Michael's Reviews > Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed to Build an SS Industrial Empire

I wrote the below review about two years ago, in 2016, and have since gone ahead and read the book from cover to cover. I still agree with most of what it says - this book is boring, technical, and highly subjective - but I'm going to upgrade it one star because it was possible for me to finish it. I actually think where this book will be most valuable to historians is in piecing together Speer's ambiguous postwar legacy, and in that sense it's a shame that Gitta Sereny didn't give it more attention in Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. I also had some problems with the translation, especially the inconsistent translations of SS ranks, which made it hard at times to figure out who was superior to whom. The book ends with a series of "appendices" which are more like incomplete chapters or essays that didn't fit into the rest of the book. This may be more common in German publishing, but the fact that the American publisher left it in is a testament to their perception that a new Speer book would sell well, no matter how rambling and dull it was.

I’m provisionally giving this book 1 star, because I tried twice to read it and got too bored to finish. That was half my life ago, however, and someday I’m going to need to return to it and read it as a more mature, educated person. Looking it over again, I think it might be more interesting than I thought. For now, however, I’m going to try to reproduce my twentysomething criticisms.

Albert Speer wrote this book after his considerable success with “Inside the Third Reich” and “Spandau,” hoping no doubt for another success as the moderate, contrite voice of the Nazi high echelons. He claims to have started it with the intention of writing a history of the armaments industry in Germany during World War Two, the area for which his ministry was responsible. But, he says, as he went through the documents of the time, he discovered how the powerful and vast bureaucracy of the S.S. had fought him at every turn, and how Himmler had hoped to make his organization the dominant power in the postwar Reich, and that is what he wrote about instead.

I said that I found this book boring, and that was my biggest problem with it at the time I read it. Most of it consists of highly technical details about materials, factories, production numbers, and official and unofficial conferences. It is not a memoir or biography, nor is it a discussion of the most heinous acts of the S.S., it is an exploration of their interference with private industry, and that isn’t going to appeal to many readers. (It may be a valuable historical record, however, which is part of why I want to come back to it). The other problem is that Speer has fallen into the trap of reproducing his own rivalries with Himmler and others in the Nazi hierarchy (including Bormann, Lammers, and Goering) from his subjective viewpoint, without seeing that he was as much a part of the “problem” of a squabbling and back-stabbing court as his enemies were. In choosing Himmler as his villain, he also reproduces the “alibi of a nation” argument – it wasn’t me, it was the guys in black hats (and uniforms) that did all the evil of the Third Reich. (In that sense, however, the book may more accurately reflect Speer’s weaknesses as a witness).

If you are serious about detailed study of the technical workings or intrigues of the Third Reich, this book may have some value, but it is not an interesting read, and its biases are only too clear. Fair warning.