Albert Speer: The End of a Myth

Posted: August 13th, 2010 | Author: danny | Filed under: Book Notes, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

This is a follow up to my post: Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs by Albert Speer

Throughout his memoirs he paints himself in the most positive light, and I felt that I needed an outside reference to even out his portrayal.  To that end, I purchased a copy of Albert Speer: The End of a Myth. The book thoroughly addresses many of the claims made by Speer an shows how he went out of his way to distort the truth to present the best image of himself. There was; however, no smoking gun presented in this book -- his involvement in forced labor and relocation of the jews in Berlin is highlighted, but his involvement in the most egregious crimes is only hinted at. The main claim that is debunked is that Speer was a politically naive technician. Throughout my reading of the memoir, I too thought that this claim seemed to be a grand deception of an adept politician.

The New York Times, sums it up best in it's review: THE NAZI WHO MADE A COMEBACK

By demolishing Speer's carefully tailored image of himself, Matthias Schmidt has contributed to setting the record straight, even though he overestimates the extent to which historians have been misled by that image. One wishes only that Mr. Schmidt had driven home with even greater force the lasting lesson of Speer's role in the Third Reich. While his was without question a political role, it was not that of a fanatical Nazi, a true believer in that pernicious creed. Instead, Speer's politics were those of an opportunist, ever ready to advance his own interests by whatever methods he found would serve that purpose. His career serves to remind us that fanatics such as Adolf Hitler and his disciples can cope with the complexities of the modern world only if they can call upon the talents of unscrupulous, self-serving men like Albert Speer.

I'd recommend this book to balance out the memoirs -- but it doesn't add too much if the memoirs are read with a critical eye and with the knowledge that he is trying to portray himself in the best possible light.

In conclusion, to shed a little more light on this master politician, I'll end with a quote from: The Nuremberg Interviews

The defendants generally tried to get away with everything they could, and as one of them suggested, they sometimes succeeded. That claim was made by Hitler's architect Speer, often regarded as the shrewdest observer among the defendants. He was not pleased at the end of the trial when he saw that Fritzsche, Papen, and Schact got off while he was given twenty years. He noted in his diary that their "likes, smokescreens, and dissembling statements had paid off after all." Speer resented not being exonerated by the court, but it was certainly not because he had failed to like or cover up the truth. Speer and no doubt other defendants resented people like Goldensohn and Gilbert. So far as we can tell, Speer gave Goldensohn no more than a brief and tersely worded statement (included in this volume). He accused Gilbert of being "always eager to add to his psychological knowledge." In answer to Gilbert's question about his sentence, Speer lied when he said the twenty years he got "was fair enough. They couldn't have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can't complain." By his own later admission, Speer was not telling the truth, for in fact he felt unjustly treated by the court.

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Notes from Albert Speer - The End of a Myth:

Page 7

During 1953 -54 Speer wrote detailed memoirs covering thousands of pages - pages of all kinds and sizes, even toilet paper. The material was smuggled out, little by little, from the Alliked prison for war criminals in Spandau, Berlin. It wound up in Coesfeld, where Wolters had once again become a successful architect. One of his employees typed up the material and the final typescript came to eleven hundred pages. Nevertheless, as the prisoner Speer stated when this work was completed, it was "only a first draft."

....
[he was] now designated Prisoner Number 5

Page 89

According to Speer's memoirs, mysterious things occurred during his medical crisis. the surgeon Gebhardt supposedly asked the internist Koch to operate. But Koch refused, because such an operation would have threatened the patient's life. The specter of a "medical assassination" by the SS-physician Gebhardt haunts Speer's description of the episode. however, toward the end of the wa, Koch could tell his ex-patient only that he, Koch, had had an angry dispute with Gebhardt about how to treat Speer's illness. Even in 1947, when Koch could have testified openly against the head SS-physician, all he remembered was that there had been "in the course of treatment differences between Gebhardt and me." Koch did not mention any life-threatening operation suggested by Gebhardt.

Page 13

By 1943, the wider German public sensed that Germany could not hold out against the mass of Allied arms potential.. now, non of Speer's talks lacked some variation of the statement that "the sheer quantity of Allied wapons could be not only balanced but outdone by higher quality." That year, according to the judgment of the historian Karl-Heinz Ludwig, the slogan "qualitative superiority" introduced "a new phase of lying to the German people - a phase the culminated in the myth of miracle weapons.

Page 116

Speer saw all this from the viewpoint of a sportsman. In fact, he told his fellow minister Schwerin von Krosigk "that the race between destruction and reconstruction was the most exciting contest in the history of the world."

Page 121

in 1944 -- the year of the stick-it-out and retaliation propaganda, the year that Speer had proclaimed the year of technological surprises in all areas - the Minister of Armaments made use of Hitler's edict. That Februrary, he asked Otto Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice, to institute prelminary proceedings against August Pagels, manager of the Linden Iron and Steel Works. "According to the documents in my possession, " said Speer, "there seems to be an especially flagrant case of sabotage of our war effort." In March of that same year, Speer asked the Minister of Justice to bring criminal action against Walter Kamaryt, a Viennese, who, according to Speer, had supplied false figuers on the need for, and available supplies of material crucial to the armaments industry.

Page 122

Looking back thirty-five years later, Speer offers an entirely different account of the Egger case in his last book Infiltration (Der Sklavenstaat). He uses it as an object lesson to depict his jurisdictional squabbles with the SS. He also tries to prove that the SS kept attacking him and his industrial managers for political reasons. Speer reprints the first part of a letter that indicates his annoyance at not being informed of Egger's arrest; Speer then doesn't forget to quote the last sentence: "I must protest against linking such proceedings with interventions by political offices based on political grounds." In his book, however, Speer conscientiously hides the fact that he wrote this letter in order to make three requests for a harsher punishment. Indeed, his distortion of the facts goes even further when he concludes his description of the case: "Egger was instantly released from custody. The accusations against him had proved to be unfounded." What reader would not conclude that Bussing's general manager had been set free only because of Speer's speedy intervention!.

Page 126

Hermann Giesler, Speer's adversary then and now, can only poke mordant fun at the "assassination plan" supposedly hatched by Hitler's one time minion: "The second most powerful man in the state lacked a ladder."

Page 191

There is no telling what negative consequences the more primitive constructions would have had for the prisoners. In any event, Speer issued an edict in March 1943, ordering that no more permanent structures were to be put up. The inmate house had to be makeshift. The outer and inner walls were to be lightweight, and there was to be no plastering inside or outside.

However, Speer changed his mind when he read the report on Auschwitz by his two assistants, who must have found catastrophic sanitary conditions there. Speer quickly wrote to Himmler and made building material available -- iron, cast-iron pipes, water pipes, and round bar steel -- especially for construction at Auschwitz. however, conditions in other concentration camps must have been presented to him a more favorable light. For in a handwritten addendum to his letter to Himmler, Speer remarked: "I am delighted that the inspection of the other concentration camps resulted in a highly positive picture."

Page 195

Nevertheless, Speer realized that the foundation of his honorableness as a contrite and converted national Socialist was his ignorance of "what was really beginning on November 9, 1938, and what ended in Auschwitz and Majadanek" (Speer). Consequently, the ex-Minister of Armaments never once accused himself of anything without simultaneously asseverating that he had that he had ultimately known nothing.

Page 201

Speer's favorite role -- as hitler's master builder -- comes across somewhat differently in the sources, documents, and eyewitness accounts than in Inside the Third Reich. Nothing could be further from the truth than the image of Speer as an architect with purely artistic ambitions, absorbed in his work, wearing a white smock, perched at the drawing board, designing one project after another for his supreme client. On the contrary: Speer very quickly realized that his position as Hitler's special architect involved practicable power as well, and Speer quickly learned how to wiled it. Everyone who tried to curb his ambitions learned about Speer's power the hard way. They had to experience his methods first-hand: his skillful use of intrigues and machinations to make his way to the top. Speer's position as hitler's premier architect was his novitiate for higher orders, and ultimately the highest orders in the Nazi hierarchy.

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