Benjamin Pogrund
THE GOOD NAZI: THE LIFE AND LIES OF ALBERT SPEER by Dan van der Vat (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, R190)
THE title tells the story. There is none of the toing-and-froing, did he know, didn’t he know about the fate of the Jews under Nazism, as portrayed by Gitta Sereny in her monumental Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth published two years ago. Instead, Dan van der Vat is uncompromising: Speer was a liar, a fraud and a hypocrite.
Van der Vat brings impressive credentials to bear in undertaking this study. His first impressions were formed as a child in German-occupied Holland when his father narrowly escaped forced conscription for Speer’s labour organisation. Van der Vat went on to become a distinguished journalist: he was the Times of London’s correspondent in South Africa and later represented the newspaper in Germany for six years. He has written a brace of books about World War II.
Speer was the architect who served Adolf Hitler with devotion and efficiency, starting with his enthusiastic crafting of Nazi rallies and going on to become the organisational genius whose efforts are credited – if that is the word to use – with keeping the German war machine functioning under the onslaught of the Allied blockade and bombardment. He is said to have prolonged the war for at least a year, with the consequent death of hundreds of thousands and widespread ruin.
It also gave the Nazis more time to pursue their mass murder of Jews, Russians, Gypsies and others deemed not fit to live.
Speer was jailed in 1946 for 20 years in the post-war Nuremberg trials. After his release he wrote his memoirs, grew wealthy, and until his death in 1981 worked hard at being a penitent, presenting himself as someone who should have known what was being done, but did not know. He offered himself as the scapegoat for Germany’s collective guilt.
Van der Vat will have none of this. In page after page he describes Speer’s behaviour and probes his thinking. He finds it was inconceivable that Speer could not have known what his fellow Nazis were doing: if nothing else, he was ultimately in charge of a staggering 14-million slave labourers forced into service for the war machine and while the lives of some of them were saved because their labour was needed, vast numbers were simply on their way to ultimate destruction.
Van der Vat’s careful marshalling of damning information climaxes with detail whose import only became known after Speer’s death and which meant that in his lifetime he was never fully confronted by it. This had to do with the Chronicle – the daily record of Speer’s ministerial activities begun in January 1941 by his years-long friend and subordinate, Rudolf Wolters, an unrequited Hitler-lover who finally broke with Speer because of dismay at his master’s insistence on denouncing the Nazi past.
Wolters “sanitised” the Chronicle so that the copy which landed in Germany’s Federal Archives did not contain references to Speer’s personal role in the decision to expel 75 000 Jews from their Berlin homes – “Jew-flats” as they were called.
Speer asked Wolters not to give the original, unexpurgated Chronicle to the Archives and instead to write a letter, which he did, saying he had lost it. But Wolters got his own back because he bequeathed the full Chronicle to the archives.
So the world finally had confirmation that Speer knew about the expulsion of the Berlin Jews. Did he know, or care, about their transport to the east and their death? Could he possibly not have known about the millions of other victims? Van der Vat concludes that it was only because Speer lied so successfully in the Nuremberg trials that he escaped being hanged with the rest of the gang.
(Just in case anybody missed the parallel, albeit on a lesser scale, South Africa has its own former leaders who pretend to amnesia.)