Volume 23, Number 4 · March 18, 1976
The Homecoming
By Neal Ascherson
Spandau: The Secret Diaries
by Albert Speer, translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston
Macmillan, 463 pp., $13.95
At midnight on September 30, 1966, they let Albert Speer out of Spandau. The double gates of the fortress opened, headlights blazed, and two black cars came accelerating down the drive toward us. An explosion of lights from the press; a glimpse of the astonished, tremulously smiling old faces of Schirach and Speer. The Berliners around me, massed in the darkness up a grassy bank, clapped a little but raised no cheer. I was aware of their emotion as we waited in silence, and thought at first that it was political: if not explicitly pro-Nazi, then at least nationalist. But when they clapped and murmured, I understood. Speer was a 'Heimkehrer' to them, the personification of the tens of thousands who had trickled home from foreign captivity over the years and of those who would never return. He was home again, one more member of the German family limping back out of the night.
Review, 2480 words
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