The war criminal as artist

O Lucky Man! These are some of the many flukes Albert Speer enjoyed: he was lucky that his drawing was so poor that the fantastical expressionist Hans Poelzig rejected him as a pupil and that he thus had no choice but to study under, and be inculcated by, Heinrich Tessenow, whose own work was strangely mute and uninflected; he was lucky that a mere three minor commissions from the Nazis, which he had joined because it was Hitler 's party rather than for any other reason, led him straight to Hitler; he was lucky that the heavy-handed Paul Ludwig Troost, who was Hitler's favourite architect, died just a year after the seizure of power; he was lucky not to have swung at Nuremberg; in death he has been lucky to have attracted biographers who, while not exactly apologists, have accorded him such cautious and unseemly respect that he has become the very model of the "decent" war criminal.

Why has he been so posthumously lucky? The notion that he was "an artist", hence somehow exempt from moral norms, probably comes into play. His ponderous sophistry and talent for mutability evidently took in those who met him. But most of all, it was his sheer demeanour of courteous normality that served him so well: he was the apparent straight man in a galere of fanatics and freaks. Equivocation is the bane visited on Speer 's assessors. The man was surely too urbane, too civilised to have been complicit in the enormities and terrors of the Third Reich - from which he gave the impression of having been semi-detached.

Joachim Fest is the author of what remains, after a quarter of a century, perhaps the most scrupulous biography of Hitler. He scrutinises his new subject with coolness, poise, obliqueness. He creates a Speer who is credible. You know the type: it is never at ease with its own level, it can only hero-worship or despise. He has Speer as diffident yet supremely ambitious, passive but infected by architectural megalomania. The man is presented as a chameleon with a worrying capacity for self-delusion.

He possessed the ability to shed his former selves. How else could the slave master have become the "Titan of penitence"? He protested his criminality with an expiatory zeal bordering on the masochistic and thus abetted the creation of the moral template to which Germans of generations after his rather routinely adhere. They confess to the crimes of their grandparents with the same eagerness that informed their grandparents' commission of those crimes.

Speer's confessional candour was not, of course, entire. While, as a member of Hitler 's government, he admitted responsibility for its crimes, he denied that he actually knew of the genocide although he "sensed" it and would allow merely that he owned "a tacit acceptance of the persecution and murder". Fest has no doubt that Speer was indeed quite apprised of the annihilation. But this is a question to which Gitta Sereny has devoted much attention and Fest is disinclined to rehearse the repertoire of Speer's casuistical evasions. So far as he is concerned, the paramount question is the nature of the relationship between Speer and Hitler. Speer was not the first fastidious aesthete to have been seduced by the aura of a "primal being", (that epithet is the historian Otto Hintze's). Fest shrewdly notes that the bond between them is seldom inspected from Hitler 's point of view. Speer enjoyed a licence in the presence of Hitler that was granted to no one else.

The envious hatred this fomented is well recorded. Speer was, to use an archaic public school expression, Hitler 's "little boy". This does not suggest an even platonically homosexual relationship but a liaison characterised by the elder 's flirtatious patronage and the younger 's insolent idolatry. Speer lit up Hitler 's being in a way that no other human did and Hitler, in gratitude, made Speer, empowered him and caused him to blossom into the architect that he himself had wished to be.

Speer's work, pace Fest, is much more than a bombastic continuation of Troost's banal classicism. It is infected by a frightening primitivism. Speer was the Nazis' liturgist. Standing in the ruins of the Zeppelinfeld at Nuremberg, one feels oneself in the presence of horrible and ancient mysteries that were invented only 70 years ago. It is the site of the ceremonies of a barbarous cult that seems as remote as the Aztecs. The only solace to be had is in the knowledge that Speer's cathedrals of light have been appropriated by rock bands with effeminate clothes and satyric groins.