Arms and the ambiguous man
Norman Stone
SPEER: THE FINAL VERDICT by Joachim Fest, translated by Ewald Osers and Alexandra Dring Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 417, ISBN 0297646168 As Albert Speer told Hitler, in the surreal last weeks of the Third Reich, if it had not been for his work as armaments minister, Germany would have lost the war in 1942-43. The surrealism of these last
weeks you literally almost could imagine a donkey draped over a grand piano with a gold watch melting in the background, such was the effect of the British bombing — was characteristic of the way in which the Nazi state was run. Hitler was a show-off, not interested in longer-term planning, and by 1942 armaments-production was a mess. Speer had been Hitler's architect, had built him a whole new Reich chancellery in nine months flat, demolishing most of the Voss-Strasse for the purpose. Then he took charge of construction and public works in the early days of the war: and chance, the death in a plane crash of the earlier armaments chief, Fritz Todt. put Speer in charge of the war economy. He was very good at the job — rationalising output, banging bureaucrats' heads together, and using German industrial managers as they needed to be used, i.e. without the endless committees and wrangles over competence which German bureaucracy goes in for. The result was that, despite Allied bombing, arms-production reached its height in the summer of 1944. Albert Speer, the technocrat, in that sense defeated the RAF's 'Bomber' Harris (subject, incidentally, of a good new biography by Henry Probert).
Just after the war, Anglo-American teams went to see Speer, because they had an important question to ask. What had been the overall effect of the bombing campaigns? George Ball, Paul Nitze, John Kenneth Galbraith, Nicholas Kaldor were involved. They were very impressed by Speer, who gave them sensible, forthright answers. The bombing had, it turned out,
actually prolonged the war, because the German population was galvanised by hatred, and because the civilian economy was so far shattered that making armaments was all the population could do. As it turned out, I did the last interview with Speer 20 years ago — he came to the BBC, but died shortly after the interview, in St Mary's Paddington — and, at dinner the night before, I asked him what he thought of the British bombing campaign. He said that, in the end, it had sucked the Luftwaffe into the defence of the cities, and thereby made it quite ineffectual on the allimportant eastern front. The late Lionel Bloch used to reproach me for attacking the bombing campaign, saying that, yes, perhaps it had not had the economic effect that it might have had, but that someone had to bring home to the Germans, who had gone mad with arrogance, that they were not behaving very well, and that, if we now had a Germany with which we could deal in a sensible way, the bombs had had something to do with it.
At any rate, educated officers could talk to Albert Speer in a way that was quite impossible with the other senior Nazis. On trial at Nuremberg, they were evasive, or hysterical, or loudly and obstinately dim (Hitler's awful foreign minister, Ribbentrop, never got the point even when they put the noose round his neck). At the Nuremberg trial, Speer's performance was straightforward and dignified: he made no attempt at an excuse, and had a personality of obvious integrity. It was only really at Soviet insistence that he was punished at all: a prison sentence of 20 years. He served it to the last minute (and wrote a very good account as to how he had survived) and then, upon his release in 1966, became a best-selling author. Inside the Third Reich is a classic book, some of its status no doubt owed to the author of this present biography, Joachim Fest, who advised Speer about writing.
That Speer had so many sympathisers, and sold so many copies, was an irritation for some people who felt that he should go on parading guilt, or even that be had been lying. An American historian, Erich Goldhagen, put into Himmler's mouth a quotation. 'Speer ... and I will ... conclude the final chapter of Polish Jewry.' As Joachim Fest puts it:
Asked why he had passed off the passage as a quotation, Goldhagen came up with the somewhat unusual explanation that he had wanted to remove the quotation marks at the beginning and end of the alleged remark by Himmler, but 'had not got round to it'.
How much did Speer actually know about what was happening to the Jews? Everyone in Germany knew, of course, that something was going on, but the full extent of the horrors was clear only towards the very end, and, as Fest shows, Speer flung himself into his work, with a 16-hour day and a great deal of travel. It is safer to say, as Speer himself did, that he ought to have found out, and that there was a sort of autism in his response to the whole business.
Much astonishment was expressed, as to how a very well educated, versatile and (when he wanted to be: you should have seen the women after that last interview, from anchor-woman to youngest dollysecretary all agog) charming man could have gone along with Hitler as part of the innermost circle. True, Speer was far from being the only educated man to follow the Nazis — in fact, the first bodies in Germany to go Nazi, in 1929, were the students' unions. There was obviously an extremely odd bond between Hitler and Speer, good-looking in a statuesque way, deferential without being sycophantic, and perhaps we should even be writing about 'Adolf and Albert' rather than 'Adolf and Eva'. There was certainly mystery as to the attraction, which neither man spelled out, and the rest can only be silence.
Joachim Fest's biography is the most rounded and satisfactory of the various studies to date. Fest, a writer of immense experience and stature, wastes no words: Speer's rather spartan upbringing, his architectural achievements, the prison experience, are spelled out and put into perspective, and 1 especially admired the succinctness with which he covered the experience of the wartime economy. In the Third Reich, as with all dictatorships, technical matters were not dealt with in their own terms. Instead, they were used to discredit a rival or to lure him on, through staged meetings and trap technicalities. According to Richard Overy (to whose work Fest might have given some prominence, as he is the best historian of the Luftwaffe), Speer sabotaged some programmes quite early on in order to discredit his own predecessor. He was, then, very astute indeed when it came to dismantling other bureaucratic empires, not least Goering's vast and pretentious four-year plan. He was clearly outstandingly good at these manoeuvrings. However, they did much to ruin the Third Reich. When the USA entered the war in 1941, they just stamped a war economy out of the ground, very quickly and with outstanding success. This was not achieved through any fatal admixture of technicality and bureaucratic manoeuvring: they just got on with the job.
I sensed, at dinner with Speer the night before his death, that he was a very melancholy man. We talked around the whole subject and I remember how surprised he was when I told him that Nazism in Germany had been supported in the main by Protestants rather than Catholics (this was especially true of Bavaria). A good moment was when I asked him what had inspired him to design the criss-crossings of searchlights for the Nazi party rallies: had it been the Catholic Church, said I, naively. No, he said, the Weimar cinema. Strange, how prophetic those old black and white films were.
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