Nazi Albert Speer: Model of Culture and Morality?
Hux, Samuel
NAZI ALBERT SPEER: MODEL OF culture AND MORALITY? Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, called him "the only one who has won my respect"; H.R. Trevor-Roper called him "the real...
...And we have suffered no damage from it in our inner self, in our soul, in our character...
...But in any case, although he was grateful for the respectful treatment, or (who knows...
...Hermann Goering's "culture" doesn't bear serious consideration: Roman togas and art "collecting...
...And that raises once again the problem, the question, of the "cultivated German"—whether Nazi, or merely one of those of "realistic" disposition who knew that politics (a nasty piece of business in any case, don't you know...
...There is no sense of the fragility of culture, and hence no protective solicitude for it: Culture is alive only to the extent it is helping him...
...For telling the truth, one assumes...
...And, incidentally—is it?—he'll recall as largely a gentile habit this perception of Speer, that "he's not like the others...
...But that doesn't matter in the least...
...but Speer's reputation survived those revelations, was even augmented during the process of revelation, and did not change appreciably thereafter...
...One braces to hear somewhere of some "best friends," and, disappointingly, is not disappointed...
...The question is, what conclusions are we to draw of Speer's "difference...
...extended, so tragically compelling a figure...
...In all respects, including the touch of humor, he was strikingly in contrast with the other Nazis, as he himself was fully aware...
...Released in 1966, publishes Memoirs in 1969 and Diaries in 1975...
...were they then every moral person would have to be cultivated, which isn't the case...
...But it's hard to imagine Speer feeling that beloved objects have taken on a sad and strange coloration...
...To say that he had read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant...
...We do not know that...
...That included Speer...
...that he ought to be...
...And again, "We can say that we have performed this task in love of our people...
...But Speer's performance aside, with its probable mixture of honesty and opportunism, what of his auditors...
...although he'd have been fool or masochist to ignore this legal technicality the court in fact had to respect...
...Probably the Germans more than anyone made a high aesthetic of this alienation of Geist (mind, intellect, spirit) from moral act, and gave to that alienation the name of Culture: the cruel aesthetic ism of Ernst Junger for instance...
...To be thus alone in such surroundings need imply no exalted spiritual and mental state...
...one may support a "liberation" movement committed to the liberation of Israelis (or Jews...
...But I have absolutely nothing to say for myself when a name like Eichmann's is mentioned...
...There is a terrible irony here...
...SAMUEL HUX In the summer of 1944, some months before he was imprisoned and shot at Dachau, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen wrote in his Diary of a Man in Despair, "I must admit something about Speer: after Papen, who combines the conscience and sense of honor of a butcher's hound with stupidity so devastating it is not an excuse but a crime, and just after these new-German pseudo-Girondists and ersatz aristocrats of the type of Krupp et al., his is the most sickening face I know among Nazidom's second string—and he imagines himself to be the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci...
...But in the days of which he speaks, he was...
...One can't say that although Speer was overly patient of governmental discrimination he was moved to reconsideration by a pogrom, since Crystal Night did not so move him...
...Heinrich Himmler, who hadn't much Geist of any sort, although he assuredly thought he had plenty and thought he was showing it, could confide to SS Group Leaders with the expectation of comprehension, "Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand...
...An admirable willingness to let possible extenuations unravel...
...In that respect they were right to say or think, "He's like us...
...That would accentuate the difference...
...In fact, Speer came closer himself to hanging than historians had assumed before Bradley F. Smith (Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg, 1977), equipped with the long-secret trial diary of chief American judge Francis Biddle, revealed that Biddle had held out with the Russian Nikitchenko for death, before yielding to avoid a hung jury...
...and that appreciation, since it's a recognition of culture, is potentially cultivated...
...Guessing rightly that, when faced with the Nazi abominations, they would plead ignorance, the guilt of others, their own inability to exercise corrective influence or even their personal righteousness, he had decided that he would accept his share of the responsibility...
...Toward war's end resists Hitler's orders that Allies be met with scorched earth—his first break from a dozen years of loyalty to the Fuehrer...
...Among the few pleasurable occasions of his imprisonment were the periodic messages of statesmen and private citizens of proper repute offering sympathy and, less pleasurable as the years passed, hope...
...Should Speer have inspired the tremendous respect he did, even if the difference was accentuated...
...But has all this anything to do with Speer...
...That German war production was as efficient as it was as long as it was, strategic bombing or not, was due in large measure to Speer's organizational genius—and also to the POWand foreign slave labor Speer utilized...
...Because of an incident at Spandau (a Russian guard should not read a book banned in the USSR), Speer reflects, "Strangely enough, it only now occurs to me, as I write this, that I felt no sense of infringement when authors and books were banned in the Third Reich: Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, and many others...
...there was no question of responsibility for the Holocaust...
...His culture is a source of clarity, however belated...
...But in the final analysis I myself determined the degree of my isolation, the extremity of my evasions, and the extent of my ignorance...
...Civilization, the collective premium on curiosity, beauty, order, is the parent of moral obligation: It fixes upon that primitive ethical code of self-interest ("Don't hurt me, I won't hurt you") without which there is no society in the first place, and shapes from it a public sense of moral obligation which is broader than scattered and private pacts between immediate individuals and more elegant and binding than that protective quid pro quo born of wise fear...
...Would they take on a strange coloration for him in adversity, his adversity or theirs...
...Cultivation and a personal sense of morality are clearly not the same thing...
...There is a naturalness and ease of association between daily event, mood and speculation that suggests an integration the arriviste is without...
...Consequently, of recent memory, one may have membership in the Judenrein Athletic Club and, with a proper attitude, be no anti-Semite...
...For some: by virtue of Speer's greater discernment than the others' and his deeper culture, he was somehow less guilty than they...
...But unless he feels obligated to others (even if they've done nothing for him lately, so no quid pro quo), he is only a half-moral person—inchoate, undeveloped...
...And I assume he even believed it...
...Even without comparing Speer's autobiographical writings with the apologies of some others—Admiral Karl Doenitz, Papen, Schacht, Baldur von Schirach—it is hard to escape the impression, even if one's resistant, that he's a formidable character in absolute terms, and impossible to avoid the certainty that in Hitler's court "Albert Speer was morally and intellectually alone...
...Although I will in time quarrel about the extent to which the word morally is appropriate, H.R...
...And I suppose that every cultivated person doesn't have to be moral, either...
...These gestures toward minimization are perhaps balanced—and more—by his insistence on his part in the "collective responsibility...
...and that appreciation, since it's a recognition of others, is potentially moral...
...And furthermore, the cultivated person (not "after a fashion"), even if he doesn't have to although he ought, probably will be a moral person...
...Indeed, anyone conscious of the "Speer enigma" over the years will recall not tributes, naturally, but a generality at least cautiously sympathetic or, when critical, qualified by a tone of respect and a hesitation to seem rigid in the application of justice...
...they may choose to benefit from the gift or violate it, or they may be incapable of conscious choice...
...I am not surprised that his sense of morality was equally warped...
...Counterpart to the ease and naturalness there is an urgency and necessity to make meaning of things with all the aid he can get...
...And the fact that one has to doubt the innocence of Schacht, pompous and arrogant, and of criminally stupid Papen, sorry for nothing except the outrageous (to them) insult of being there, should be irrelevant to one's opinion of Speer...
...Dies in September 1981...
...Yes, we know that...
...To have gone through this and yet— apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness—to have remained decent, this makes us hard...
...A Democrat may serve in a Republican administration, a Republican in a Democratic...
...Nonetheless (disloyalty temporarily purged by a desperate failure...
...If Speer was a man of moral and intellectual capacity (as none of those who find him very personally familiar doubt for a moment), if, that is to say, Speer was a man of cultivation, not a mere pretender bloated on Nazi Schwdrmerei, then one either judges him by a rigorous code or one assumes there need be no relation between personal culture and action...
...But this is to speak at the level of broad society...
...Socialists and Christian Democrats may come to a parliamentary agreement...
...The court must have thought that Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche spoke the truth as well: They were acquitted...
...Reek's view turns out to be a lonely dissent...
...Does that mean, Ball rather inanely asks after recalling those lines, that Speer "should be judged by a more rigorous code than the others...
...On the other...
...George W. Ball in The Past Has Another Pattern recalls that when he helped interview Speer for the U.S...
...Doktor Goebbels...
...On the one hand he was grateful...
...Culture is always giving something to Speer: consolation, comprehension of self occasionally, freedom for a while from isolation—all more modest forms of power...
...If so, I suspect the answer is the same as Speer's...
...And I appreciate he couldn't have remained silent about the matter, knowing how loudly that would speak...
...This is, of course, no idle or accidental example...
...His most recent article in these pages, "Unmasking Spanish Faces," appeared in March 1982...
...According to George Steiner (Language and Silence), "We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning...
...And I said, "short on," not "without": Speer's suffering is real enough to me...
...It isn't his architectural career, God knows, that convinces one of his culture...
...most people can neither prance so high nor wallow so low...
...The reputation was based— before the Memoirs and Diaries—on Speer's Nuremberg "performance," a word I use to note some possibilities, at least...
...Which is it—and why does it matter...
...it being possible to practice one of the twin capacities without practicing both...
...And if one has my experience he'll recall conversations— which may be more relevant than historical criticism—in much the same way...
...It is also true that the habit of thinking within the limits of my own field provided me . . . with many opportunities for evasion...
...Was it because Speer seemed sincerely "sorry...
...How was it so easy for Speer to be not just a Nazi, not just a functionary of the state, but an associate, a pro-tege\ an intimate of Hitler...
...Sorry" is no extenuation...
...For, in fact, Speer's implicit definition of anti-Semitism is more or less the world's: anti-Semitism is an attitude...
...But all in all, it's hard to avoid a certain skepticism about Speer the defendant...
...I prefer at any rate to believe the disease is curable...
...They are both talents for appreciative responsibility: 1. A person may appreciate what others do for him...
...Trevor-Roper called him "the real criminal of Nazi Germany...
...from a place in the community of nations and, with a proper attitude, be no anti-Semite...
...It is indeed possible to see Speer at Nuremberg as a man simply trying to save his neck through adaptability...
...so that those twin capacities become so imitative one of the other that they begin to appear as one capacity directed toward different realms of experience...
...Gilbert remarks more than once in his Nuremberg Diary that Speer seemed to think he was risking a death sentence by not minimizing his responsibility...
...A reading of his diaries dispells that notion...
...Not even incipiently...
...Becomes in 1942 Minister of Armaments and War Production...
...Of course it could be argued that Ball, the commandant and the sergeant were meeting Speer before the full public revelations of Nazi crimes...
...But agreement with a high-sounding proposition is cheap...
...It's more than a little embarrassing to read his claim (in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, U.S...
...The relationship between the individual's cultivation and the individual's sense of morality (assuming them both) is a kind of connective analogy—or, they are twin capacities directed toward different realms of experience...
...visits Hitler several times in the bunker up until the end...
...their dossiers were adequate to the job...
...I am drowning in filth...
...but also those who found him—all things considered and extenuations, harrumph...
...But no defendant could have seemed more contrite than Fritzsche, whose agony was, according to Gilbert, palpable...
...Receives sentence of 20 years at Spandau prison in Berlin...
...They were exceedingly foolish...
...I've seen Joseph Goebbels referred to as, in spite of all, a cultured intellect...
...Jackson's message is comprehensible: After all, he borrowed explicitly Speer's "collective responsibility" theme for his summation...
...The one who not only appreciates but feels obligated to culture will in all likelihood transpose that capacity without thought and not only appreciate what others do for him but feel obligated to them...
...We can remind ourselves of the Speer story quickly enough: Joins Nazi Party 1931...
...I don't expect Speer to have said, "I was after all—note my actions, my considered associations—an anti-Semite...
...My guess is that by the time his Spandau time was up, or long before, Speer probably was no anti-Semite...
...Why did his culture not make it difficult...
...And not the simple fact that so many of the diary entries are remembrances and speculations of a properly elevated sort—recollections from age seven of Schiller's The Maid of Orleans, the memory of an aria, a sentence from Goethe or Turgenev, thoughts for a history of the window, und so weiter...
...he wasn't very big-time—a radio announcer and third-string propagandist...
...To one Sergeant Williams, who provided him with extra rations, "so that, as he said, I would have my strength for the trial," Speer must have seemed like one of his betters...
...It is also a discipline of risk, an acceptance of the power of culture to move one in uncomfortable ways, to violate one so to speak...
...Quite the contrary, accepting such prescriptions actually gave many Germans a feeling of elitist specialness" (11/20/62...
...but then adds, "And then again there is the liking I arouse almost everywhere" (Diaries, 1/26/47) —which is almost amused...
...They are born long after this phylogeny of civilization and morals and need not repeat the process in the small in their own evolution...
...And some made a low barbarism...
...One would like to know what Speer really thought of all this...
...But he knew how history should try him: as he sometimes tried himself...
...The biggest delusion in Speer's speculations is the most apparent...
...In western history there is only one people who not only preached the good that may accrue to one from human culture but consistently preached and practiced a protective obligation to culture in the large and in its parts, an absolute imperative that one cherish and revere the book—that is, the Jews...
...I shall never be able to get over having served in a leading position a regime whose true energies were devoted to an extermination program" (8/24/60...
...But I wonder if the question enters the calculations of those who find Speer "like us"—whether that leads to thinking him less or more culpable than "the others...
...It is true that I did not know what was really beginning on November 9,1938 [Kristallnacht], and what ended in Auschwitz and Maidanek...
...awareness of its fragility...
...If I have seemed short on compassion for one whom so many have thought excessively punished, I would only lie now to hem and haw an apology...
...The judgment of his comparative innocence—usually only implicit, a matter of inferences—is absurd: It is devoid of meaning save the confusion and sentimentality of Speer's audience...
...Agreement—if it's agreeable enough with one's image of what one's like—can be an attitude...
...And you can't even say he ought to be (although it would enrich his life), since he is in the singular what civilization was working toward in the plural...
...and had he been offered, say, Himmler's job, one can doubt absolutely he'd have taken it...
...But I'm not sure that was unequivocally a maximizing of his guilt...
...It sounds for all the world as if he's talking about human beings...
...Storey must have been saying with other words, "We respect you more than the others...
...I grant there's something imprecise and quasi-metaphysical about the notion—since I'm obviously not talking about contributions to the local library fund...
...Perhaps 1 can forgive myself for everything else: [being Hitler's architect, armaments minister, even slaver...
...the drawings, and it seems to me often now that these things can have a strangeness about them, and I want to cry...
...the sheer embarrassing banality of mind swamps even the posturing cynicism he was so proud of...
...2. A person may appreciate what culture does for him...
...Speer's fortunate reputation was not based to any significant degree on his plan to assassinate Hitler, for although real (independently documented), the affair smacked too much of the quixotic...
...About Speer's words, at least, that seems to be true...
...But why '38...
...I am choking in it...
...One cannot judge him as one of those German citizens of ambivalent opinions who thought or hoped the anti-Semitism a passing rhetorical vulgarity...
...And Speer's defense on the issue of POWs—that Soviet prisoners, at least, were not protected by the Geneva Convention which the USSR had not signed— sounds rather opportunistic...
...Fritzsche, however, clearly a surrogate for Goebbels, did not belong at the major war criminals' trial...
...It is also a respect for the fact that culture, for all its necessity and power, is, because human-made, fragile: the recognition behind Reek's words...
...So what...
...maybe because it taught him once that the proper style of confession invites the kind of applause that's the next best thing to an acquittal, in the Memoirs he rejects all possible extenuations and mitigations as "efforts at legalistic exculpation...
...Storey's letter is really odd: "least culpable...
...But it's requisite nonetheless: a kind of necessary fiction that they do not exist and survive without our passion for them...
...His designs for the Nuremberg rallies, his monumentally monstrous buildings in Berlin and plans for others all suggest a conception of culture as power—of one sort or another...
...There's no suspicion that he shared the mentality of a Streicher...
...There is, I agree, a certain doggedness in some of the self-confrontations, as in a sequence of painful diary entries in November and December 1946 that progress from the protective assertion that Hitler was cautious about anti-Semitic remarks in Speer's presence, to the admission that he never was, to the recollection that he, Speer, never felt revolted even when Hitler spoke of "annihilation" or "extermination...
...I am almost as short on patience with some of the innocent as on compassion for one of the guilty—even though it is now far too late for it to be in the interest of the dead if the world should grow impatient with the comforts of attitude...
...Samuel Hux is a frequent contributor to Commonweal, Dissent and Worldview, as well as moment...
...Sauckel hangs, by the way...
...The British commandant at Kransberg castle, where Speer was held before Nuremberg, must have felt the same thing...
...But the relationship between cultivation and morality is richer than the poverty of relationship that contemporary wisdom imagines: that there isn't, alas, any connection...
...For some: by virtue of same, he was more guilty than they...
...Oops...
...I've referred to Fritz Reck a couple of times—that passage in which his beloved objects "have a strangeness about them" and he wants to cry...
...If he had only known that what began on Kristallnacht in 1938 would lead to Auschwitz and Maidanek...
...As Speer recalled in his Memoirs, the "commandant invited me for a drive the day we met...
...I'm sure he never did get over it...
...At the same time, that sense of public moral obligation, once set in process, tempers— one might even say humanizes or personalizes—civilization...
...And undoubtedly he wasn't...
...but an anti-Semitic regime is not a coalition and allows no complimentary portfolios...
...Reflecting upon Jackson's message he comments on his "effort to tell the truth and not take refuge in cheap alibis...
...In large, but imperfect, part— yes...
...Whatever respect he imbibed as a student for moderation and cleanliness of design and craftsmanship, he easily threw it up when offered the opportunity to pursue the opposite...
...In none of my speeches, letters, or actions is there any trace of anti-Semitic feelings or phraseology...
...Given the fact that he wasn't among the acquitted...
...And I'm not sure whether to expect that it shall...
...Captured by Americans in May 1945...
...It is true that as a favorite and later as one of Hitler's most influential ministers I was isolated...
...it may have been a subtle way of diffusing it among numbers...
...There writes in secret his Diaries and a draft of Memoirs...
...Strategic Bombing Survey at the European war's end, "with charm and apparently spontaneous candor, he evoked in us a sympathy of which we were all secretly ashamed," and then admits having felt, albeit with an apology for an attitude "so inexcusable," that Speer was "like us...
...But in the absence of that moral necessity that cultivation and deed agree, we have, somewhere in the middle, careers such as Speer's...
...individuals with their own gifts and flaws and quirks are as independent of the civilization and public morality of their society as they are creatures of it...
...but it's clear in context that Trevor-Roper is not speaking in merely comparative terms...
...Speer was convicted solely for the forced labor program...
...And none would have thought him "like us...
...But unless he feels obligated to culture (even it it's done nothing for him lately), he is only a half-cultivated person—or cultivated "after a fashion," as I put it earlier...
...More of this later...
...Speer is so clearly not the cultural arriviste parading his blotchy polish (as in Goering's idiot self-advertisement: "I am the last of the Renaissance men...
...The judgment of his greater guilt makes sense...
...It may be hard to love its discrete components—a book, a painting, a fugue, a dance, a metaphysical proposition— as opposed to appreciation for what they may do for one...
...11/30/46...
...But why should Speer's truth-telling evoke such celebration...
...Anti-Semitism is an "attitude" only to those who can dissociate moral sense from action, cultivation from public deed...
...and also a source of pain...
...He was, somehow, "not like the others...
...great works of art, as Kafka said and Aristotle before him, can hurt one, inflict pain...
...For a convicted war criminal, Albert Speer has enjoyed an extraordinarily favorable reputation—and did long before his celebrated Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs and Spandau: The Secret Diaries...
...That whole world of Julius Streicher always struck me as morbid, twisted...
...One might, with a kind of nasty retributive justice, call this die Deutschenfrage, except that the confusion Speer's reputation signifies suggests the problem, as a mental habit, belongs to no one people now...
...In fact, it made it easier—and hence the difficulty of my speculations...
...While others at Nuremberg trials are saying they only followed orders, Speer assumes accountability...
...Of course it does...
...its absence, when one chances to think of something absent, is an attitude...
...It's not fair to judge a "Culture" by its elitist aesthetes or its proud psychopaths alone...
...This article is based on a portion of a book in progress, a Gentile's speculations on Judaism as a saving "idea of culture in an age of brutality...
...The Western powers would have released him from Spandau long before his 20 years were up but for the resistance of the Russians (who had their own byzantine reasons evidently having little to do with hard-line justice...
...But this does not argue a lack of connection...
...Cultivation isn't a matter of possession or display...
...And it was evident by his behavior that he had every intention of putting the greatest additional distance between himself and the primitives, as he regarded them...
...But he managed to say quite a few things for himself over the years...
...I know there was nothing for him to say but what he said...
...In February 1945 even plans to assassinate Hitler by pumping poison gas into the Chancellory bunker—plan aborts because of reconstruction of bunker air-funnel...
...In extremity, Fritz Reck looked about him and wrote, "I look at the things I have brought together here, and cherish, the library, the medieval statuettes, the candelabra...
...But that sequence actually begins thus: "Even in the light of the strictest examination, I must say that I was not an antisemite...
...It may be hard to love culture, taking it so for granted as many do, and feeling superior to it as more than a few do...
...Trevor-Roper's conclusion about Speer in The Last Days of Hitler bears up, even while it was one of the earlier written contributions to Speer's reputation: "Whatever the errors of judgment, and the neutrality of conscience, which enabled him to acquire and retain the personal friendship of the most bloodthirsty tyrant in modern history, it is quite clear that in Hitler's court Albert Speer was morally and intellectually alone...
...Solicitude for culture...
...Now none of this means that being cultivated translates uncomplicatedly into being moral...
...But I think it just to say (spme rights of generalization that pure logic doesn't convey, history does...
...Nonetheless, G. M. Gilbert, prison psychologist at the trials, who observed Speer almost daily over a year, was convinced of Speer's sincerity in his testimony...
...Whether or not one thinks that morality and cultivation are mutually imitative twin capacities, as I do, most would agree that it isn't moral to prejudge or condemn a race or ethnic group and it isn't cultivated to be subject to irrational spites whether virulent or "polite...
...In the Memoirs, Speer recalls of 1931: "Even after joining the party I continued to associate with Jewish acquaintances, who for their part did not break relations with me although they knew or suspected that I belonged to this anti-Semitic organization...
...The most precision I can honestly manage follows in the form of historical allusion...
...We drove alone, without guards, through the Taunus woods, lay down for a while under a huge fruit tree, tramped about the woods, and he told me about hunting bears in Kashmir...
...In some cases even its rape is empowering...
...Insists furthermore that beyond one's responsibility for his "own sector" there is a "collective responsibility" of those "closest associates around the Chief of State" from which there can "be no attempting to withdraw" since, had the war been won, "the leadership would probably have raised the claim that it was collectively responsible...
...We have instead, by default, the curious attitude that a person's cultivation—which after all is not something he's born with but something society makes possible for him to attain—is a private matter with no obligations of behavior...
...Can one imagine Goering moved by his gains of museum-theft (the loss of their cash value aside...
...But I think we are more merciful sometimes than the dead would let us know we have a right to be...
...Government Printing Office, 1947) that any poor treatment slave laborers suffered was a matter of "individual bad instances...
...John Kenneth Galbraith, who interviewed Speer with Ball (and Paul Nitze) at Flensburg, put the matter nicely in A Life in Our Times: Memoirs: "Albert Speer, forty in 1945, was tall, slender, with dark, slightly sparse hair and a mobile, sometimes amused, face...
...It's a complex and demanding recognition of the power of both ambitious patterns of intellect and single objects of its creation to steady one, to console...
...For all his appreciation of the various ways culture assists him, I do not see in Speer any sense of responsibility, obligation toward culture, any respect for its fragility...
...The Spandau Diaries contain a message Robert H. Jackson, chief American prosecutor, sent Speer through his attorney—"Tell your client that he is the only one who has won my respect"— and an excerpt from a letter sent Speer by deputy prosecutor Robert Storey— "As you probably know, you were admired by the United States judges [sic—there was Biddle] and prosecutors as the least culpable of any of the defendants...
...That Speer was a god-awful architect may be irrelevant—but not the reasons...
...Morally it's an odd notion that confession makes one less culpable for what one's confessed than another who hesitates to confess...
...There is a criminal logic to history in this century...
...not the general condition...
...But it implies a moral preference mankind of late has not consistently made a moral necessity: that there must be some connection between personal cultivation and public deed...
...Well, it's not quite true that there was no minimizing...
...Speer was a cultivated man— after a fashion...
...The Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935, and practiced in various degrees for two years before that, and promised well before Hitler's ascension...
...Some of the defendants thought Speer was hanging them...
...By 1934 is Hitler's personal architectural advisor, and plans, with Hitler, the monumental Berlin meant to be Hitler's greatest "artistic" achievement...
...so often leads so unfortunately to excess...
...Indicted for using forced labor, admits he'd had no qualms about it and adds that forced-labor czar Fritz Sauckel was responding to his, Speer's, numerical requirements...
...At that time I was no more an anti-Semite than I became in the following years...
...Every moral person doesn't have to be cultivated, no...
...one may serve, by choice, in a high, responsible cabinet position, an anti-Semitic regime and, with a proper attitude, be no anti-Semite...
...The reputation was based only in part on Speer's efforts against the scorched-earth policy, for this was after all no objection to Hitler's war crimes but rather an objection to Hitler's intended punishment of Germany...
...Trevor-Roper called him "the real criminal of Nazi Germany...
Vol. 8 • September 1983 • No. 8
