“I would have sold my soul like Faust”
“in the final analysis I myself determined the degree of my isolation, the extremity of my evasions, and the extent of my ignorance.”
The preponderance of historians agree that Albert Speer was a calculatingly selfish intellectual and a technocrat devoid of morality. But he was no empty suit: he was capable of remarkable feats of strategic and perhaps dubious cultural importance. On the one hand he was driven by a genuine lust for power and was certainly at one time Hitler’s heir apparent, while on the other, a cool thinking intellectual who realized in late 1944 he had better start trying to save at least part of the economy for a post-war Germany, with any eye toward whitewashing some of his earlier actions.
Of a certainty this book is a carefully calculated apologist tome. But then what biography is not a self-serving device for insuring the best possible face for posterity? Speer saved himself at the Nuremberg Trials by admitting guilt, but he never admitted responsibility either – that was for others. For all of that, Inside the Third Reich is a vital piece of the historical tapestry of the Third Reich, particularly if one enjoys reading between the lines.
The book encompasses three distinct parts. First a series of important vignettes of major Nazi leaders and their roles, most importantly a first-hand account of Hitler’s “work ethic”, charisma and megalomaniac tendencies from the man closest to him as well as a look at some of the inner workings of the NSDAP and the Nazi government. Secondly, a loose biography aimed at personal rehabilitation while dancing around the issue of the Final Solution. And third, an interesting overview of monolithic architecture used as a social tool and its important place in the Nazi ethos.
Hitler, Nazi Infighting and Government
Speer said that if Hitler had had a friend he would have been it. I think that Hitler saw in Speer the cultured and smart professional architect that he longed to be in an earlier life. Speer likely saw in Hitler the ultimate extension of his own lust for power. Together they both showed great ability to accomplish mammoth tasks, Hitler with luck, Speer with work, but both without a trace of humanity. Well, in fairness, Hitler liked dogs.
Speer was the rogue intellectual in Hitler’s intimate circle, rivaled perhaps only by Goebbels for education and intelligence. Hitler’s strange hours (up at noon, to bed by 3AM) strained everyone around him. The generals were always sleep deprived. Hitler did not foster any social ties among the leaders. In fact Speer states that “he watched any efforts at rapprochement with keen suspicion.” Speer too was generally aloof and acted with his hand-picked associates generally away from the Nazi party. In that sense, one of his defense arguments at Nuremberg of being apart from certain activities holds up.
The strange “working vacations” at Obersalzberg are fascinating because they reveal a side of Hitler as the Pied Piper who never really worked at all. Speer examines in length the discussions held in the teahouse above the Berchtesgaden Valley before the war and builds a picture of Hitler that is helpful but not complete. Hitler often “drifted into endless monologues” yet bored himself to sleep at times. He treated his mistress Eva Braun with cynicism and marked disrespect, like she was not really worth mentioning. His treatment of her and his assertion that “a highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman” tell something of his deep inferiority complex. It may go toward explaining his choice of so many unsuitable and inferior men for positions in the Third Reich. Speer also notes that Hitler used these times to “make fun of his closest associates”. Hitler ridiculed Himmler’s SS mythology and his archeology. He also took issue with Goering’s hunting fetish. It is painfully obvious that Hitler did not like being shown up by the highly educated and by industry experts. The World War I corporal took advice poorly. Speer helps greatly in understanding Hitler’s skewed sense of reality. His decision making was the product of “illusions and wish-dreams” and he knew remarkably little of his enemies, and in fact refused to use good information available to him. “Instead, he trusted his inspirations…and these inspirations were governed by the extreme contempt for and underestimation of others.”
Looking at the low-brow actors within Hitler’s inner circle from a bourgeois intellectual viewpoint, Speer saw the powerful men “jealously watching each other like pretenders to the throne.” Speer particularly hated Martin Bormann who he avoided and viewed as particularly brutish, and added the ultimate sobriquet: “he had no culture. Additionally Speer relates that most of the Nazi party bigwigs “were almost to a man without cosmopolitan experience” and he goes further to state “Of the fifty Reichleiters and Gauleiters, the elite of the leadership, only ten had completed a university education…virtually none had distinguished himself in any notable achievement in any field whatsoever. Almost all displayed an astonishing intellectual dullness.”
Speer wrote that Hitler obviously felt at ease among people “of the same origins as himself”. It is astonishing that Germany, which prided itself on intellectualism and education, was ruled by generally uneducated and brutish functionaries. Or perhaps conversely, this specific type of functionary made it possible to murder Jews, win battles, loot occupied territories, and sleep well at night. Careful calculation and superior intelligence saw Speer generally successful in his dealings and maneuverings for power with Goering, Goebbels, Bormann, and Himmler. Sometimes allied, mostly not, the inner circle spent most of its time building independent fiefdoms, of which Goering’s was the largest.
Speer also addressed the steady rise of the SS in power, and particularly that of Heinrich Himmler, who in the summer of 1943 was made Minister of the Interior. It was Himmler who secured concentration camp prisoners in part for Speer’s factories and it was this action that drew the most attention at Nuremberg. Eventually, the SS went into business for itself and became a rival economic entity within the German economy, viewed with evident distaste by Speer.
On July 30, 1941 Speer wants us to believe that he had the big picture in mind when he visits Dr. Todt, who was in charge of the entire German construction industry, and asks point blank if in fact the huge architectural building projects he was involved with at Hitler’s behest were taking away valuable manpower and resources from the war effort. There is no question that German efficiency was lacking in the overall prosecution of the Nazi war manufactory. When Todt’s plane goes down mysteriously, Hitler taps Speer in his place. Was Speer a victim of his own limited architectural success or more likely the men around Hitler reaching the level of their incompetence? Goering had been steadily making a hash of the Four-Year Plans, and even Hitler knew that a strong, smart administrator was the only answer for increasing war materiel production. What better than an able man already in the trusted circle? And as Speer himself points out it was in keeping with the dilettante in Hitler to choose a non-specialist.
The “Speer Way”
That Speer’s very real organizational skill and his tireless work prolonged the war is certainly true. First through his role of architect, then as Minister of Armaments and Production, Speer centralized decision making and policy. He created the first generally unified ministry post for production and consolidated his power by demanding that representatives of the armed services and civilian boards sign a paper giving him full control of the process. This also brought him in to instant conflict with the other inner-circle fiefdoms, particularly Goering’s (still administering the 4-year Plan parallel to Speer’s work) and later Himmler’s. He found himself more than equal to the task-so much so that it is likely that during a later illness Himmler tried an attempt on his life.
Speer’s plan was based upon self-responsibility. He claims that the famous Jewish organizer of the first war, Rathenau, was his muse. Essentially Speer created a system of information exchange, division of labor, and standardization. He gathered groups of independent technocrats and “experts” into directive committees for weapons, and directive pools for allocations of supplies. Then Speer stepped back and instead of micro-managing, he gave the experts room to prove themselves. Plants were to focus on one thing, do it well, and maximize production under long-term contract. This was real industrial mass production. While not new theories, Speer could activate them and attained great success, noting; “The backing of the Fuehrer counted for everything”.
What Speer terms as the “labor problem”, or the lack of workers for industrial jobs, played into the hands of the procurers of forced-labor. Sauckel, the head of labor assignment in the Third Reich did the dirty work, but was certainly enabled by Speer. In a footnote in the book Speer writes “I was always in basic agreement with his mass deportations of foreign labor to Germany.” Hitler would not agree to the mobilization of German women, which the U.S. and Britain used to great effect, and when dramatic short-falls in labor became apparent, Speer fell right in line with the procurers of slave labor, and turned a blind eye. Speer certainly visited many forced-labor and concentration camps and the underground caves of the Dora rocket project where slave-laborers under his control were dying by the thousands.
Incredibly Speer shows us that at no time were there actual overall plans for the war, much less any economic policy. Time and again Hitler would divert resources, or demand armament programs that took away form Germany’s overall capacity to win the war. Hitler’s ignorance exacerbated his amateurishness. The audacity that had initially served Hitler so well on the battlefield became eclipsed by an endless series of decisions made in a delusional vacuum of general ignorance. Ultimately, the prosecution of war, diplomacy and the workings of state cannot survive such decisions.
Who was Speer and what did he know about the Holocaust?
Speer did not have a happy childhood. He says he was sickly. He leaves the impression that regardless of an upper-class life style, he was dying to get out of his parent’s house. He does seem to prove driven in his choice of career. However, there is an element of emotional void throughout his discussion of his own life. He describes his courtship much like a scientist would an insect mating ritual. Incredibly throughout the whole 500-plus pages Speer only mentions his wife and children in passing. He must have been remarkably distant and unapproachable to them. He mentions no emotional attachment to the children. Speer deliberately chose work over family, to the point that he was solely fixated on facilitating Hitler and the advancement of Nazi Germany.
One of the millions of disillusioned and emotionally wandering men after the First World War, Speer attended a speech made by Hitler in late 1930 at Berlin University and it had a profound effect on him. Speer offers the feeling that the speech’s content was filling a void, not reinforcing any previous conviction. Hitler’s “magnetic force” is mentioned time and time again. Finally Speer had something to guide him. Yet Speer claims that he set aside the overt National Socialist Party doctrines of anti-Semitism and violence perhaps wishfully hoping that they would be modified and watered down eventually. Speer in fairness had to make a decision between a communist Germany and a National Socialist Germany and like most Germans, he chose the latter. Early in the book Speer self-servingly lamented his own naiveté regarding political matters. He said that “if I only wanted to, I could have found out even then that Hitler was proclaiming expansion of the Reich to the east; that he was a rank anti-Semite; that he was committed to a system of authoritarian rule;” etc. The exploitation of this real or created naiveté is a central theme of the book. This very smart, calculating man hung his hat on this thesis and it allowed him to escape the hangman’s noose after carefully distancing himself from certain Nazi policies at the end of the war.
He stated: “My inclination to be relieved of having to think, particularly about unpleasant facts, helped to sway the balance. In this I did not differ from millions of others. Such mental slackness above all facilitated, established, and finally ensured the success of the National Socialist system….How incalculable the consequences were!” Be that as it may, millions of others didn’t run the war-time economy of the Third Reich only he did.
Speer would have us believe that he was one of the masses and not in control of his destiny. The problem is that this is simply not accurate. This upper-middle class intellectual already was exposing his careful packaging as threadbare. In the ensuing chapters of the book there are a series of events that combined create a portrait of blinding amorality. Speer joined the NSDAP in January of 1931 as one of the earliest Nazis. He tells of meeting Hitler and falling under his spell, but an alternative reading might offer up a picture of a young struggling architect in a lousy economy amorally attaching himself remora-like to the biggest whale in the Teutonic pond.
Two early incidents stand out to me as indicative of Speer’s utter lack of moral spirit. Very early in his new career as Hitler’s architect, Speer was told to completely remodel the Borsig Palace for the SA. Papen’s staff told him that they would not vacate for a month or two. Hitler told him to start the demolition work anyway, and when Speer arrived the next day, there was blood on floor from the shooting of one of Papen’s assistants. Speer’s response: “I looked away, and from then on avoided that room. But the incident did not affect me any more deeply than that.” One of Speer’s own men turned in his resignation after this incident.
The day after Kristalnacht, on November 10, Speer was driving to work and saw the burning synagogues. He “accepted what had happened rather indifferently”. Years later while writing the book in prison he looked in retrospect to his lack of comprehension: “Did I sense that this outbreak of hoodlumism was changing my moral substance? I do not know.” One wonders if there was any moral substance to change.
If an historian looks for additional material with which to examine Speer’s carefully crafted responsibility for his actions, it is not hard to find. A case in point is this piece of cross-examination of Speer at Nuremburg, June 21, 1946:
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Your statement some time ago that you had a certain responsibility as a Minister of the Government for the conditions I should like to have you explain what responsibility you referred to when you say you assume a responsibility as a member of the Government.
SPEER: Do you mean the declaration I made yesterday that I . . .
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Your common responsibility, what do you mean by your common responsibility along with others?
SPEER: Oh, yes. In my opinion, a state functionary has two types of responsibility. One is the responsibility for his own sector and for that, of course, he is fully responsible. But above that I think that in decisive matters there is, and must be, among the leaders a common responsibility, for who is to bear responsibility for developments, if not the close associates of the head of State?
This common responsibility, however, can only be applied to fundamental matters, it cannot be applied to details connected with other ministries or other responsible departments, for otherwise the entire discipline in the life of the State would be quite confused, and no one would ever know who is individually responsible in a particular sphere. This individual responsibility in one’s own sphere must, at all events, be kept clear and distinct.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Well, your point is, I take it, that you as a member of the Government and a leader in this period of time acknowledge a responsibility for its large policies, but not for all the details that occurred in their execution. Is that a fair statement of your position?
SPEER: Yes, indeed.
As for Speer’s knowledge of the Final Solution, I can feel comfortable in stating categorically that he must have known. What follows is a grouping of some of the most important points as I see them.
Historians have not decided if Speer attended the afternoon session of Himmler’s October 6, 1943 meeting in Posen. These meetings with the army, navy and important bureaucrats were arranged to explain the Final Solution in explicit detail for the exact purpose of insuring that no one sued for peace and everyone toed the Party line to the bitter end. Historians have uncovered that Speer had addressed this conference in the morning, while Himmler spoke in the afternoon. Speer has been shown to have left the conference at midday to meet Hitler at his headquarters. However, it stretches credulity to believe that Speer did not know the content in at least broad terms of Himmler’s later speech. In fact Himmler saw Speer often, and was a major rival for power in the inner circle. He surely told him about the fate of the Jews at one point, if for nothing else than to ensure Speer knew that Hitler was beholden to him. Speer of necessity collaborated closely with Goebbels as well, who was informed of all such events as a matter of course.
Another point is that Speer had been a close friend of Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s physician, who performed horrible experiments upon Jewish prisoners. Equally damning is that Speer had to have known about the diversion of trains for transportation of Jews. He makes a great point of his notable success in carefully vertically integrating aspects of German production, including shipment and delivery times. His frustration must have been immense at having even a small portion of his rail tonnage diverted for human cargo.
Although he claimed never to have read Mien Kampf, Speer was present for many of Hitler’s endless monologues about the Jews, and simply must have known Hitler’s deep feelings on the subject. After Operation Barbarossa the program became more and more central for Hitler, and although it was not talked about publicly, many of his colleagues, casual contacts and army officers that Speer met and worked with must have gossiped in a “water cooler” type of setting.
In the summer of 1944, his good friend, Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Upper Silesia, told him about something so awful occurring in the territory under his control that he could not bring himself to describe it fully. With remarkable clarity in hindsight, Speer says this must have meant goings on at Auschwitz, but at the time “I did not query him, I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler.” This is quite a remarkable statement coming from the “big picture” manipulator of German industry. There really can be no doubt that Speer had in his possession information about the crimes that Hitler, the government, and ultimately many Germans were committing.
Power and Infighting
Though Speer had nothing whatsoever to do with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s bombing of Hitler’s bunker or of the subsequent coup attempt, he was the one Nazi official the conspirators seriously hoped to win over. His name appeared followed by a question mark on the provisional government list drawn up by the conspirators. One can almost feel the satisfaction that Speer got out of that — not as an antagonist of Hitler but as a known indispensable part of the German government. The ineptitude of the attempt was not lost on Speer. He mentioned how astonished Goebbels was at the oversight of the conspirators in Berlin who failed even to cut off his own telephone line. It is impossible to really know if Speer would have gone along with Stauffenberg if they had actually met. Likely even if Speer had got wind of it, he would not have participated if he knew how amateurish the attempt would be.
In September of 1944 Speer was made aware of Hitler’s “scorched earth” policy. Certainly remembering the early Soviet retreats, Hitler ordered all ministries to destroy everything of value as the Wehrmacht retreated deeper into Germany. This was anathema to Speer, who as the protector of German industry certainly felt betrayed, and ultimately reasoned out that such an order would insure the post-war impoverishment of Germany. By this time allied bombing was creating massive shortages of fuel and other necessities. In the end, Speer directly contravened Hitler’s orders and went so far as to arm workers in power plants and elsewhere to insure that SS or army units would not destroy the facilities. These acts played well in Nuremberg, and do speak to a self-serving and certainly belated civil responsibility up to now not readily apparent in his actions.
Architecture and Building in the Third Reich
Nazi architecture was designed to impress. On Hitler’s preconceived notions: “ultimately he was always drawn back to inflated neo-baroque such as Kaiser Wilhelm II had also fostered…Hitler remained arrested in the world of his youth: the world of 1880 to 1910, which stamped its imprint on his artistic taste as on his political and ideological conceptions.” This is a telling statement, and seems borne out by Hitler’s broader actions: expansion to the East and the Jewish Question being notable examples of early views still strongly held.
There was no “Fuhrer’s Style” according to Speer. It was a bastardization of early Nazi architect Paul Troost’s neoclassicism. Speer goes further to say that Hitler’s predilections ran toward a pragmatic view of architecture, not as an ideologically based concept such as the SS under Himmler, with a penchant for idolatry, runes and mystical nonsense culminating in the bizarre Wewelsburg Castle, oddly never mentioned by Speer.
Hitler’s obsession with architecture and perhaps his own personal failures seemed to initially drive his obvious affection for Speer. Hitler took an intense personal liking to the young architect after meeting him through Goebbels. Speer was a third-generation architect who had carried out two commissions for the Berlin Gauleiter’s office in 1932. Speer immediately showed skills at quick improvisation while designing the huge fields used for Party rallies. He was the innovator who intuited the Nazi pageantry style using huge banners and brilliant lighting techniques.
Speer’s first famous building commission that was completed was the Reich Chancellery. It featured a 480 foot gallery, through which every visiting official wishing to meet the Fuhrer must do the walk of shame and awe to get to Hitler’s office at the far end. Speer’s work in bringing the project in on schedule gained him a rightful reputation as being a great organizer.
Speer wrote: “Hitler…denounced the internationalization of art. The National Socialist creed held that the roots of renewal were to be found in the native soil of Germany.” Architecture in the Third Reich was used as propaganda to legitimize the National Socialist goal of cultural homogeneity, pageantry and ambition. The neo-classic forms were given the task of legitimizing the new form of government. Speer’s use of monumental, sterile, awe-inspiring forms is to this day deified in some architectural circles such as Pyongyang, and was much copied by Stalin, and until the fall of the Soviet Union, followed as almost a state religion there.
National Socialism’s view on architecture was the rejection of a modern style. Private housing should be in the wholesome vernacular style, while public buildings became monuments. The modern movement (Bauhaus, etc.) suffered instant dismissal after the NSDAP took over in January 1933. The ideal model was the Greek temple, the Renaissance palace, the Baroque castle, and the Classicist building of the Empire era.
Hitler, through Speer and dozens of other architects and builders had two separate goals. The first was to set the Nazi party and its leaders up in style, the second to remake the great German cities such as Berlin, Nuremberg and Munich showcases for the Third Reich. The latter plan ultimately existed only in the mind of Hitler and the drawings of Speer.
Speer was all too happy in the book to show that Hitler had low-brow taste. He pointed out Hitler’s love of hotel or “cruise ship” décor and the dreadful oil paintings he put in his private residences. Nonetheless, Hitler’s personal “style” became much copied by the inner circle group as well as the individual Nazi Gauleiters built their trophy houses.
Architecture has long been used by fascists and democrats alike to serve a purpose. It is rarely useful to pin political affiliation to general architectural merit. But architecture does project great power in symbolism. There is no question for instance, that the allied occupation armies after the war made quick work of removing many Nazi monuments and removing swastikas from building facades, while keeping the remaining buildings intact.
For his efforts Speer was awarded a multitude of offices and commissions. In 1934 he was commissioned to design the Reich Party Rally grounds at Nuremberg. By 1937 he was appointed General Architectural Inspector for the Reich capital, responsible for the redesign of Berlin. Berlin and the other large cities were to have the same general treatment of monumental, sterile, neo-classical oppressiveness. These un-built edifices to the Nazi ideal were victims of the war, but it is worth noting that the palaces and vacation homes of the Nazi elite were indeed built as planned.
The most bizarre and amusing of all Nazi ideas about architecture was the manufacture of historical ruins depicting the past glory of the Aryan State. In fact Hitler and Speer wanted to oppress humanity through the ages with their theory of “ruin value” that they dreamed up to insure the Thousand Year Reich was remembered in ensuing centuries. These fake temples with appropriately romantic settings were to be dotted about Germany, a la Athens.
Summation
Speer claimed a change of heart toward Hitler as he realized that the war was lost with certainty. He discussed his own musings about dumping poison gas down the ventilator of Hitler’s bunker. Yet incredibly, with the war nearly lost, on February 14, 1945 Speer offered to hand over “the entire sizable increase in my fortune since the year 1933” for purposes of propping up the mark. Why prop up the mark then? Who on God’s green earth was buying anything denominated in marks at that point? Did he really believe that he would gain enough good will to dodge the hangman’s noose? What about his family’s comfort after the war? This plan was never carried out as no one in the inner circle wanted to do it too, or be shown up. But it says a great deal about Speer’s personal “investment” in the Third Reich.
By the end, Hitler was a delusional shambling old man. Yet Speer risked his life to fly in to go see him in the Fuhrer Bunker days before Berlin was overrun. He described it: “I wanted to see him one last time, to tell him goodbye.” His “emotional bond” to Hitler still remained strong. Yet it was with pity that he saw an “empty, burned-out, lifeless” Hitler. On May 7, 1945 Germany surrendered. Hitler was dead, and Speer was alive to be tried by the allied governments.
Speer, being an amoral technocrat, did not understand civic duty unless it suited specific goals (i.e. discouraging Hitler’s scorched earth policy and protecting skilled workers). He himself said that he didn’t care about politics at all. He was not a brutal man, but an educated intellectual with genuine (if at times misplaced) aesthetic feelings. It is no leap of faith to compare himself as he did, to the millions of Germans deeply pressed by the Communist threat and the economic disaster of the 20’s. It could also be said that Germany itself had no clear values or purpose at this time. The endlessly changing governments with weak chancellors and the turmoil in the Reichstag ensured a nebulous national persona that in the end highlighted frustration with the loss in WWI and further eroded public confidence. There was no collective moral outrage – citizens seemed more fatalistic than anything else. Into this vacuum rushed Hitler, National Socialism and cultural prestige. Der Fuhrer was blessed with a mesmeric and demagogic presence while pushing for a new Germany to be proud of – something desperately desired by much of the populace and certainly by his fawning architect Albert Speer.
Can the theory of the “Sonderweg” or “special track” of German history invoked by certain historical apologists indeed be given credence, on a partial basis at least, to describe the collective German myopia that led to the rise and fall of the Third Reich? Albert would certainly have liked that…..
