Books
Geetanjali Mukherjee

Will The Real Albert Speer Please Stand Up

He presented many faces to the world, but which one was genuine?

Over the years Albert Speer has been given several titles — ‘the good Nazi’, ‘Hitler’s architect’, ‘future Reichchancellor’, and even ‘the only penitent defendant at Nuremberg’. There is no doubt that there are many faces to Albert Speer: he was a man who had far greater power during the war than any other aside from Hitler, and was widely believed to succeed Hitler; his tremendous powers of organization raised German production to its peak at a time when resources were at an all-time low; and it was expected by all, including himself, that he would receive the death sentence like the other Nazi leaders, instead escaping the noose with only twenty years.

In light of his extended involvement in the Nazi party, both as Hitler’s architect and the Minister for Armaments, and his contributions to the illegal war waged by the regime, the question naturally arises: did Speer receive adequate punishment? Did the verdict reflect the perception that Speer was somehow ‘less culpable’ than the other defendants, or did he mastermind his defence in a way that reduced his sentence? The events leading up to the Nuremberg trial, and the trial itself, provides clues to answering these questions: what can we learn about the personality of Speer from the evidence available, and why does it matter?
46 printed pages
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • Maria Petershas quoted4 years ago
    Sebastian Haffner, Nazi historian, declared: “[Speer] rather symbolizes a type which is becoming increasingly important in all belligerent countries: the pure technician, the classless bright young man with background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world and no other means than his technical and managerial ability. It is the lack of psychological and spiritual ballast, and the ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational machinery of our age which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays…they first find it very difficult to earn a living and then find it very easy to run the world. This is their age; the Hitlers and the Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers… will long be with us”.
  • Maria Petershas quoted4 years ago
    As Speer later confessed to Sereny, “I was blind by choice…I was not ignorant”.
  • Maria Petershas quoted4 years ago
    As Sereny points out to him, “…you cannot ‘sense’ in a void; ‘sensing’ is an inner realization of knowledge. Basically if you ‘sensed’, then you knew”. To this Speer replied, “Thank God you weren’t Robert Jackson,”

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