ALBERT SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD:

Speer is handsome, charming, cultured, sophisticated, multi-lingual, well-spoken—a real smoothie. AND a very smooth liar.

I thought that Nazis were hot-tempered sadists, degenerates, predators, envious and greedy riff-raff, with cold, cold hearts, maimed perhaps, by cruel, authoritarian parents, a la Alice Miller. Hitler was a Rasputin-like madman, not a son of wealth and culture as Speer was.

I’ve taught Abnormal Psychology and no diagnostic category can convey the level of Speer’s self-regard and amorality. Sociopathic serial killer will not do. Dangerous Freak of Nature, while not a diagnostic category, is more like it.

Speer was the highest-ranking Nazi and one of Hitler’s closest confidantes. Of his meeting with Hitler he says: “It was love at first sight.”

And yet, Speer insists that he was “not guilty.” In fact, he likened himself to Oedipus. “I did not know what crimes I have committed.

Read the whole thing.