Paula Astridge – författare

Albert Speer was one of the most brilliant and controversial men of the Twentieth Century. Although he was the Adolf Hitler''s favourite for many years, Speer refused to share in his suicide and was condemned to twenty years in Spandau Prison for war crimes. His open confession of guilt at the Nuremberg Trials spared him the noose but, to this day, a question mark hangs over his head. What was the level of his involvement in the Holocaust? Was he a man of integrity caught up in a web of evil from which he couldn''t escape - or was he just clever and convincing enough to have obscured the worst of his sins? No-one has ever argued convincingly one way or the other. Paula Astridge''s very personal - and exhaustively researched account - will both entertain and enable the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Hermann Goering, one of the most senior members of the Third Reich, was one of those responsible for murdering millions. His brother Albert risked his own life to rescue hundreds of Jews from the nazi death machine. Ernst Udet won the Blue Max for his record number of ''kills''. Captain Wilm Hosenfeld used his position in the Wehrmacht to save many persecuted Poles. This is the story of their intertwining lives - of two men who worked ''in the way of Reich'' and two men who stood ''in the way of the Reich''. Theirs are stories of exemplary courage and sacrifice, of extreme cruelty and flagrant disregard of the lives of others - of good versus evil and of how it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish the two. Exhaustively researched, this novel takes a long hard look at the lives of these four men and asks the universal questions - were they really all bad, or all good?