As in Robert Frost's poem, on the internet I often take the road less travelled by, which brings me to some surprising sources of information I had never known existed. And so it was when I read about Heinrich Breloer, a German author and film director, who has mainly worked on docudramas related to modern German history, which took me to the three-part docudrama "Speer and Hitler", described as a milestone in the understanding of Nazi Germany by the German people.
If Hitler had had a friend, it would have been Albert Speer. Dashing and worldly, Speer became one of the superstars of the Third Reich. Afterwards, the Nuremberg Trials gave him a stage on which he could shine again: he now became the good Nazi. Among the accused, he was the only one to openly welcome the trials as a necessary duty. With disarming conviction, he told his prosecutors that he was neither involved in nor aware of the Holocaust. Saving himself from execution, he was sentenced to only 20 years of prison. At Spandau Prison he wrote his biography, which became a best-seller all over the world.
It took Bavaria Film and one of the most respected filmmakers in European television, Heinrich Breloer, over 12 million euros, years of research in Germany, Washington, London and Moscow, 125 hours of interviews with Speer's children and other eyewitnesses, and the processing of 20,000 pages of Speer's diaries. Not to mention the meticulously detailed reconstruction of authentic sets.
