Review: Albert Speer

An eloquent play about understanding and responsibility

Albert Speer – Hitler’s architect

The Helsinki City Theatre has been accused of the light-heartedness of the programme. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why the play Albert Speer – Hitler’s Architect, directed by Kari Heiskanen, premiered on the big stage at the beginning of the year.

Of the leaders of Nazi Germany, Albert Speer (1905 – 1981) is one of the least known. His life span has puzzled numerous writers; Speer is and remains enigmatic.

Although Speer joins the National Socialists soon after graduating as an architect, he was not a particularly active player in the party at the time. However, after founding his own architectural office, he begins to receive increasingly extensive works from the Nazi Party. Through them, he gets to know the Leader.

Hitler’s personality has a strong influence on the young architect; in a way, he is enchanted by the dictator’s grandiose visions of the great future of the German people. Hitler takes a liking to Speer’s architecture and over the years sees him as one of his closest confidants. As the world conflagration rages at its worst, Speer becomes Germany’s armaments minister and thus the leader of the entire country’s war economy.

It is only when the war has turned into a harbinger of Germany’s destruction that Speer’s eyes are opened to see Hitler’s folly. Speer opposes Hitler’s scorched earth strategy and sabotages his orders.

After the war, at the Nuremberg trials, Albert Speer is sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Speer is released in 1966. He then published his memoirs on the Third Reich, which became a bestseller in Germany. Later, he published prison diaries and a study called The Slave State. It analyses the structures of the Nazi regime from the perspective of one participant.

Speer’s own literary production, as well as the City Theatre’s performance, give a picture of Speer as a contradictory personality who on the one hand wants the good, but who sees and understands the world around him in a strangely limited way. After being released from prison, he tries to purge himself of the most horrific crime, the execution of six million Jews. Again and again, Speer claims that he was unaware of the concentration camps and their atrocities. The play suggests that Speer must have been aware of the matter.

Kari Heiskanen builds both the big scenes and the backwaters of Speer’s personal accounts with a sure hand. The poignancy of the play rests on the role of the main character, and Asko Sarkola acts it with small gestures, rather dryly but believably. In the performance of almost 30 actors, the other roles are the background and sounding board.

The play will continue at the Helsinki City Theatre this autumn. The performance has clear points of contact with our own time, so it should be seen by as many viewers as possible.

Albert Speer’s story is closely linked to the well-known influencer Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is also loved by the Finnish Christian people. Next year will mark the centenary of his birth. This talented German priest had publicly stood up against Hitler regardless of the dangers, illegally trained priests and helped Jews out of the country. The defiance of the leader of the Third Reich did not go unnoticed: he was banned from teaching and preaching, his travel was restricted, and his seminary was closed. In the final stages of the war, he was executed in the Flossenburg concentration camp.

The publication of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters in 1953 brought him to the attention of the whole world. He was a fighter for whom no sacrifice for the right cause was too expensive. Only in the perfect state of life on this side do you learn to believe,” he wrote to a friend from prison.

When Speer stepped onto the stage of the City Theatre, another book about Boenhoffer was published. This time, the biographer is Elizabeth Raum.