13,175 Miles Around the Yard

He was literally the master builder of the Third Reich--designing the monumental edifices that fulfilled his Fuehrer's passion for grandeur--as well as the man who kept the Nazi war machine supplied. Now Albert Speer is content with more modest projects: writing his memoirs. When it was published six years ago, his Inside the Third Reich--a devastatingly intimate look at life within Hitler's inner circle--became an instant bestseller in West Germany and reached a wide audience abroad. The onetime Nazi architect in chief and Minister of Armaments and War Production has now completed a second memoir called Spandauer Tagebuecher (Spandau Diaries). Appearing in serialized form in the West German daily Die Welt beginning next week, the Diaries cover Speer's years as an inmate in West Berlin's Spandau War Crimes Prison for forcing millions of non-Germans to work as slave laborers in the Third Reich's factories during World War II.*

Speer's new book may well stir as much interest as his first. Many historians agreed with the judgment of Britain's H.R. Trevor-Roper that he was the brightest of the top Nazis. The focus of the new work is narrower than that of his memoir of the Nazi years, since it peers introspectively at the author's difficult adjustment to life in prison.

Lax Guards. In an interview last week with TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron, Speer explained the background in which the book was written, stressing that his confinement in Spandau had a greater personal meaning for him than his important role in Nazi Germany. One reason is that the Nazi era lasted only twelve years, while Speer remained jailed in Spandau until 1966--a full 20 years. Originally built to house about 600 convicts, the mammoth, rust-red prison was requisitioned after World War II by the Allies for the sole purpose of locking up Speer and six other senior Nazi officials. To this day the U.S., Russia, Britain and France maintain a special commission (and a guard force of 25 to 30 men each) to run Spandau; its only inmate is Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess, 81, serving a life sentence./-

Because he was never very close to his fellow inmates ("No one trusted anyone else"), Speer sought some kind of relationship with the guards. "They were not vicious," he told TIME's Byron. "Except for the Russians, they tended to be lax about minor infractions of the rules. At first, prison rules were aimed at keeping us in the dark regarding political developments. If it were not for the guards, for instance, we would never have known that the Russians had blockaded Berlin and that an airlift was under way." Later, however, the prisoners were allowed to read newspapers and books.

Reading provided a major outlet for Speer's mental energy. "Spandau was truly my education," he muses. Allowed to borrow from Berlin's libraries, Speer sometimes devoured as many as 50 books a month. He also became an enthusiastic gardener. "It became my salvation," he confessed last week. Terracing, weeding and pruning, he worked at the plot in the prison yard four or five hours daily. "I became something of a landscape architect, you might say," he says--a joking reference to the architectural skills that originally brought him to the attention of Hitler.

Because writing was specifically proscribed by prison rules, Speer had to work on his memoirs secretly. Using sheets of toilet tissue, the backs of calendar pages and scraps of note paper, he wrote in an almost indecipherably small scrawl. Then he hid the notes under the sole lining of a shoe or inside a bandage kept wrapped around a leg to relieve his phlebitis. To smuggle out the scraps, Speer had the help of a few friendly guards. One of them was a Dutchman who served as a forced laborer in German factories during the war, but received what he felt was decent treatment.

Speer's dogged perseverance is demonstrated in one passage of the Diaries. It describes the following meeting with Hess during their regular walks around the prison courtyard: "One more hour to the Bering Straits, Mr. Hess," said Speer cryptically. When Hess stared back uncomprehendingly, Speer explained: "Years ago, you told me to count the number of times I walk around the yard. We also talked about turning the daily exercises into a big excursion. Well, we have just completed our 78,514th round and thus--on our excursion--we should be able to see the Bering Straits in the fog." "You've done that all these years," stammered Hess incredulously. "Yes, I have," replied Speer. "Eight years, five months and ten days. All in all, 13,175 miles."

From the Rubble. Speer, 70, now can do his walking in the yard of his home near Heidelberg, high above the Neckar River where he lives comfortably with his wife Margarete. He occasionally speaks to student groups about the experience of the Nazi years, but tries to avoid commenting on present-day politics. When asked whether he sees any application of the Nuremberg principles to the U.S. role in Viet Nam, he answers: "It is not for the judged to judge the judge." Even though Speer is the only ranking Nazi to emerge from the rubble of the Third Reich with his dignity somewhat intact, it is unlikely that he will ever free himself completely from the opprobrium of having been so dedicated a servant of Nazism. When it was discovered in 1971, for example, that he had taken a hiking trip to Norway, Oslo promptly declared rum persona non grata.

* The book will be published in the U.S. by Macmillan next year under the title Inside the Walls of Spandau.

/- Of the other original inmates, Walther Funk, head of the Reichsbank, Czechoslovakia's Nazi Boss Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, and Admirals Erich Rae-der and Karl Doenitz were released either after completing their sentences or because of failing health.

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