Golden Boy. Paula Astridge
he confessed it to the twelve jurors. Standing in the witness box, he admitted it quite calmly. With his hands holding fast to the thigh-high wooden railing, he leant his body a little forward for emphasis when he said it: ‘I am guilty. I am guilty. I take full responsibility for the crimes.’
That was an admission that those other ten refused to make. Theirs was an evasion of responsibility that had nothing to do with cowardice, but with their sincere belief that they were innocent. All of them insisted that they had fought for a truth and were unfairly condemned to die for it. Yet to Speer it was more unfair still to be kept alive to live for it.
First though, he had to live through the appalling night of terror that preceded their executions. In vain, he tried to deafen his ears to the nightmarish sound of those ‘ten dead men walking’. All of them, in rank and file and with their accusing eyes turned in his direction, shuffled past his cell and down the corridor to their doom — the execution chamber which was their last point of call on Earth.
That night, Speer’s courage failed him. With his frantic, white-knuckled grasp on his cell bars to steady himself, he realised his words had been cheap. Who was he fooling? He wasn’t prepared to die either for The Cause or for his part in it. The truth was that he was paralysed with fear, petrified at the prospect of having to die like that. His trembling legs buckled at the knees as he fell to the floor to pray. He rattled off a feverish prayer of thanks; not for those 10 men who, at that very moment, were coming face to face with their own mortality, but because he wasn’t the one with the rope around his neck.
Coming to terms with his own limitations, however, did not help block out the horror. He heard it all — his compatriots’ every last word as they went down fighting. Their final pleas for mercy, their gurgled moans of agony, and worst of all — that ‘lump-in-the-throat, flag-flying’ moment, when the last man stood defiant; saluted and voiced his undying loyalty to Leader and Cause.
Then followed the sounds of silence — an eerie, sickening quiet that said they were all dead. Gone. Just like that. Their spirits quickly dispatched. All ten of those vicious men whose voices and vices had dictated the ways of the world had been bundled onto an express elevator to Hell.
In their wake was a void, a loud, accusing silence that roared in Speer’s ears and spurred the thud of his heart into gallop. Its pounding beat pacing the chaos of his conscience and causing its guilty inner voice to shriek out: ‘Shame, shame, shame!’
If he’d had the means to do it he could have slit his wrists right then and there. But the guards had closed off that escape hatch by stripping his cell clean. They had removed from it any implement that might serve as a means of suicide, which was an act of morbid diligence on their part. However in Speer’s case it was wasted effort. Whether through cowardice or courage, he was a man determined to survive.
That’s why, after sitting for three full days on the edge of his prison bunk in a mind-numbing despondency, he managed to drag himself up and out of his deep depression. He had no choice. He was stuck in this dark pit of despair for the rest of his life. The stark, grey nothingness of his new world’s stone walls were to be his home for the next 20 years.
The reality was that he had no present and no future. But he did have the past; and that they could never take from him. He would frame it, focus on it and cling to its irresistible memories until the day he died.
PART ONE
GROWING PAINS
CHAPTER ONE
There was no disputing the fact that Albert Speer got where he wanted to go by design. Talent and intent, however, are two vastly different things. And being in possession of the first did not necessarily mean he was guilty of the second.
Yet that was the way the world saw it, laying on him the blame for what had happened. What did it matter whether or not his involvement in the Holocaust had been hands-on? He was there and that was that — enough evidence in the eyes of the horrified human race to hold him responsible and to hound him to his grave.
At the age of ten however, Albert Speer had a long way to go before reaching that end and for the time being only had to cope with the fact that he was down and out.
It was for the third time in a week that a perfectly healthy boy fell flat on his face in a dead faint.
‘What on earth’s the matter with him this time?’ his mother, Frau Luise Speer, asked.
‘Bad blood circulation,’ the doctor replied as he detached the stethoscope and folded the rubber cords back into his black, medicine bag.
‘Well what are we supposed to do with him?’ Frau Speer’s voice picked up pace with anxiety at the sound of the clock chiming in the hall. It alerted her to the fact that her prestigious assembly of guests would be arriving for luncheon within the hour.
‘Live with it!’ the doctor advised with an austerity that matched her own.
His less-than-commendable bedside manner was perfectly acceptable to Frau Speer. She liked people who got straight to the point rather than dance around it with what they called ‘finer feelings’. Unfortunately, Albert was full to the brim of the wretched things, an emotional overload that, together with his skinny body, nervy movements and complex network of highly-strung emotions did not appeal to her one iota.
This ice-hearted austerity of hers, however, came nowhere near matching that of her husband’s, whose astonishing disinterest in his middle-placed son and namesake, Albert, broke all bounds of fatherly neglect.
‘He’s far too sickly to ever amount to much,’ he announced within his son’s earshot as Albert lay shaking and sweating all over his mother’s prized chaise longue. For that, Albert had already been soundly reprimanded by his Mama. Her distress over the damage done to its expensive French fabric had marked her beautiful but implacable brow with lines of concern — lines much deeper than those imposed by her son’s mystery illness. Both, however, threatened to mar her perfect peaches-and-cream complexion. A source of pride for her at the age of 30, which, but for her second son, would still be flawless.
Albert, it was always Albert! Quite honestly, there were times when she could not bear the sight of him. Times like these when she had to admit that, basically, she just didn’t like him. She found his thoughtful, intense presence oppressive, as if he were forever expecting some intangible thing from her that she could not give. Love, she supposed.
He could forget that idea! These days, she hadn’t the time or inclination to expend any more of it. Not with her hectic social schedule and when she had already drained her restricted resources of that particular commodity in favour of her two other sons: Hermann, her eldest, who was bursting with athletic prowess and future promise, and little Ernst, her youngest, whose beguiling blue-eyed, blonde-haired precocity made him the apple of everyone’s eye.
Yet this was exactly her point. If Albert wanted his share of her, then why didn’t he have the pluck to push himself forward and demand it, as did her other two sweet boys? Why did he persist, instead with such tiresome displays of emotional blackmail?
These regular fainting fits were enough to drive a saint mad. Albert’s mother, who fell fathoms short of the like, could more readily accept the doctor’s diagnosis than the possibility that Albert might be suffering from something more deep-seated than thin blood. It never crossed her mind that the root of his problem was stress as a result of the constant bullying he received from his two brothers and the conspicuous absence of love and attention from his parents.
‘Shut up!’ Albert’s 12 year old brother, Hermann, hissed at him the day before, as he rammed home his command with one, then two swift, savage kicks to Albert’s stomach. A third aimed at his head for good measure.
This was Albert’s punishment for having let out a yelp of acute pain after Hermann slammed the kitchen door fair in his face and watched with glee as Albert, for a stunned moment, stood stock-still with his body reverberating before