Memories (Albert Speer)

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Albert Speer as a defendant in Nuremberg, 1945 or 1946

Memories is the title of the autobiography of Albert Speer , who was Minister of Armaments of National Socialist Germany from 1942 to 1945. The work was written between 1946 and 1966. Speer managed to impress the general readership as well as the historical scholars. However, one judges his detailed descriptions from the leadership circle critically, because Speer keeps many crimes of the [[Third Reich <"Third Reich"]] and his participation in them withheld or falsified. The book was published in numerous editions, including as a paperback, but to this day does not contain any afterwords by another hand or critical comments.

Emergence

In the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial , Speer was sentenced to twenty years in prison for having performed slave labor as an armaments minister . While he was serving his sentence in Spandau prison , he wrote around 1,200 manuscript pages between 1946 and 1966. Because prisoners in this prison were not allowed to write biographies, he wrote the draft on toilet paper, cigarette paper, and other writable media. The manuscripts were smuggled out and received back after his release from prison. The journalist and historian Joachim Fest helped him with the creation of the work.

In 1969 the memoirs were published; In 1970 the English translation was published under the title "Inside the Third Reich".

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Albert Speer with Adolf Hitler in 1939 on the Obersalzberg

Memories is written in a semi-autobiographical style. The book begins with a reference to Speer's ancestors and childhood; but most of them describe his work within the Nazi leadership.

Speer describes how he entered government through an unusual chain of events. At first he was an architect and in 1928 he almost got a job as a “state and court architect” in Afghanistan . On behalf of King Aman Ullah , Josef Brix had put together a group of young German technicians who were supposed to reform the country, but the Afghan ruler was deposed prematurely in January 1929. Speer continued his work as assistant to Heinrich Tessenow , professor at the Technical University of Berlin . At an event in the Hasenheide , at which Hitler gave a speech in front of a student audience, he first met the later dictator. Because Hitler saw himself as an architect and artist, he turned to Speer and introduced him to his inner circle of power. Due to the relative proximity to Hitler he found himself in an envied but difficult position for him. Speer later remarked: "I would have been Hitler's best friend [...] if he had been able to have friends at all".

Until 1942 Speer only provided services as an architect, especially in the planning of large buildings . Because of the war, however, they could not be completed. After Fritz Todt died in a plane crash , Hitler unexpectedly appointed Speer as the new armaments minister . Speer claimed after the war that he protested because of a lack of experience, but eventually agreed.

German war material production improved considerably under Albert Speer. Before taking office, Hermann Göring was Germany 's economic dictator (commissioner for the four-year plan ). But Göring became less popular with Hitler and after a power struggle with Göring Speer was able to obtain most of the powers relating to the armament efforts of the Third Reich. He carried out reforms similar to those already implemented in the USA and Great Britain . Speer ensured the total mobilization of the factories for war purposes and the use of female workers. Although he succeeded in increasing the production of war material from year to year, the war was already lost for Germany.

As the war drew to a close, Speer describes his disappointment with the war, the National Socialists and with Hitler himself. Although he was one of the few people who was close to Hitler to the end, he sabotaged his scorched earth policy (Hitler's " Nero command ”of March 19, 1945) to avert the complete destruction of Germany.

The memories end with Hitler's death and the end of the war in Europe.

meaning

After Karl Dönitz, Speer was the highest-ranking official in Nazi Germany who survived both World War II and the Nuremberg Trial. During the war, the Allies described him as one of the few intelligent and sensible people in the Nazi leadership. Because of his high position, Speer was able to describe the characters of many ministers and functionaries from his own personal view, including Joseph Goebbels , Hermann Göring , Heinrich Himmler , Rudolf Hess , Martin Bormann and especially that of Adolf Hitler .

Description of the Nazi leadership

Speer's memories brought new aspects to the history of the Second World War. Speer does not portray Nazi Germany as a perfectly organized state that strictly adhered to the Führer principle , but portrays the division of the leadership due to overlapping areas of competence and the inability of individuals. Most surprisingly, the portrait of Hitler appears as that of a lazy, moderately gifted would-be artist who only briefly performed at his best. The image of Adolf Hitler as that of an intelligent, determined leader was damaged by a key witness who had belonged to the top management himself.

Speer's descriptions of his personal insights into the life of the Nazi greats are remarkable, especially because some of his colleagues and their families valued him as a neutral confidante. Speer described, for example, that Joseph Goebbels' wife, Magda Goebbels , complained about her husband's infidelity and at the same time had an affair with one of Speer's old friends, Karl Hanke . During a visit to Göring's Carinhall estate , Speer saw the overweight Reichsmarschall spend his days hunting and eating and playing around with stolen jewels .

Since the mid-1930s, after Hitler had achieved dictatorial power, the Führer had been very irregular in his work as head of state. He stayed up late at night and went to bed at five or six in the morning and then slept until noon; he had spent hours with meals and tea parties and wasted his time and that of his ministers on long and boring monologues; films were often shown until midnight. In his memoir, Speer's inability to carry out normal routine work in the office raises the question of what time of day Hitler actually undertook anything important. Eva Braun told him that Hitler was so busy and tired in the summer of 1943 that there was no sexual intercourse with her. Goebbels stated in his diary for this period (1943) a “leadership crisis”.

Speer concluded from conversations with the Führer that he was unable to develop emotionally or intellectually . Because Hitler was able to conjure up people - Speer included - he thought he was a sociopath and a megalomaniac . In 1945, when Germany had practically lost the war, Speer could not convince Hitler to admit defeat or at least to develop a defensive strategy.

In Speer's opinion, the situation in Germany began to deteriorate after the Battle of Stalingrad when Hitler, insisting on his ideas, misunderstood reality. By distancing himself further and further from reality in this way, Speer claims, Hitler's personal secretary, Martin Bormann , tried to exploit the vacuum and only passed on to Hitler all information intended for Hitler in a refined and filtered manner.

In a similar way, Albert Speer also painted a negative picture of the other members of the Nazi leadership. Because of Hitler's indecision and his belief that struggle always leads to strength, the powers of the ministers were never clearly distributed. Different ministries often dealt with the same tasks and Hitler refused to provide clarification. In order to carry out projects successfully, the ministers would have had to repeatedly resolve conflicts and seek majorities - Speer had repeatedly teamed up with Goebbels and others to neutralize Göring's incompetent management of the German economy as the representative for the four-year plan .

reception

Armaments Minister Albert Speer in an ammunition factory in 1944

In his book - as during the Nuremberg Trial - Speer denies any knowledge of the Holocaust . The two speeches in Poznan that Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler gave on October 4 and 6, 1943 in the town hall of the occupied Polish city of Posen (Poznań) in front of Gauleiter and high-ranking Nazi leaders are of decisive importance . Himmler renounced the otherwise common cover-up terms for the murder of the Jews (“special solution to the Jewish question”) and spoke explicitly about the “extermination”, which he presented as a historical mission of National Socialism. Albert Speer stubbornly denied that he was present at this speech and claimed that he had left before, although he was addressed directly by Himmler in connection with the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto .

While Speer admits that foreign workers were used in the area of ​​responsibility of his ministry , he claims that he tried to improve their living conditions or to give up their use altogether. Even Joachim Fest , the spear had supported his memoirs in the drafting, presented in later editions of the memories many contradictions to statements Speer at Nuremberg established. Most notable were Speer's flimsy explanations for why he had been loyal to Hitler for so long. In the autobiography he confessed that this was done out of loyalty to the person.

In the book, Speer also claims that he planned the assassination of Hitler in the spring of 1945 in order to bring about an end to the war. However, there is no evidence of this. After his release in 1966, he gave numerous interviews. In it he often contradicted what he had claimed in court or in his memoirs.

Benevolent commentators said Speer felt personal guilt about the genocide and spent the remainder of his life justifying himself and claiming that he had been deceived by Hitler. Shortly before his death, Speer compared his work in the Nazi state with that of a person who had made a pact with the devil .

Skeptical observers argue, however, that Speer's confessions and statements were simply aimed at avoiding the death penalty at the Nuremberg trial . He grabbed every blade of grass to relieve himself. For example, he offered the main prosecutor in Nuremberg Robert H. Jackson further inside information if he could obtain an amnesty for him. Other defendants in similarly high positions were executed, including Fritz Sauckel .

For decades, historians have used the memories as an allegedly first-rate source of internal information about the NSDAP . Following various critical studies submitted from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium, for example by Matthias Schmidt or Heinrich Schwendemann , the Speer biography of the historian Magnus Brechtken , published in 2017, comes to the conclusion by means of a confrontation of Speer's stories with the sources that Speer's memories with a world edition of almost three million copies as an apparently authentic contemporary witness report shaped the historical image of a small criminal clique around Hitler. This was responsible for war, the Holocaust and slave labor, while Speer himself did not want to have known about it and presented his reading audience with “the fable of the inexperienced bourgeois son” who “suddenly sees himself surrounded by unsavory brown guys”.

filming

The book was filmed in 1982 as a multi-part television film with Rutger Hauer in the role of Alber Speer under the title Inside the Third Reich . It was first broadcast on the US television station ABC .

expenditure

literature

  • Joseph Persico: Nuremberg. Infamy on Trial . Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1996, ISBN 0-14-016622-X .
  • James O'Donnell: The Bunker. The history of the Reich Chancellery Group . Da Capo Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-306-80958-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The index for explosives production rose from
    • 103 for 1941
    • 131 for 1942
    • 191 for 1943
    • 226 for 1944.
    The index for ammunition production, including bombs, ... from
    • 102 for 1941
    • 106 for 1942
    • 247 for 1943
    • 306 for 1944.
    ( Memories (1969), p. 560) Speer was Minister of Armaments from 1942.
  2. ↑ Hitler wanted to use the world's first jet aircraft, the Me 262 , as a “lightning bomber” and not, as the Luftwaffe command (e.g. Adolf Galland (1912–1996)) demanded, as a fighter against the devastating Allied air raids on the Reich .
  3. ↑ Gitta Sereny: Wrestling with the Truth. Albert Speer and the German trauma
  4. ↑ Magnus Brechtken: Albert Speer. A German career . Siedler Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-8275-0040-3 , pp. 385-419; Quote p. 399.