Albert Speer was Hitler's architect before the Second World War. Through Hitler's great trust in him and Speer's own genius for organisation he became, effectively from 1942 overlord of the entire war economy, making him the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in Spandau Prison at the Nuremberg Trails, Speer attempted to progress from moral extinction to moral self-education. How he came to terms with his own acts and failures to act and his real culpability in Nazi war crimes are the questions at the centre of this book. The author had access to Speer, his family and friends and his private papers.