THE GERMAN film industry has, in the past year, produced two major films on contemporary history. Untergang (Downfall), about Hitler's last two weeks in his bunker, was seen in cinemas by five million Germans. Now there is the second one, Speer und Er (Speer and He — Hitler again), which was shown for 90 minutes on three evenings last week on all German and Austrian TV networks. BBC Four has been screening it this week, with the third part tonight.

Heinrich Breloer, the director of Speer und Er is a leading documentary maker. Exceptionally for German or indeed non-German filmmakers he had appeared to eschew making mainly films about Nazis. However, it is probably impossible for a 63-year old German in the creative professions to avoid declaring his moral position about that period in Germany's history. The result for Breloer, fascinated, it appears, but morally repelled by Albert Speer, is Speer und Er, probably the most judgemental film produced in Germany since 1945.

Breloer co-wrote and directed it, and serves as commentator and questioner of contemporary witnesses and historians, perhaps the gravest mistake, for his effect on people under obvious stress as he interviews them (as I will show) is in some cases inhibiting. This said, he has succeeded in a number of masterstrokes, the most important — and without which the film probably couldn’t have been made — being to obtain the active collaboration of three of Speer’s children: Albert Jr, a well-known architect; Hilde Speer Schramm, a sociologist whom I have known as a friend and admired for many years for her work, much of it for Jewish women; and Arnold Speer, a physician. All have different feelings about their father, not necessarily as negative as are suggested.

Of course, for me, perhaps because I knew Speer well and believe I understood the feelings between him and Hitler, Breloer’s interpretation seems a bit obvious. In the film, Hitler at one point addresses Speer as Albert, which he would never have done. Interestingly, Speer’s oldest son, Albert Jr, questioned last week in Die Frankfurter Allgemeine about “the love affair between Speer and Hitler”, shares my rejection of this definition.

He explains that it can’t be considered as one might such a close relation between two men today, but rather as deep (but rather shy) reciprocal affection that, he says, conceivably could be described as love: for Hitler, the young architect Speer was doing what he would have loved to do himself, but (as Albert Jr ironically adds in the interview) “unfortunately he had to save Germany instead”. And as for Speer, the unemployed architect — he had found the “ head of state who laid the world at his feet”.

I actually think it’s even simpler: for Hitler, Speer was the son he never had; for Speer, at least in the beginning, Hitler was the father he wished he could have had.

Speer and Er appears basically to have been created not really as the title suggests, to explain the unique relationship between Hitler and Speer (a fascinating area that remains to be explored), nor indeed to communicate much additional understanding of Hitler, but — as Breloer is quoted — to “demythologise” the impression of “the good Nazi” which Speer, he says, managed to create as the result of his Nuremberg trial and which the world fell for.

And there is truth in that: certainly in Nuremberg (and I attended some of those trials) Speer desperately wanted to see himself separated, disconnected from the other accused. Speer was proved right: the court did see him differently from the others, which is why ten of them were hanged and he survived.

According to German media analysis, Speer und Er was watched by the largest TV audience in living memory. What they saw last week is a film in four parts describing 50 years including those Albert Speer spent with Hitler, 14 of them while Hitler was alive. Part I: Germania: The Delusion. Part II: Nuremberg: The Trial. Part III: Spandau: The Punishment. Part IV: Sequel: The Deception, which, focusing almost entirely on Speer after his release from Spandau prison, was screened by German television in the late evening of day three of the showings and completes, very effectively, the intended “demythologising” of Albert Speer.

It is this Part IV I must now describe: unfortunately the BBC (it tells me) was not offered this essential part by Bavaria Film. Breloer, incensed that this happened, said to me today: “For heaven’s sake, how could they fail in this: it’s the summary, the compilation — the explanation of it all.”

I am not sure that his Sequel: The Deception, which British viewers will not see, is “the explanation of it all”. For the Albert Speer who is presented there is not the man who, during the four last years of his life, until he died in 1961, sat opposite me for months.

At his home in Heidelberg, in my hotel in Munich and at their mountain lodge where I stayed with him and his wife Margret for the last two weeks, we talked, 12 hours most days.

Heinrich Breloer feels that Speer betrayed all of us. “He lied to you, too,” he said when we last spoke, and I reminded him that I knew when he did and said so in my book about him. I don’t believe for a moment that this conclusion has been created by deliberate untruths, but what was no doubt its driving force, is the passionate conviction (not only of Breloer, but of collaborators, of researchers, probably also of friends he saw while he made it) that Speer fooled us all; that because he was so convincing, so smooth, he was the worst of all the Nazis, that he was wildly anti-Semitic and responsible for the death of many thousands of Jews.