Inside the Third Reich (original) (raw)
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- Aug. 23, 1970
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Albert Speer, Hitler's gifted Min ister of Armaments and War Pro duction, was tried like other Na tional Socialist leaders at Nuremberg in 1946. But unlike his co‐defen dants he freely admitted his guilt. He took full responsibility for the slave‐labor battalions in his factor ies, and for collaborating with the S.S. which provided him concentra tion‐camp prisoners. Moreover, he voluntarily assumed a measure of guilt for all of Hitler's measures, in cluding the crimes. “Who else is to be held responsible for the course of events,” he told his judges, “if not the closest associates around the Chief of State?... I have this ob ligation all the more since the chief of government has withdrawn from his responsibility to the German peo ple and to the world.”
Speer used his time in court not to defend himself, but to uncover how Germany had become engulfed in crimes against humanity. The ex tent of these crimes, he said, was due to Hitler's use of modern tech nology. “Every country in the world today faces the danger of being ter rorized by technology.... Conse quently this trial must contribute to laying down the ground rules for life in human society. What does my own fate signify, after all that has happened and in comparison with so important a goal?”
He imagined he had sealed his own death warrant but the court, taking all the evidence of his resistance to Hitler as well as his efforts to amel iorate the lot of his slave workers into consideration, overrode Russian demands for the death penalty and sentenced him to 20 years imprison ment in Spandau prison.
From all available evidence Speer was the most responsible member of Hitler's lieutenants, a man who ap peared to be as decent as he was intelligent. How could such a man have allied himself so irrevocably with a dictator whose name has be come a synonym for evil? Students of World War II eagerly awaited his release from Spandau for the an swer.
By the end of 1954, in fact, he had inscribed it in memoirs secretly written and smuggled out of prison bit by bit. When he regained his freedom 12 years later, Speer had more than 2,000 pages of manuscript. With the aid of documents of the Ministry of Armaments and War Pro duction in the Federal Archives in Koblenz, he reorganized his material into book form.
The result — “Inside the Third Reich”—is not only the most signifi cant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phe nomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make ex cuses, even by implication, and is as unrelenting toward himself as to his associates. “My moral failure,” he writes, “is not a matter of this item and that; it resides in my ac tive association with the whole course of events. I had participated in a war which, as we of the inti mate circle should never have doubt ed, was aimed at world dominion. What is more, by my abilities and my energies I had prolonged that war by many months.”
Speer came from a prosperous, up per‐middle‐class family, and he as pired to be an architect like his fa ther and grandfather. As a student he was depressed by the postwar poverty and unemployment, the gen eral aura of hopelessness around him, and was persuaded to attend a Hit ler rally in 1931 at his university. Speer expected a rabble‐rouser in military tunic and swastika armband. Instead, Hitler appeared in a con servative blue suit looking “marked ly respectable.” He spoke hesitantly in a low voice, almost shyly, as though he were delivering a histori cal lecture. Once he had ensnared the young intellectuals, Hitler's shyness disappeared, and he spoke urgently with hypnotic persuasiveness.
Speer was captivated; all his skep ticism and reservations vanished, and he left the hall imbued with new hope for Germany. A few weeks lat er he applied for membership in the National Socialist party. It was, he now admits, a frivolous and thought less act, but he had become en thralled by Hitler's magnetic force. “His persuasiveness, the peculiar magic of his by no means pleasant voice, the oddity of his rather banal manner, the seductive simplicity with which he attacked the complexity of our problems—all that bewildered and fascinated me.” Speer remained fascinated and bewildered until the end. (Continued on Page 2)
Above: Hitler returning from a visit to the Eiffel Tower, with Albert Speer on his right, Paris, 1940.
Memoirs by Albert Speer. Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. Illustrated. 596 pp. New York: The Macmillan Company. $12.50. To him Hitler was a god. At one solemn ceremony the Führer extend ed a hand to the young convert. Speer was so overwhelmed by the honor that his own hand, raised in salute, fell with a smack on the bald head of the man in front, Julius Streicher.
Speer became Hitler's foremost architect. An architect manqué him self, the Führer evidently saw in Speer his alter ego and the oppor tunity of fulfilling his own youth ful dreams. He commissioned the young man — he was not yet 30 —to design Nuremberg Stadium and a new Berlin. For the next 12 years Speer enjoyed a rare relationship with Hitler. Unique as this associa tion was, Speer never felt close to his master. “Everything was missing. Never in my life have I met a person who so seldom revealed his feelings, and if he did so, instantly locked them away again.”
Engrossed in his own work, Speer blinded himself to the persecution of the Jews—“I thought I was not implicated if I myself did not take part.” Today he rejects the excuse that he knew little or nothing about the atrocities of the concentration camps “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 con clusions would have been the natural ones to draw from the little I did know.... No apologies are possible.”
Speer's detailed description of Hitler's inner circle makes for com pulsive reading, not for any sensa tional disclosures but because the life he reveals was so ordinary, marked by “barren evenings” and a “curious vacuity.” The most remark able feature was its informality. Surprisingly, Hitler took no offense when his companions openly made fun of him. “There are two possibili ties,” his secretary, Fraulein Schroe der, would say, repeating his favorite phrase. “Either it is going to rain or it is not going to rain.” And Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, who was kept hidden from all but a few intimates, would jokingly refer to herself as “Mother of the Country.” The so‐called Table Talk of this élite group in “Merry Chancellor's Restau rant,” as Hitler called their dining room, had a narrow range, and with its limited point of view grew “weari some” to Speer.
This élite group was a snake pit of intrigue with Propaganda Min ister Joseph Goebbels plotting against Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, who was conniving against Reich führer Heinrich Himmler, all in turn a target of Martin Bormann, a Machiavellian character who had gained control of access to Hitler and by 1943 was de facto chief of internal affairs of the Third Reich. For mutual protection, Goebbels and Speer united in a cabal against Bor mann, but it collapsed when the wily Bormann, using his master's tech nique of divide and conquer, bribed Goering with a gift of 6‐million marks, and then inveigled Goebbels, another born survivor, to come over to his side.
A little later, Speer barely escaped death. He was scheduled to fly to Berlin in a plane with Dr. Fritz Todt, Minister of Armaments and Muni tions, but, tired after a late meeting with Hitler changed his mind. Mo ments after takeoff, Todt's plane mys teriously exploded. (Speer believes a second attempt on his life was made while he was recuperating in Himm ler's private sanitarium.) Ironically, the crash elevated Speer in the Nazi hierarchy. To general surprise, and most of all his own, Hitler made him Todt's successor, and in es sence he became the second most important man in Germany.
With full authority to reorganize the munitions industry, Speer con verted it almost overnight to mass production. In six months produc tion increased significantly. Hitler was delighted but not Speer. Pro duction still lagged behind that of World War I. One cause was ex cessive bureaucratization. The staff of the Ordnance Office, for example, was ten times that during the pre vious war. Another was Hitler's re luctance to ask the Germans to make sacrifices. Curiously he demanded far less from his people than Churchill or Roosevelt. To forestall civilian discontent he increased consumer goods and military pensions; almost a million and a half women were allowed to remain as household serv ants.
Moreover the party leadership had grown so corrupt after nine years in power that it was impossible to re duce its luxurious style of living. Speer fought for a drastic reduction in consumer‐goods production, but even after the disaster at Stalin grad the most he could get was a 12 per cent cut from the peacetime level.
The production problem was ag gravated by the increasing number of mis takes committed by the re gime. (Goering once advised Speer in all seriousness to save steel by making locomotives out of concrete.) The most grievous errors, according to Speer, were made by Hitler himself: “by his confused plan ning of the air war against England, by the shortage of U‐boats at the beginning of the war, and in general, by his failure to develop an over all plan for the war.” Hitler was limited by his experiences as a corporal in World War I; his thinking was restricted by traditional weapons and de signs. For example, he feared the mechanism of the retract able landing gear of the newly developed Condor wouldn't work; he preferred the old Junkers 52 with its rigid gear.
Incredibly, he continued to allocate an army of workers and vast amounts of material to his massive program for re constructing 31 German cities. “The building must begin,” he told Speer, “even while this war is still going on. I am not going to let the war keep me from accomplishing my plans.” After an Allied bombing attack he would often insist that burned‐out theaters be rebuilt at once on the grounds that it was a cultural necessity and theatrical performances were needed to keep up the morale of the populace. As the Allies drove closer to Berlin the Füh rer continued to build triumphal arches and party buildings. Liv ing in his own dream world, he remained fascinated by the models of the future cities and would spend hours discussing the details of construction with Speer. He was endlessly excited by a model of the grand boule vard of the new Berlin, and admired it from every angle as if he were a sightseer.
With the crumbling of the Third Reich, a curious change came over Hitler. Convinced more than ever of ultimate vic tory, be became increasingly inaccessible. At conferences he would end arguments by de claring that there was no turn ing back—“We can only move forward. We have burned our bridges.” Sluggish yet caustic, he made all decisions in isola tion in total disregard, accord ing to Speer, of any technical basis.
It was only then that Speer became sufficiently freed from his thralldom to realize that Hitler's insistence on fighting to the bitter end was an act of high treason against the na tion. He decided to assassinate his fallen idol by injecting poi son gas into his bunker. Speer obtained the gas, but when he checked the ventilation shaft, constructed under his orders, he discovered that it had been replaced by an inaccessible chimney.
With assassination ruled out, Speer devoted himself to frus trating Hitler's orders to leave a wake of destruction behind the retreating troops. He flew to the Hungarian petroleum re gion, to the coal area of Up per Silesia, and to Czechoslo vakia, persuading not only rep resentatives of his own Minis try, but also high‐ranking gen erals to ignore the scorched earth edict. He finally faced Hitler himself with the argu ment that such destruction meant “eliminating all further possibility for the German peo ple to survive.”
But the Führer was adamant, “If the war is lost,” he replied, “the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental surviv al. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. In any case only those who are infe rior will remain after this struggle, for the good have al ready been killed.”
Speer left Berlin, but he had an “overpowering desire” to bid farewell to the man he had attempted to murder and made a hazardous flight back to the besieged city. His descriptions of the last days in the bunker and his own efforts to end the war provide a fitting denoue ment to a remarkable and ab sorbing account.
I recommend this book with out reservations. Speer's full length portrait of Hitler has un nerving reality. The Führer emerges as neither an in competent nor a carpet‐gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped concepts endowed with an ineffable personal mag ic. Of equal import is Speer's unsparing self‐analysis. He has revealed himself layer by layer not in self‐flagellation but in an earnest attempt, I believe, to atone for his mistakes and to warn others of the folly of signing a pact with Mephistoph eles. His admonitions have a frightening timeliness for all men of goodwill who have been led into the corridors of power.
Author's Query
PRISCILLA LONG IRONS
231 Brookline St.
Cambridge, Mass. 02139.
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