Inside the Third Reich by
Albert Speer, excerpt:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Albert Speer, Page 112-3
I
During the years after my release from Spandau I have been repeatedly asked what thoughts I had on this subject during my two decades alone in the cell with myself; what I actually knew of the persecution, the deportation, and the annihilation of the Jews; what I should have known and what conclusions I ought to have drawn.
I no longer give the answer with which I tried for so long to soothe the questioners, but chiefly myself: that in Hitler's system, as in every totalitarian regime, when a man's position rises, his isolation increases and he is therefore more sheltered from harsh reality; that with the application of technology to the process of murder the number of murderers is reduced and therefore the possibility of ignorance grows; that the craze for secrecy built into the system creates degrees of awareness, so it is easy to escape observing inhuman cruelties.
I no longer give any of these answers. For they are efforts at legalistic exculpation. It is true that as a favorite and later as one of Hitler's most influential ministers I was isolated. It is also true that the habit of thinking within the limits of my own field provided me, both as architect and as Armaments Minister, with many opportunities for evasion. It is true that I did not know what was really beginning on November 9, 1938, and what ended in Auschwitz and Maidanek. But in the final analysis I myself determined the degree of my isolation, the extremity of my evasions, and the extent of my ignorance.
I therefore know today that my agonized self-examinations posed the question as wrongly as did the questioners whom I have met since my release. Whether I knew or did not know, or how much or how little I knew, is totally unimportant when I consider what horrors I ought to have known about and what conclusions would have been the natural ones to draw from the little I did know. Those who ask me are fundamentally expecting me to offer justifications. But I have none. No apologies are possible.
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This is Speer's feint towards some form of repentance or apologia. The book is a classic, I own it, and had to read it. All the same, it fails in its mission, other than as history told from a side other than the victors. Try as one might, one cannot humanize Hitler.
Inside the Third Reich by
Albert Speer attempts mightily to do so. He wrote the book after serving a 20 year term in Spandau Prison. He was perhaps able to justify himself well enough not to ingest lethal poison the way many of his compatriots did. There are other books about people who lived high and mighty, but ended shattered, such as
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Those, however, were novels, not true tales about someone who launched perhaps the world's greatest slaughter, WWII combined with the Holocaust.
When the book came out in 1969-70 (there was apparently an early release in Europe in October 1969, then release as translated in late August 1970) there was fawning press coverage about the "good Nazi." Speer got his start as Hitler's architect, and then progressed to be a director of armaments. Apparently the book's contents have become what is accepted history of the Third Reich. After Kristallnacht, however, it was not possible to be truthfully ignorant about the utter evil.
The writing was, all things considered, pretty good. One finds themselves rooting for Hitler, the same way Speer, for most of his life, lived for Hitler's approval the same way a dog lives for the pats of his owner. I am glad I read it, since I've been staring at it on my shelf since recovering it from my parents' library after their death. All the same, it is not a book I will keep for re-reading, or one that I will recommend to my friends.