The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer

National Review, Nov 10, 1997 by Conor Cruise O'Brien

The Good Nazi: The Life & Lies of Albert Speer, by Dan van der Vat (Houghton Mifflin, 406 pp., $30)

Mr. O'Brien is the author most recently of The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785 - 1800 (Chicago).

THIS is a good account, both of Albert Speer's life and work with Hitler, and of the versions of his story that he presented at Nuremberg and (in somewhat different forms) later. Albert Speer was accepted as a member of the Nazi Party effective March 1, 1931. He soon won Hitler's approval as an architect. As Speer later wrote: "After years of frustrated efforts I was wild to accomplish things -- and 28 years old. For the commission to do a great building I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe's."

Mephistopheles continued to reward his Faust. Speer became Hitler's principal architect in 1934 and was awarded a house near Hitler's mountain retreat at the Berghof -- a privilege that Speer shared only with Bormann and Goring. In February 1942 Speer succeeded Fritz Todt as Hitler's construction chief and as a result soon found himself in charge, under Hitler, of the construction aspects of the German war effort.

Later, after Germany's defeat, Speer was to claim that he had taken no part in the persecution of the Jews and that he had been barely aware that anything of the sort was going on. The record shows, however, that he played an active part in the mass eviction of Jews, most of whom were subsequently murdered. According to an account prepared under Speer's direction:

In accordance with Speer's orders, a further action was started to clear about five thousand Jew-flats [sic]. The existing apparatus was appropriately enlarged so that the Jew-flats, despite the universal problems resulting from the war situation, could be made ready at top speed and be filled with demolition tenants from the areas to be cleared most urgently. By these measures the Jew-flats were brought into use for their predetermined purpose and on the other hand further empty flats were made ready for catastrophe purposes.

And a great deal more to similar effect.

From late 1942 onward, Speer was given charge of the same economic areas in the occupied East as came under his aegis in Germany as minister and inspector-general of construction, roads, water, and energy. By this time the Holocaust was already in full swing in these areas, and the repercussions of its organization and perpetration were dominating the railway and road systems of the area. It would have been impossible for a person with Speer's responsibilities not to be fully aware of what was going on and also impossible not to facilitate it when required to do so by its organizers, the chief of whom was Speer's boss, Adolf Hitler.

Late in the war, and knowing that it was already lost, Speer won some title to the recognition of the victorious Allies by obstructing the implementation of Hitler's scorched-earth policy. Partly as a result of this, and partly as I think for other reasons (see below), Speer got remarkably gentle treatment when he came to trial at Nuremberg. He was cross-examined in June 1946 by Justice Robert H. Jackson, a veteran Democratic politician and Truman appointee. As van der Vat writes:

Having heard Speer deny that he had been a member of the SS since his earliest party days in 1932 [actually 1931], Jackson gave an early example of his sloppy approach: "You filled in an application once, or one was filled in for you, but it was, I believe, not accepted or something like that?" Speer explained that he had sidestepped the high honorary SS rank Himmler had offered him several times [a most unlikely story]. Jackson got Speer to concede that he knew about Nazi anti-Semitism and that "the Jews were evacuated from Germany" [sic]. But Speer flatly denied involvement in the evacuations. Speer must have been confident that [the relevant documents] had not been found when he made this flat and untrue denial. . . . Jackson did not hesitate to ask one leading question after another, a practice forbidden in Anglo-Saxon legal procedure; not a few of them enabled the defendant to present himself in the best possible light unchallenged: "Is it not right that there was perhaps nobody at all in Hitler's entourage apart from yourself who had the courage to say to his face that the war was lost?" Speer did not find it unduly difficult to respond positively to such uninhibited blandness, like a tennis player dealing with a gentle lob.

Van der Vat does not speculate on the reasons for the "uninhibited blandness" of Justice Jackson's cross-examination; so let me offer what seems to be the likely political explanation of this phenomenon. Robert H. Jackson was -- as van der Vat shows -- a most undistinguished lawyer, but he was a highly successful politician, in the confidence of both Roosevelt and, later, Truman. It was Truman who appointed Jackson to his responsibilities at Nuremberg, which were at least as politically sensitive as they were judicially onerous. And the political context was quite delicate by the middle of 1946, when Speer's trial came on. By that time, it was clear that the Soviets would remain in control of the territories occupied by them in Central Europe, however the Allies might feel about that. The Cold War had in fact begun, and it might have escalated into a hot one. In the new context, the Nuremberg Trials were beginning to turn into an embarrassment to the victorious Allies, and particularly to the Americans, the people most preoccupied with the global picture. The Americans looked as if they might soon be needing German allies, and they also knew that the Germans, while accepting their own defeat, resented the performances at Nuremberg as seeming to make the entire burden of war-guilt rest solely on their shoulders. Yet the process set in motion at Nuremberg had to continue to a generally predetermined conclusion, at the risk of dire political repercussions among the Allied populations.