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servant (511 words) |
 | Van der Vat went on to become a distinguished journalist: he was the Times of London's correspondent in South Africa and later represented the newspaper in Germany for six years. |
| Van der Vat's careful marshalling of damning information climaxes with detail whose import only became known after Speer's death and which meant that in his lifetime he was never fully confronted by it. |
| Van der Vat concludes that it was only because Speer lied so successfully in the Nuremberg trials that he escaped being hanged with the rest of the gang. |
| notgood (825 words) |
| Dan van der Vat has little sympathy for Speer, 'a persecutor of the Jews, a liar, a fraud and a hypocrite', so that his account has a quite different tone from Sereny's, whose long relationship with Speer induced a surprisingly humane respect for the ageing penitent. |
| The core of van der Vat's case is the discovery in the Chronicle that Speer was involved in clearing Jews out of rented accommodation in Berlin in 1941 to free flats for bomb victims. |
| Both van der Vat and Sereny rely on what was in fact the first scholarly debunking of Speer, the book by the German scholar Matthias Schmidt, published in 1982, where the revelations from the Chronicle are set out in unambiguous terms. |
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