Albert Speer

A panoramic historical drama about the man whose devotion to Hitler blinded him to the worst crime of the twentieth century, drawing closely on Gita Sereny's definitive and magisterial biography of Albert Speer. Plucked from obscurity to be Hitler's architect and Minister of War, Albert Speer became the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany and the closest Hitler had to a friend. Having narrowly escaped hanging at Nuremberg, Speer emerged from twenty years at Spandau gaol, as he thought, a changed man. But even as he publishes his bestselling accounts of the Third Reich, the extent of his complicity in Nazi crimes returns to haunt him and his long-suffering family. David Edgar's play Albert Speer was first performed in the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre, London, in May 2000.