LAURENCE REES: And the single most overrated leader?

ADAM TOOZE: Albert Speer. There’s no question that his contribution to the war effort has been grossly exaggerated. The phenomenon that Speer could become everybody’s favourite Nazi by the early 1970s I think, in retrospect, is both inexplicable and really quite distasteful. There’s no question in my mind that he deserved capital punishment at Nuremberg along with the other major war criminals and that he had full knowledge of the Holocaust and the extraordinary violence being dealt out to the slave labourers. What’s remarkable is that he managed, by virtue of the exaggeration of his war record, to somehow present himself as a more civilised person. So two legends, as it were, feed each other.