Even as he recounts his frosty final meeting with Hitler, Speer rushes to take credit for the special spotlights he had made to illuminate the Führer at his rallies.Ĥ0 years after his death, Speer’s moment in Hollywood, a chilling true reckoning of his career, has arrived, with his own words damning his account. The Speer who feigns ignorance of the death camps - or deluded himself into believing he knew nothing - visited Mauthausen, and was aware of the deadly conditions of his own forced laborers. “Speer Goes to Hollywood,” Vanessa Lapa’s Ophir Award-winning documentary recreates the contents of Birkin’s tapes, down to the scuttling of chairs and pouring of aperitifs, shattering Speer’s reputation as a repentant, or even a “Good Nazi.” In candid conversation, set to a staggering array of archival footage, Speer reveals himself to be a vainglorious opportunist convinced of his intelligence and talent and intent on airbrushing his own complicity in the Nazis’ highest crimes as the minister of armaments and munitions.īy following the arc of his life and the pages of Birkin’s screenplay, Lapa and her collaborators have assembled something like the proposed big screen adaptation, but one that challenges Speer’s narrative with evidence from the Nuremberg Trials and Speer’s own bigotry caught on tape.
But Birkin recorded their conversations and - pivotally - kept them. The film Speer wanted was never made, and his meetings with screenwriter Andrew Birkin - a Stanley Kubrick protegé who would go on to co-write films like “The Name of the Rose,” - may have remained yet another Hollywood curiosity among the long list of scuppered Paramount projects. Speer, then a regular on European television programs, agreed.
DeMille spectacle,” Speer’s publisher said in an archival video. “The problem is it can’t be a Hollywood movie, depicting the Third Reich as a Cecil B. Albert Speer, the Nazi architect who built a Cathedral of Light for Hitler and commanded millions of prisoners in the forced production of weaponry, had a comfortable second life.Īfter serving 20 years in prison, Speer became a best-selling author, penning the memoir “Inside The Third Reich.” Naturally, in 1971, he and his publisher were interested in a film adaptation.
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