Hitler biographer Joachim Fest dies

[Jim O]

The German journalist and historian Joachim Fest, who worked closely with Hitler's architect Albert Speer on his memoirs and penned one of the best-regarded biographies of the Nazi dictator, has died. He was 79.

The national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where Fest worked for two decades until 1993, announced yesterday that Fest had died on Monday evening at his home in Kronberg, of unspecified causes.

Born in Berlin in 1926, Fest was drafted into the army during the second world war and served in the regular armed forces, before being taken prisoner. After the war he worked as a journalist in radio, television, newspapers and magazines. In addition to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he worked with several other respected German media outlets including Der Spiegel magazine, and public radio and television broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

He gained close insight into the inner workings of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich during conversations with Speer, an architect who became minister of armaments during the war and was instrumental in maintaining the Nazi war machine during the early 1940s.

At the Nuremberg trials, Speer was sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Following his release from Berlin's Spandau Prison in 1966, Fest worked with him as the general editor of his controversial memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, published in 1970, and later, in 1976, Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Fest's 1974 biographical portrait of Hitler is widely regarded as one of the best on the dictator in existence. His later works included Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, which was the basis for the acclaimed 2004 film Downfall, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, and Speer: The Final Verdict.

Source: Guardian Unlimited