Speer Goes to Hollywood
                                                                                                 
Director: Vanessa Lapa
Year: 2020
Rating: 6.5
Well, I am of the opinion that everyone in Nazi Germany who had anything to do with the war effort and anything to do with the concentration camps and anything to do with the forced labor should have been tried, found guilty and executed. That so few people were is criminal. And certainly, Albert Speer should have executed rather than sentenced for 20 years and then freed to write a best-selling book and live a comfortable life. I feel the same way today about the Trump administration.

This is a strange documentary that you don't realize till the end credits is a bit of a cheat. After Speer's book Inside the Third Reich that whitewashes his involvement became a big deal, Paramount thought it would be a great idea to make a film of it. They sent Andrew Birkin to work with Speer in 1971 on the script and they spent weeks together doing so and recording all of their conversations. These conversations going through Speer's life mixed in with historical footage of Speer, Hitler, the war, the camps, the Nuremberg Trials etc make up the film. It is horrifying juxtaposing these friendly conversations against the footage. Speer was a monster using millions of forced labor from prisons to build armaments. Thousands died. Were tortured. And Speer says he had no idea.

Birkin who had worked with Kubrick almost becomes a collaborator in the whitewashing. He keeps suggesting ways to soften Speer. And Speer all these years later shows no regret over what happened and still contempt for the Jews. And Birkin goes along with it. In a way it is an echo of the many who went along with Hitler. But in the end credits, you realize that the voices on the tapes were actors. The director Vanessa Lapa says this was done because of the quality of the sound, but it was later shown that she tweaked the conversations. How much that mattered, I can't say but it should have been stated upfront. The film was never made, but two years after Speer's death in 1980, a mini-series was produced for TV with Rutger Hauer portraying Speer.