
David Leslie Hoggan was an American author of The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed and other works in the German and English languages. He was antisemitic, maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi groups, chose a publishing house run by an unregenerate Nazi, and engaged in Holocaust denial.
The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich is a book by British historian Ian Kershaw that was first published in 1987.
William D. Rubinstein is a historian and author. His best-known work, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, charts the rise of the 'super rich', a class he sees as expanding exponentially.
The sexuality of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, has long been a matter of historical and scholarly debate, as well as speculation and rumour. There is evidence that he had relationships with a number of women during his lifetime, as well as evidence of his antipathy to homosexuality, and no evidence of homosexual encounters. His name has been linked to a number of possible female lovers, two of whom committed suicide. A third died of complications eight years after a suicide attempt, and a fourth also attempted suicide.
Martin Kitchen is a British-Canadian historian, who has specialized in modern European history, with an emphasis on Germany. He is internationally regarded as a key author for the study of contemporary history.
Nazi architecture is the architecture promoted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime from 1933 until its fall in 1945, connected with urban planning in Nazi Germany. It is characterized by three forms: a stripped neoclassicism, typified by the designs of Albert Speer; a vernacular style that drew inspiration from traditional rural architecture, especially alpine; and a utilitarian style followed for major infrastructure projects and industrial or military complexes. Nazi ideology took a pluralist attitude to architecture; however, Hitler himself believed that form follows function and wrote against "stupid imitations of the past".
The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality is a 2002 book by German historian Wolfram Wette which discusses the Myth of the clean Wehrmacht. The original German-language book was translated into five languages; the English edition was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press. The book builds on Omer Bartov's 1985 study The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare. The book received a positive reception.
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant are the published memoirs of Otto Wagener about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party's early history. A German major general by the end for World War II, Wagnener was, for a period, Hitler's party economist, chief of staff of the SA, and personal confidant. His career was derailed by rival Hermann Göring.
Speer: Hitler's Architect is a biography of Albert Speer written in 2015 by Martin Kitchen.
Speer Goes to Hollywood is a 2020 Israeli documentary by director Vanessa Lapa, starring Albert Speer. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020 as part of the Berlinale Special. The Israeli premiere took place as part of the official competition of the Jerusalem Film Festival 2021, where Lapa won the Diamond Award for directing. The American premiere took place at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. The film won the Best Documentary by the Israeli Academy - Ophir Award for the year 2021.
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939-45 is a 2010 non-fiction book by the British historian Roger Moorhouse about everyday life in Berlin during World War II, as seen from the viewpoint of its residents. The book draws on diaries, letters, newspaper articles and other written accounts by ordinary Germans who lived in Berlin, but also prominent officials of the Third Reich such as Joseph Goebbels or Albert Speer, as well as foreign journalists, Berlin's Jews, and others. Many of these accounts weren't published before.