Albert Speer by Gitta Sereny
Vish, Donald H
THE ALLURING FACE OF EVIL Albert Speer His Battle with the Truth Gitta Sereny Knopf, $35,757 pp. Donald H. Vish The face of evil is the face of Dorian Gray: attractive, alluring, fascinating,...
...Speer was to Hitler the pure-blooded, aristocratic architect he would like to have been...
...Sereny herself concludes that Speer's moral corruption was rooted in his emotional attachment to Hitler, which was nurtured by his success and driven by his dependence on Hitler...
...According to the French pastor, Georges Casalais, the prison chaplain, Speer arrived at Spandau prison (1946) a tortured man and became the "most repentant...
...Unlike glory, evil cannot be visualized on a grand scale-it is too abstract...
...I felt neither the Nuremberg trial nor [Speer's] book told us...how a man of such quality could become not immoral, not amoral but, somehow infinitely worse, morally extinguished...
...And if we are to believe the people around Adolph Hitler, evil is also invisible...
...Sereny's prose is clinical, detached, and her story is relentless...
...Only when reduced to a human scale can its frightful mien be grasped...
...Speer's colleague, Willie Schelkes, told Sereny he doubts ambition alone accounts for Speer's "total absorption" in his work (which had never so engaged him before) and posits that Speer's complete fascination with the challenge of his job and his need to validate Hitler's faith in him are the keys to understanding his moral flaws...
...All told, Sereny thinks that 12 to 20 million people were murdered by the Nazis...
...She is a master of letting the story tell itself...
...He steadfastly denied any knowledge of the Final Solution...
...Among one group described by Hartley is a family of eight, including an infant, a grandmother, two parents, and a ten-year-old boy comforted by his grandfather-all are naked, all are neatly positioned behind the corpses of the group that went before...
...From time to time, she digresses, giving the reader background information which proves relevant to understanding Speer and the milieu in which he functioned...
...In attempting to understand Speer, Sereny chronicles a farrago of horrific Nazi crimes, premeditated and planned with scientific precision, ranging from systematic killings of mental patients to industrialized genocide...
...all are cut down by a single Tommy gun resting on the knee of a single soldier who smokes a cigarette as the next wave is being readied...
...Speer describes himself as Hitler's friend and an "unpolitical architect...
...While Sereny's book reflects the face of Albert Speer, it is also a mirror that projects the image of Adolf Hitler and the faces of all those who saw nothing and suspected nothing...
...Asked about this thesis, Speer told Sereny "it came closest to the truth...
...That's the way evil is-likable, alluring, capable of great charm...
...Donald H. Vish is a lawyer and free-lance writer in Louisville, Kentucky...
...Speer himself provides some clues...
...In 1975, a psychoanalyst advanced the theory that Hitler and Speer shared a homo-erotic (not homosexual) love for each other...
...When Speer was sentenced to twenty years for conscripting slave labor, many were shocked that he wasn't hanged-the fate of his subordinate Fritz Sauckel, who worked under his direction...
...At the Nuremberg trials, he accepted vicarious guilt for Hitler's crimes, but claimed he knew little or nothing of the details...
...In the "Spandau draft" of Inside the Third Reich, Speer confesses to his vaulting ambition which would lead him to sell his soul for the commission to create a great building...
...Hartley (now Lord) Shawcross, Britain's chief prosecutor, did this at Nuremberg when he described the systematic execution of Jews in small groups of twenty-each group shot to death...
...He introduces her to the German word horig to describe a wide range of emotions from servility to passivity that Hitler evoked in others through his hypnotic charisma and charm...
...Only its results, like Dorian Gray's portrait, reveal its grotesque-ness...
...to place in context the evil crimes against humanity to which this likable "man of excellence" made himself a part...
...Sereny's arrangement of quotes and use of the language from official documents is chilling...
...Gitta Sereny, in the first line of this impressive book, says of Albert Speer: he was a man "I knew well and grew to like...
...The principal aim of Sereny's book is to understand Speer...
...He suggests that Sereny study charisma, "the most dangerous quality there is...
...Donald H. Vish The face of evil is the face of Dorian Gray: attractive, alluring, fascinating, and likable...
...Here is a scale of evil that even Dante failed to imagine...
...Hitler was for Speer the approving father he never had...
...An aristocrat, he described his wife Margaret to his daughter Hilde as a peasant who brought "an infusion of stable stock" to his genetic legacy...
...No one sees it or even suspects it...
...What Sir Hartley's description did for Speer, Speer's own story does for the reader: reveals the face of evil as a human face which devastates and haunts us...
...In Sereny's view, Speer's and Schelkes's explanations are both correct...
...Hitler would become his Mephistopheles...
...Later he served as minister of armaments and war production where he displayed his talent as the organizational genius of the Third Reich...
...Albert Speer was Hitler's architect...
...Speer would say thirty years later he was devastated by Hartley's account which "haunts me to this day...
...In his last book, Infiltrations (1979), Speer admits burying himself in his work in "an unconscious effort" to anesthetize his conscience...
...Of Speer's own personal weakness, he tells his seventeen-year-old daughter Hilde, who wrote to him in 1953 and asked him to explain himself, that he enjoyed living in the "aura of reflected glory" and found Hitler to be a "deeply exciting" man who conveyed to the people that he "loved us...
...While her comments and observations are there when needed, much of the story comes from the mouths of witnesses and official documents...
...Released from prison in 1966, the same year his book Inside the Third Reich was published, Speer died in 1981...
...Of the 6 million Jews killed, two-thirds were women and children...
...Sereny writes...
...He moderates an on-line political discussion forum for Lexis Counsel Connect...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 4
