Taken In by the Fuehrer

...For Nazism, until just three decades ago one of the most powerful doctrines in the world, was by then openly espoused by barely a handful of unbalanced extremists...

...All the more fantastic, then, that Speer's recollections confirm that Hitler said the same things in private as in public...

...Therein lies the special fascination of Speer...

...For Speer the Jews were not, in the language of modern political science, a "salient issue...

...As he recalls, he was drawn less to Hitler's politics than to Hitler himself...

...According to Speer, Hitler used to chat idly over dinner about the need to exterminate the Jews...

...Recalling this comment several months later, following his sentencing, Speer revealed his strong sense of self-righteousness: "It does seem to me as though the Himmlers, Bormanns, Streichers, and their ilk cannot explain Hitler's success with the German people...

...He does not invoke the usual justifications for the visionary attraction of the movement, the decay of Weimar and the frustration of serious people—especially the most naive and vigorous part of the population, the educated young...

...But how could a man in Speer's position have been indifferent to the fate of the Jews...

...The word "Nazi" is used loosely as a universal pejorative today, in fact, because so many people no longer grasp that it has a literal meaning...

...To most of those who have grown up since 1945, no ideology could be more bizarre or unthinkable...

...sometimes it even seems to me that everything else was merely camouflage for this real motivating factor...

...He recorded in his diary the revulsion he felt at the prospect of being joined with Esser: "I always kept those Bavarian vulgarians in Hitler's retinue, men from the early days of the Party, at arm's length...

...That whole world of Julius Streicher always struck me as morbid, twisted...

...Most strikingly, it becomes apparent that Speer considered people like himself different from the thugs who made up the backbone of the Nazi movement...

...Indeed, his world has changed so radically since 1945 that he can not even recapture what he saw as the meaning of Nazism...

...His attitude was a mixture of not knowing, not believing, not noticing, and not caring...

...Moreover, the anti-Semitic slogans also seemed to me a tactical device for whipping up the instincts of the masses...

...And they too did the same to me...

...He therefore concluded that, being a "high-minded" Nazi, he bore a special measure of responsibility for the movement's success...

...Like almost all of us, I thought Hitler's anti-Semitism a somewhat vulgar incidental, a hangover from his days in Vienna...

...Yet hatred of the Jews was Hitler's central conviction...

...In the early days of his imprisonment, after he had publicly acknowledged the enormity of the Nazis' crimes and his own hand in them, Speer was still able to write: "Even in the light of the strictest self-examination, I must say that I was not an anti-Semite...

...Speer dimly recalls the Hitler of his youth as a charming enthusiast of monumental architecture, but that Hitler, he belatedly admits, never existed...

...Projects so abstract that Speer can hardly remember where he thought they would lead...

...Consequently, one picks up Spandau: The Secret Diaries, composed from over 25,000 entries Speer smuggled out of Spandau prison, hoping that this obviously intelligent and articulate follower of Hitler will finally render the appeal of Nazism comprehensible to the contemporary reader more meaningfully than he did in his earlier Reminiscences (published in the U.S...

...On the eve of his release from prison, for example, he learned that a television reporter planned to interview him together with veteran Nazi Hermann Esser...

...He enjoyed describing his fantasy of New York City in flames...

...Nowhere in these diaries, in fact, is there any sign of why Hitlerism would appeal to a thoughtful, unpolitical man...

...In no particular is Speer's distinction between his brand of Nazism and that of the others more maddeningly baffling than in his attitude toward the Jews...

...It is ultimately in this respect, it seems, that Nazis like Speer felt themselves to be most different from the "vulgarians...

...Montesquieu's Frenchman incredulously asked an Oriental visitor, "How can one be a Persian...

...Reviewed by Victor Baras Assistant Professor of Political Science, the New School for Social Research In 1946 the War Crimes Tribunal sentenced Albert Speer, head of the Nazi military-industrial complex and Hitler's favorite architect, to 20 years in prison...

...Nevertheless, an explanation, or rather a rationalization, of his involvement with what should probably be called Hitlerism does emerge in the course of the book...

...as Inside the Third Reich...

...Unfortunately, Speer does not really address the question directly...

...The Nazi masses and the demagogues who led them followed the public Hitler, while Speer and his kind considered themselves loyal to der Fuhrer as he truly was...

...We who actually were least inclined to think selfishly were the ones who made him possible...

...Speer claims not to have grasped that Hitler really hated Jews until much too late...

...He thus became the most important Nazi (with the possible exception of the mysterious Rudolf Hess) to survive Nuremberg and, upon his release, something of a living relic...

...In contrast to the uncouth Nazis, whom he viewed as mere careerists, Speer saw himself as a man of principle...

...God only knows why he can't shake it off, we thought...

...During the Nuremberg trials he wrote to a friend: "I think that I am more typical of the regime than all these repulsive bourgeois revolutionaries...

...In the end, Speer's rationalization, no less than all the others we have been given over the years, is unsatisfactory...

...Hitler was sustained by the idealism and devotion of people like myself...

...Not even incipiently...

...Speer might well have asked, "What do they think I am, a Nazi...

...Build up the new...

...and we want to ask Speer, "How can one be a Nazi...

...In any case, such explanations would not apply to Speer, since, far from being a youthful political idealist, he insists he was not political at all...

...To the young Speer, Hitler's racism seemed unimportant, or at least less important than certain other of his ideas...

...I never thought them really important, certainly not compared with the plans for conquest, or even with our vast projects for rebuilding the cities...

...The vignettes in Spandau are appalling and predictable...

...In 1960, upon learning of the Eichmann trial, Speer again attempted in his diary to deal with this question: "Where [Hitler] really did go beyond the norms was the way he took seriously his insane hatred of the Jews and made that a matter of life and death...

...Speer found this "a horrible thought...

...He was not quite like the other prominent Nazis, as the Nuremberg court's relatively lenient sentence and the numerous efforts by American and West German officials to have him released early (all blocked by the Russians) attest...

...He loved to imagine the expanses of Russia dotted with German villages...

...In retrospect, those ideas seem remarkably elusive...

...Tear down the old...