Albert Speer (1905–1981) was Hitler’s personal architect, his trusted man and protégé; he became Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production—and by the end of the war, he was the second most influential person in Nazi Germany. Speer was also the only one of twenty-two Nazi leaders who, at the Nuremberg Trials, took on the burden of guilt for the Reich’s war crimes. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, which he served in Spandau together with six other high-ranking Nazis—Gess, Reder, Shirach, Funk, Neurath, and Dönitz.
For twenty years, Speer recorded his memoirs in microscopic handwriting on toilet paper, tobacco wrappers, and calendar sheets—while sympathetic guards secretly smuggled them out into freedom. In this way, out of 25,000 scattered pages, two books were created: “Memoirs” and “Spandau: The Secret Diary.”