Fellow traveller
C. M. Woodhouse The Slave State Albert Speer trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Weidenfeld and Nicolson pp. 384, £10.95) 1-4% uring the last 20 years of his life, L./Albert Speer earned a modest reputation as the only Nazi who ever apologised. This hardly rehabilitated him as a Good German, but he was the least bad of a bad lot. After establishing this reputation with two previous books (Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: the Secret Diaries), he aimed to consolidate it with The Slave State, which is published posthumously. His apology now turns into an apologia. Although he was Minister for Armaments, he discovered that he had been after all 'a part of — not the centre of — the events.'
The message is reiterated in chapter after chapter. Despite having joined the Nazi Party early in 1931, Speer insists that he was merely a technocrat, struggling for industrial efficiency against the ideological maniacs. He was always distrusted by Bormann and never achieved any personal relationship with Himmler. The latter in fact tried to murder him with the help of a quack doctor. Even Hitler complained to Goebbels that Speer had let himself be 'harnessed too closely to the wagon of business'. Three times he explains that he was discredited by being incriminated in the plot of 20 July 1944.
It seems there were many things he did not know at the time — in fact, most of the contents of this book, which he based largely on the personal files of Himmler in the Federal German archives. Himmler was not content with his responsibility for the concentration camps: he wanted also to manage the industries whose labour they supplied, and to decide their priorities. Also, of course, he wanted eventually to exterminate the inhabitants of the camps. These ambitions were in conflict with the industrial responsibilities of Speer, as well as with each other. So far, Speer was at least aware of what Himmler was aiming at, even if it was nonsensical.
Himmler's plans to extract rubber from dandelions, oil from geraniums and aviation-fuel from the roots of fir-trees, or to establish armaments factories under water, inevitably wasted a great deal of Speer's time, but they could eventually be frustrated. More serious were the plans for the post-war empire of Greater Germany — including, for example, a chain of German cities to be built from the Alps to the Caucasus — because in these fantasies Himmler had the personal support of Hitler. Speer seems to have known nothing of them until he came across Himmler's personal papers.
It is not difficult to see how Speer would have tried to neutralise these plans, though he might well have failed against the megalomania of a victorious Hitler. He points out that Himmler's SS experts based their calculations on the assumption that slightly more than four million slaves would be available. Then he makes his own calculations, showing that for a 20-year programme in fact nearly 141/2 million slaves would be needed. He clearly sees no need to emphasise the inconsistency of the assumptions with the policy of extermination, especially as the Jews were the most efficient workers as well as the prime candidates for that policy. Presumably they would simply and literally have been worked to death.
All this is typical of Speer's approach to his nauseating subject. He did not object to Himmler's cold-blooded butchery but only to his technical ignorance. The style of his book, perhaps aggravated by a pedestrian translation, is that of an aggrieved bureaucrat writing a formal complaint to higher authority. Even his self-defence collapses on inspection.
Did he try to ameliorate the conditions of the concentration camps? He did, but only in order to extract greater productivity from the inmates, and even that half-heartedly. The importance of producing the rockets which we called VI (and the Germans A-4) was so great that Speer proposed to remove the workers, under-nourished and overtired as they were, from their permament confinement in caves (where the air 'was cool, damp and stale and stank of excrement') into new barracks. This was done, but according to one of the inmates there was 'no great improvement'. Speer reports without further comment his verdict that 'the power of the SS must have been greater'.
That is his regular excuse for every failure. He admits that he was 'one of those who put all qualms aside when the needs of war demanded it', because he was 'so deeply in Hitler's thrall'. In his old age he developed at least enough moral awareness to know that he was a moral coward. But he cannot be allowed to make Himmler his scapegoat.
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