"Probably 'Guten Tag' ''"No 'Heil Hitler' and 'Deutscher Gruss'?" I asked. Speer, in the course of his growing relationship with Hitler, inevitably became a part of it. Speer, I was already convinced, had never killed, stolen, personally benefited from the misery of others or betrayed a friend. His denial of knowledge of the murder of the Jews was of course central to the problem, but to my mind it needed to be left in abeyance, in a way refusing him the relief of denial until everything else had been said. There were two essential matters I wanted our conversations eventually to focus on: one, the origin of Hitler's evil (which to my mind went even beyond his obsession about the Jews and his worst crime, the gas chambers in occupied Poland); the other, Speer's realisation of - and participation in - it.Hitler's genius in part was to corrupt others, but the evidence I have collected suggests that with extraordinary skill he deliberately protected those closest to him - who from 1933 on included Speer - from any awareness which could have disturbed them or the harmony of their relationship with him But corruption is insidious. All of them wanted to trap him into admitting the same thing. "Always the same thing," he said with weary resignation, and added meaningfully, "you will too."I knew what he meant, of course; the subject that was always uppermost in his mind and in the minds of all those who questioned him was the murder of the Jews, the knowledge of which during the Third Reich he had always denied.Conversations such as I intended having with him needed to be structured.

I warned him that I would attempt, in my own way, to break through this pattern and through the defences he had manifestly set up over so many years.Oh, yes, he shrugged, everybody came with that intention. I told him I had read everything I could find that had been written about him in three languages, and that I was as surprised by the similarity of the questions he was invariably asked as I was by his own almost monotonously uniform answers. By this time, however, I had repeatedly seen Speer on television, being interviewed in German and in English. Despite the remarkable intelligence of his books and the apparent sincerity there of his moral self-examination (unique among former high-ranking Nazis, as I by then knew from my own experience), he seemed to me unconvincing in person; his mea culpas appeared to flow too readily from his lips; his smile was condescending, his voice too smooth. On screen, he communicated no vestige of doubt, or of humanity.When, in the spring of 1978, we finally met face to face for a profile I was to write of him, at his beautiful home above Heidelberg castle, my feelings were very mixed, ranging from curiosity and fascination to a troubling malaise.Over dinner that first night, I told Speer and his wife, Margarete - he referred to her as Margret - about the ambivalence of my feelings toward him. Here he manifested not only a real literary talent but, between the lines, the sadness and loneliness I would find in him later.

His handling of his long prison life - the reading, writing, gardening, his "Walk around the World", as he imagined the 31,936 km he walked over the last 12 years of his imprisonment - seemed to me astonishing, and his account of it deeply moving. By then he had served 20 years in Spandau prison and, released in 1966, then 61 years old, had written two extraordinary books.Inside the Third Reich was very cool, very controlled, recalling to my mind's eye, that still, attentive figure I had observed in the Nuremberg dock in 1946.I felt very differently about The Secret Diaries. Eight of the cells bore the signs of desperate men: papers strewn all over the floor, remnants of food on the tables, blankets balled up on the bunks. Only General Jodl's cell was spotless, his tin bowl and spoon washed, his blanket militarily folded.

And on one wall of Seyss-Inquart's cell was a calendar with the last day of his life, 16 October, marked with a cross.That afternoon Hess, Schirach and Speer were handed brooms and mops and taken to the empty gymnasium. One can't quite think why, for the gallows had been dismantled and the floor had been washed. None the less, they were told to clean and mop it again, watched closely by a GI and a lieutenant.Speer wrote about this in his book Spandau: The Secret Diaries, but when he recounted this story to me years later he had still not got over that trauma. His face went red, then pale, and when he almost furtively wiped it, his clean, folded handkerchief came away wet. The gymnasium floor, he said, had been quite clean, except for one enormous dark spot that wouldn't budge. Hess, he said, finally stood at attention and saluted it with a raised arm.I SAW Speer in the dock at Nuremberg on three occasions when, by invitation of a friend, I was able to attend the trial.

But I was very young, knew nothing about Speer, and only noticed him among the 21 accused because, then 40 years old, he looked young and, with his smooth face and strangely shaped, bushy black eyebrows, startlingly handsome. Contrary to many of the other defendants, who pretended to be bored or asleep, read or fidgeted endlessly with their hands or in their seats, he invariably sat very still, listening intently, with nothing moving in his face except those dark, intelligent eyes.But I never heard his voice until about 30 years later. Whether they had individually collaborated in the crimes or not, in their capacity as leaders, he said, they had to accept a common culpability.The morning after the hangings, the seven men who were given prison sentences - Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Donitz (life and 10 years, respectively); Hitler's old comrade and deputy, Rudolf Hess (life); Minister of Economics Walther Funk (life); former Foreign Minister and Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Konstantin von Neurath (15 years); Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach and Speer, first Hitler's architect then his Minister of Armaments and War Production (both 20 years) - were moved down into empty cells on the ground floor and were then assigned to clean out those just vacated by the hanged men. Goering, who was in a position to pay well to learn of the executions in time, had committed suicide a few hours before he was to be hanged. He had sometimes been almost a friend of Speer's, but became a venomous enemy at Nuremberg, where they fought a last bitter leadership battle.Goering, insisting the trial was a travesty conducted by victors against losers, wanted all the accused to reject the validity of the court and claim innocence before the German law under which they had lived and which, he held, had legitimised their actions.Speer, on the contrary, asked them all to join him in a recognition of a universal law under which they, as part of Hitler's leadership, had to accept responsibility for acts - crimes in the eyes of all of the civilised world - for which they, but not the German people, could and should be called to account. With Sauckel, his "unattractive working-class lieutenant in the slave labour program," as Airey Neave described him, Speer had, by necessity, worked closely. Not all of them, it appears, had taken it: when at 1am Colonel Burton C.