Leonid Nikitinsky

31 August 2024

by Leonid Nikitinsky

Source: Novaya gazeta

What is relevant today about the autobiography of Hitler’s ‘personal architect’, Albert Speer, and the attempts to understand him as a person?

Speer on trial

‘If Adolf Hitler had anyone who could be called a friend, then I would be one of them,’ was a statement made by Albert Speer during the Nuremberg Trials that spanned from November 1945 to October 1946, in response to accusations about his relationship with one of history’s great monsters. 

Albert Speer, a key figure in the Nazi leadership from February 1942, and author of the book Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs of Reich Minister of Military Production, is probably not as contradictory a personality as the opinions which have been held about him. Some consider that the stance he chose to take at the Nuremberg Trials, where he was the only one of 26 defendants to plead guilty to charges made against him, was just a ruse to escape the hangman’s noose. But, if we were to consider Speer solely as a pragmatist, being ‘Hitler’s friend’ was in itself too much of a losing position in 1945. By the vote of the smallest majority of judges, he was spared the death penalty and given 20 years’ imprisonment.

Having served his full sentence, Speer was released in October 1966, not long after the resignation of West Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (who, as an anti-fascist, managed to escape public discussion of the Nazi past) and soon after that of Adenauer’s chief of staff, Hans Globke, a civil servant who had provided legal commentaries to the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 (and was saved the hangman’s noose only because of the post-war disorganisation in the legal system, and the lack of consistency in the selection of defendants when Nazi-era lawyers were put on trial from March to December 1947). 

It is important for us to remember, however, that Speer began to gather the notes he had written secretly in prison into a book format, published in 1969, before the second and, as it turned out, more effective wave of de-Nazification in Germany. The book’s publication coincided with the start of this movement which is roughly dated to 1968 and the student riots of that year. 

The two bestsellers Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: A Secret Diary, as well as numerous interviews, brought Speer fabulous royalties. After his death in 1981, from a stroke while visiting his lover in a London hotel, it came to light from one of his opponents that ‘Hitler’s friend’ had not only become rich from the profits of his controversial confessions, but that he also made lots of money secretly from selling paintings which at some time he had obtained at a much lower price. Did he now know how these paintings were linked to the Holocaust? 

These observations are not intended to refute the facts Speer lays out in his memoirs, but they do cast doubt on his sincerity with regards his own person. But he could hardly have given a definitive response to the questions that arise here. It is important, though, that he tried to do this for 20 years. 

Two feature films have been made about Speer, coming out in Germany in 1982 and 2005, but the theme of cooperation with the Nazi regime was explored more deeply in Istvan Szabo’s Mephisto, based on the novel by Klaus Mann. True, the main character of Mann’s novel is a leading actor, who rose to become the director of Berlin’s main theatre, while Speer was an architect. But in spite of that, both films are about the dilemma that people in the world of culture faced when signing a pact with the Devil. The films about Speer are detailed accounts of his life and the descriptions of the daily social gatherings of Hitler’s circle. But as fictional accounts they do not provide adequate non-fictional portraits of Speer the man. 

But this is not as important as how Speer managed to achieve such a return to prominence after imprisonment. Let’s look at things in order, starting with how he found himself as a member of Hitler’s inner circle, and then at the helm of Germany’s wartime economy. Both of these two things seem to have come about by chance, but then wasn’t Hitler also a chance figure in history too? Possibly, many tyrants’ cannibalistic whims can be explained by the fact that, dreaming of a historic mission, in the depths of their souls they perfectly well understand how ill-equipped they are for such a mission, and that great power fell on their shoulders purely as a result of many accidental and coincidental circumstances.

The Personal Architect 

Speer was the son of a very successful architect, and he studied to become an architect himself. In Spring 1930, he was enthralled, along with lots of his comrades, by a speech made by Hitler, in which he appeared to offer Germany a clear pathway out of the swamp in which the Weimar Republic seemed to have got stuck. Speer joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the SS, but was never an active member. He first caught the attention of the Nazi leaders in 1933, when he was commissioned to oversee the rebuilding of the Ministry of Propaganda building, and thought up the triumphant staging of the Party Congress in Nuremberg. Hitler, who was as impressed by 30-metre crimson fabric swastika banners as any other participant at the Congress, appointed Speer assistant to his own architect Paul Troost, even though Speer, as he later admitted, at first strongly disliked Troost’s monumental style. But when Troost died in January 1934, Speer adopted his architectural style, making it even more ‘monumental’, and was appointed Hitler’s personal architect. He began to regularly join assistants and secretaries at Hitler’s lunches and dinners. 

Understanding this closeness to Hitler is impossible without appreciating that Hitler saw himself as an unsung architects and artists of the time. Hitler raved about German greatness, which in architecture he thought meant long corridors, high ceilings, the severe beauty of presentation, the physical scale of the spread wings of the Nazi eagle and the strength of the buildings. Hitler believed that the monuments of the time would survive the millennia, just as would the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. 

Speer was able to catch these visions and express them in concrete, for example in the gigantic new Reich Chancellery building, or the Nazi Party rally grounds. 

Speer and Hitler envisaged plans for the complete reconstruction of Berlin city centre. The project was put on hold due to the war, but the clearing of areas of land had already begun. This process involved the removal of around 50,000 families, with Jewish families simply being thrown out onto the street, and ‘respectable’ German families were provided with apartments in other parts of the city, apartments emptied of their Jewish residents. Critics claim that Speer himself was probably behind this plan, but it does not seem likely: why would he get involved in such minor matters as that? 

When Speer showed his father, also an architect, these designs, Albert Speer senior gave his concise but accurate verdict on Hitler and Speer: ‘You’re both mad.’ 

Looking back on that moment, the prisoner of Spandau completely agreed with his father. He was not enthused by the architectural art, but by the endless possibilities that opened up before him. No one can say what kind of architect he may have become in the normal way of things. What was left of the Reich Chancellery after the storm of Berlin was used for building material, and only the authorities in Nuremberg preserved the rally grounds there – the gigantic ruins, the steps partly overgrown with moss –to tell tourists something they could not have learned from any film or historical document. This was the know-how with which Speer conquered Hitler’s heart: even ruins must be grandiose. 

On the other hand, Speer also gave himself credit for the saving of Paris. Hitler was an admirer of Georges Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, but he himself intended to wipe the city from the face of the earth. Only having been convinced (even if only by Speer and his designs), that Berlin would outdo Hausmann’s Paris, Hitler abandoned his interest in Paris when the Nazis occupied France, it could go to Hell for all he cared.    

As for Speer’s finely detailed descriptions (based not just on memory, evidently, but also on surviving documents) of social gatherings held in the headquarters of the all-powerful (at the time) Fuhrer, in addition to the endless intrigues among members of his circle, they are of interest to historians, despite it being hard to make sense of them nowadays. In general, Hitler’s supposed charisma is disputed by Speer’s portrayal of him as a somewhat second-rate person: flat jokes, the same conversations constantly, pedantic in his diet, and an undoubted inferiority complex.  

The Right-Hand Man 

Speer’s artwork was left buried under the ruins after the war, and because of this, another of his characteristics came to light: his ability to coordinate human labour to make impressively quick work of seemingly impossible tasks. He comes across as a manger- type figure (despite this word being, obviously, non-existent in Nazi Germany). 

On the morning of 8^th February 1942, a plane carrying Minister of Armaments and Production, Fritz Todt, with whom Hitler and Speer had dined the night before, exploded from an unknown cause. Hitler appointed Speer to this post without a thought. As Speer explained to the Nuremberg Ttribunal, he had no choice but to take the role. Not because he would have been shot for refusing, but because in those circumstances, it was a question of honour and he did not consider the consequences, and, possibly, on account of his former position of chief architect he was not at the time fully aware of them.

Form this moment on, the memoirs describe endless train journeys and meetings, but also new intrigues, now connected to industry and taking on greater importance. This is the autobiography of an ‘economic planner’, like, for example, Moscow and Life by the late Moscow mayor, Yury Luzhkov. But this subject matter was not about building to make life better, but the opposite, about tanks, planes, submarines and bombs, designed to destroy millions of lives. It stands to reason that Speer did not think about this at the time, and he did not have nightmares of hordes of dead people, if that had happened he would not have been able to cope. 

As a technocrat, as one would say nowadays, he had no time to philosophise. His goal was to obtain and coordinate resources: financial and human, including the labour of thousands of concentration camp prisoners, materials including, for example, rare metals which could only be found in territories of which Germany gradually lost control as the war was lost. Speer succeeded in all of this with flying colours, continuously increasing the production of the means to kill, until around the end of 1944. 

The Allies’ experts saw him, and not Himmler or Goebbels, as Hitler’s right-hand man in the Third Reich. 

If we see it from Speer’s perspective, abstracting ourselves from moral issues, his view of the war, as well as, for the most part, the economy, was serious and instructive. Unlike Hitler and his generals, he did not have to spend every day pinning new pins on military maps. He had understood that the war was lost since May 1943, when fleets of British bombers led a successful bombing campaign to destroy the dams of the industrial regions of the Ruhr Valley. There was nothing Germany could do to match the ever-growing Allied air fleet, which set itself the goal of destroying Germany’s military industrial capacity, infrastructure, and transport; the resources had dried up. Having fully realised this, Speer simply did what he was ordered to do. 

He began knowingly to sabotage the Fuhrer’s orders only when Hitler, on the threshold of capitulation, decided to order the destruction of Germany’s industrial potential, along with all bridges, floodgates, and railway centres. A little man, hiding away in his bunker, and having decided to commit suicide, decided that since the German nation had lost the war, it was not worthy of surviving, but should die with him. 

Travelling around the ever-shrinking territories that remained under German control, Speer personally persuaded top officials, factory directors, and regional leaders to disobey Hitler’s orders. He wrote a speech in which he carefully but clearly planned to explain the necessity of preserving industrial potential and showed this speech to Hitler. When Speer showed the pages, crossed out by Hitler, to one of a faithful typist (and there were no others left by this point) in the bunker, she said: ‘Shame! It was a good speech.’ Speer’s speech, which was actually intended for the German people, was recorded on a disc at the request of the Gauleiter of Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann. But Speer dictated the conditions for it to be broadcast: if he was sentenced to death by shooting should Hitler become aware of his sabotage. 

This was a calculated risk. Moreover, Hitler was informed about Speer’s sabotage, which he must have seen as betrayal. But Speer still continued to meet with him in the Berlin bunker even in April 1945. On one occasion, Hitler spread out their model for a reconstructed Berlin on a table, a Berlin which, up above them and the layers of concrete, had already been virtually wiped out, and not a single tear was shed for the city. Hitler practically begged his friend (as it was still fully appropriate to call Speer at this time) to believe that defeat was not inevitable. But Speer honestly stuck to his original position. Hitler did not order his execution, as he did in the case of Himmler’s adjutant Hermann Fegelein, who had escaped from the bunker. In his final days, there was something in him not just pitiable (as with any beast), but also human, and without acknowledging this aspect of his character, we cannot appreciate the full sense of horror evoked by this monster. 

After Hitler’s birthday on 20 April, which went uncelebrated in the bunker, Speer came to Berlin for the last time. A light aircraft flew low over Germany, and its passenger could see a bird’s eye view of bombs going off here and there, ‘like someone lighting a match down below’ – the sound of the engine drowned out this sound. The plane landed at the Brandenburg Gate and Speer climbed into a car which took him to the ruins of the Reich Chancellery he had built.  

Hitler asked him: ‘What do you think? Should I stay in Berlin? Tomorrow is the last chance to leave…’ ‘It seems to me that it is better for you to die as the Fuhrer of our nation here, not in some house in the countryside.’ ‘I just wanted to ask your advice one last time…’ ‘Fraulein Braun wants to die with me, and I will definitely shoot Blondi [Hitler’s dog] …’ 

Some generals arrived, and ‘we parted so unceremoniously, as if we were to see each other the following day.’ The architect remained in the bunker for a while after this, something was stopping him from leaving just then. He sat at the bedside of Magda Goebbels, who was recovering in bed from a heart attack (‘How happy I am that at least Harald [Madga’s son from her first marriage] is still alive.’)

Eva Braun asked him: ‘How about a glass of champagne for a final farewell? And some chocolates?’ She ‘was cheerful and content and was perhaps the only person in the whole bunker with an air of admirable self-control.’ She was ‘the only person capable of compassion’: ‘But why do so many need to die? It’s so pointless…’   

The Return 

Different parts of the books at times give the impression that they were written by different people. Most of it would be boring and banal to the modern reader. One moment Speer describes in the book, the moment you have read above, was genuinely tragic. The memoirs were written by a professional co-author, the journalist Joachim Fest (his name is not mentioned in the published version), but here it is not a question of authorial professionalism: you can only fake pathos, of which there is none in the descriptions of those final moments. 

It is likely that the co-author reminded Speer from time to time of the need to show the decency to express repentance. These take the form of disclaimers that run through the text like a broken record, such as, ‘How could I not have understood that at the time.’ How many times exactly have those same words been repeated since 1945? 

It was important for the Nuremberg judges to ‘establish’ whether or not Speer had knowledge of the Holocaust, or whether he was just pretending not to know, in order to decide whether he should be accused of crimes against humanity along with the other defendants who were sentenced to death. But the answer to this question is not as simple as, for example, ‘Did you know there is a pharmacy in the next building?’ 

This is a question with which millions of Germans were faced with after the end of the war, and it would be easy to establish guilt if the answer were to be ‘yes, I knew’, but it would not be possible to be as sure if the answer were to be ‘no, I did not know’. There are varying levels of awareness. 

The prosecution in Speer’s case denounced him by referencing visits made by him to one of Buchenwald’s sister camps, Mittelbau-Dora, where prisoners selected by capability and know-how laboured away in specially dug tunnels to create V2 ‘Revenge Weapons’ from August 1943 to Spring 1944. Of course, Speer was aware that these labourers were prisoners, and that some number of them may well have been Jewish, but this fact did not bother him in the slightest. He probably knew that these prisoners would never be allowed to the surface to see the light of day again, that many of them would be worked to death, and he demanded that the conditions of their detention and their food be improved, since they were slaves he needed for the war effort. On his expeditions into these tunnels, he did not perceive the workers there as human beings: ‘I did not know’. 

Finding himself in prison, the technocrat who had all of his previous life (he was 40 years old by the end of the war) been interested only in sketches and calculations, Speer immediately buried himself in books about history and philosophy, so as to begin to understand something about what had happened.

Only towards the end of his sentence did he admit (to himself, and not to someone else on whom his fate might have depended) that he also was to blame for the Holocaust: he ‘did not know’ as he did not want to know. 

This is a question of alibis, a question posed in its most extreme form by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by Chekhov in Gooseberries, and answered summarily by the literature expert and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin: ‘We have no alibis in our being.’ The philosopher Karl Jaspers, who survived the Nazi era living in Germany, and had a Jewish wife, expressed the same notion in his concept of ‘metaphysical responsibility.’ Unlike criminal responsibility, and political responsibility, which can be blamed on one person by another, metaphysical guilt is something a person can only find in themselves, in deciding whether or not to bear that cross. 

Speer, undoubtedly, having read Jaspers in Spandau Prison, intentionally came to terms with this notion and rejected all ‘alibis.’ 

Every crime committed, even ones with long-lasting effect, will sooner or later be completed, but blame for it never disappears just by issuing a sentence. It can either be denied (by an alibi), or it can be continually experienced in such categories and shades as: admission of responsibility, metanoia (the Greek for ‘change of mind’), confession, repentance, or penitence. 

Most likely, only penitence is capable of annulling past actions in the eyes of the Being that knows and understands everything, but not in one’s own eyes. In such a perspective, ‘change of mind’ and confession are the prerequisites for penitence, and repentance is a means to this. But how can this transformation be brought to fruition? And what is penitence – an event like that which happened on the road to Damascus to Saul, the persecutor of the first Christians? Or is it a state of being that ends only with death itself? 

Speer stopped somewhere on this long road, but he definitely walked a lot further than half of it, and his memoirs are a repentance, although hardly at all times and in everything.

This path lies ahead for all of us, distinguishing who will end up where, and who will have the strength to go furthest. But no one can to any degree be consciously happy who has not set out along it (see Gooseberries, by Anton Chekhov).

Translated by Oscar Seecharan