Hitler, Göring, Speer and Co.  
By Harry F. Waters
Newsweek, May 10, 1982

        Mel Brooks was wrong.  It’s not just “Springtime for Hitler,” it’s prime time for Hitler—with every television season bringing yet another variation on tales of the Third Reich.  Just about the only perspective of note that hasn’t been explored is that of Albert Speer, the Führer’s personal architect and close confidant, whose 1970 memoirs provided a fascinating worm’s-eye view of the whole Nazi edifice.  Now ABC, in a five-hour dramatization that will be broadcast over two nights next week, has adapted Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich” into an extraordinarily intelligent TV portrait of the human face of evil.
      Speer, who wrote his autobiography while serving time as a war criminal in Spandau prison, was the only member of Hitler’s hierarchy to acknowledge his guilt at the Nuremberg trials.  As he later told it, his awareness of his own complicity began almost from the moment that Hitler first bewitched him, and it is his moral wrestling match between revulsion and opportunism that powers the ABC mini-series.  At the age of 28, Speer’s architectural prowess had won him entrée to Hitler’s inner circle; he soon emerged as the Reich’s master technocrat, directing a huge industrial complex.  It wasn’t until the defeated Führer ordered him to supervise the razing of every German town that Speer finally unmuffled his conscience and defied his Mephistopheles.
      As Speer, Dutch actor Rutger Hauer delivers a brilliantly controlled performance, registering with subtle precision the glimmerings of self-hatred that lurked behind Speer’s dispassionate mask.  Though Britain’s Derek Jacobi looks about as much like Adolf Hitler as Archie Bunker, he evokes the Führer with masterful verve.  Audiences conditioned to seeing Hitler depicted as a crazed Caligula may find Jacobi’s interpretation unsettlingly sympathetic.  Besides capturing the choleric rages, Jacobi shows us a man who could frolic in the snow like a schoolboy, tearfully choke up over an architectural blueprint and perform hilarious dinner party impressions of Mussolini and Chamberlain. His is a Hitler who, as one character archly observes, “belongs in the theater, not the Reichstag.”
      Seduced: Students of Speer’s memoirs may miss the author’s ruminations on his life’s most chilling lesson:  how easily the purely technological mind can be seduced by an ideology that offers the world for a workshop.  The absence of such thoughtful substance in the TV adaptation can be attributed to the medium’s need for visual pyrotechnics.  Less understandable are the liberties taken with the book’s supporting cast.  Speer’s wife (Blythe Danner) has been transformed from a timidly compliant helpmate into a vociferous opponent of the Hitler regime.  And the brutish Hermann Göring comes across here as a rouged and mascaraed simp, a kind of Nazi Liberace.
      Nonetheless, “Inside the Third Reich” works because it is precisely what its title says it is—an inside study of the Hitler era.  The show was filmed entirely on location in West Germany, directed with admirable restraint by Marvin Chomsky and graced with vivid cameos by Ian Holm (as Joseph Goebbels), Trevor Howard, Robert Vaughn and the ubiquitous John Gielgud.  It proves that even history’s most overtilled soil can still yield fresh dramatic fruit.  In a candid moment, a network executive explained to me why storm-trooper black has become so fashionable on the tube.  “It’s the safest way to portray violence,” he confided.  “I mean, who can protest the past?”  For once cynicism in the pursuit of ratings has turned out to be more virtue than vice.

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