All reviews copyright 1984-2018 Evelyn C. Leeper.
INSIDE THE THIRD REICH by Albert Speer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/14/18, 12/21/18, and 12/28/18]
Someplace recently I read a recommendation for INSIDE THE THIRD REICH by Albert Speer (ISBN 978-0-684-82949-4) as perhaps the best analysis of World War II. Certainly Speer addresses a lot of the strategic and tactical mistakes on both sides. For example, he says that the bombing raids against the ball-bearing factories in 1943 did potentially damage to the entire war effort, ball bearings being critical to many types of machinery, but then the Allies failed to follow up and completely destroy the factories. (They also failed to follow up on the raids against the Ruhr Valley dams.) But the Germans also failed to bomb strategic factories in the Soviet Union, wasting their bombs on railroads that were rapidly repaired. Tactically, Hitler insisted on troop movements that were completely uncoordinated with anything else. A lot of the tactical errors were probably due to "fighting the last war: "In the table talk much weight was given to experiences in the First World War. Most of the guests had served during the war."
Speer also felt that a contributing factor to the rise of Hitler was the lack of any training or practice in schools of the art of critical thinking, but rather an emphasis on rote learning: "It seems to me essential to point out these lacks, as a result of which a whole generation was without defenses when exposed to the new techniques for influencing opinion."
So much of what Speer says sounds depressingly (or even frighteningly) current.
For example, he talks early on about creating scapegoats:
"To compensate for misery, insecurity, unemployment, and hopelessness, this anonymous assemblage wallowed for hours at a time in obsessions, savagery, license. This was no ardent nationalism. Rather, for a few short hours the personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. And Hitler and Goebbels threw them the victims. By lashing out at their opponents and villifying the Jews they gave expression and direction to fierce, primal passions."
There was also a yearning for "the good old days":
"We were also escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated. We felt that the world around us was out of balance. In nature, in the mountains and the river valleys, the harmony of Creation could still be felt. The more virginal the mountains, the lonelier the river valleys, the more they drew us."
"The crucial fact appeared to me to be that I personally had to choose between a future Communist Germany or a future National Socialist Germany since the political center between these antipodes had melted away. Moreover, in 1931, I had some reason to feel that Hitler was moving in a moderate direction. I did not realize that there were opportunistic reasons for this. Hitler was trying to appear respectable in order to seem qualified to enter the government. The party at that time was confining itself--as far as I can recall today--to denouncing what it called the excessive influence of the Jews upon various spheres of cultural and economic life. It was demanding that their participation in these various areas be reduced to a level consonant with their percentage of the population. Moreover, Hitler's alliance with the old-style nationalists of the Harzburg Front led me to think that a contradiction could be detected between his statements at public meetings and his political views. I regarded this contradiction as highly promising. In actuality Hitler only wanted to thrust his way to power by whatever means he could.
"Such remarks [as referred to in Speer's previous paragraph] were usually followed by comments on the way the Austrian central government had crushed all independent cultural impulses on the part of cities like Graz, Linz, or Innsbruck. Hitler could say these things apparently without being aware that he was imposing the same kind of forcible regimentation upon whole countries."
In INSIDE THE THIRD REICH by Albert Speer (ISBN 978-0-684-82949-4), Speer has a lot to say about Hitler's personality, attitudes, and so on.
We see a leader having no ideology, but relying on whatever got him support at the time:
"Hitler's alliance with the old-style nationalists of the Harzburg Front led me to think that a contradiction could be detected between his statements at public meetings and his political views. I regarded this contradiction as highly promising. In actuality Hitler only wanted to thrust his way to power by whatever means he could."
"In saying this he was expressing what Hitler and his staff had already been doing for years: picking up anything that promised success without regard for ideology--in fact, determining even ideological questions by their effect upon the voters."
"But the idea of a caviar-eating Leader was incompatible with Hitler's conception of himself."
"Since he regularly responded to opposition by choosing someone more amenable, over the years he assembled around himself a group of associates who more and more surrendered to his arguments and translated them into action more and more unscrupulously."
"The discrepancy between the total mobilization of labor forces in democratic England and the casual treatment of this question in authoritarian Germany is proof of the regime's anxiety not to risk any shift in the popular mood."
(See also below in the comments on a yearning for "the good old days"--Hitler would use that as a way to gain support, whether or not he believed it, or whether or not there was any contradiction in his statements.)
A head of state spending more time on his hobbies and pastimes than on work (though apparently golf was not one of them):
"I myself threw all my strength into my work and was baffled at first by the way Hitler squandered his working time. I could understand that he might wish his day to trail off in boredom and pastimes; but to my notion this phase of the day, averaging some six hours, proved rather long, whereas the actual working session was by comparison relatively short. When, I would often ask myself, did he really work?"
A head of state who was unqualified to lead, and not willing to surround himself with those better qualified:
"Hitler, too, had seen nothing of the world and had acquired neither knowledge nor understanding of it. Moreover, the average party politician lacked higher education. Of the fifty Reichsleiters and Gauleiters, the elite of the leadership, only ten had completed a university education, a few had attended university classes for a while, and the majority had never gone beyond secondary school. Virtually none of them had distinguished himself by any notable achievement in any field whatsoever. Almost all displayed an astonishing intellectual dullness. Their educational standard certainly did not correspond to what might be expected of the top leadership of a nation with a traditionally high intellectual level. Basically, Hitler preferred to have people of the same origins as himself in his immediate entourage; no doubt he felt most at ease among them. In general he was pleased if his associates showed some 'flaw in the weave,' as we called it at the time. As Hanke commented one day: 'It is all to the good if associates have faults and know that the superior is aware of them. That is why the Fuehrer so seldom changes his assistants. For he finds them easiest to work with. Almost every one of them has his defect; that helps keep them in line.' Immoral conduct, remote Jewish ancestors, or recent membership in the party were counted as flaws in the weave."
"Goering did nothing about these problems. Whenever he did do anything, he usually created total confusion, since he never took the trouble to work through the problems but made his decisions on the basis of impulsive inspirations."
"To be sure, it was in keeping with Hitler's dilettantism that he preferred to choose non-specialists as his associates. After all, he had already appointed a wine salesman as his Foreign Minister, his party philosopher as his Minister for Eastern Affairs, and an erstwhile fighter pilot as overseer of the entire economy. Now he was picking an architect of all people to be his Minister of Armaments. Undoubtedly Hitler preferred to fill positions of leadership with laymen. All his life he respected but distrusted professionals such as, for example, Schacht."
"It is significant that Hitler did not choose the direct route of obtaining information on this matter from responsible people but depended instead on unreliable and incompetent informants to give him a Sunday-supplement account. Here again was proof of his love for amateurishness and his lack of understanding of fundamental scientific research."
However, eventually the people around him tried to use their better knowledge to block Hitler's more ludicrous orders:
"Occasionally they tried to counter the effects of obviously absurd orders by adding little clauses that Hitler did not understand. Under the leadership of a man so submissive and irresolute as Keitel, the High Command often had to look for all sorts of crooked paths in order to arrive at its goals."
A leader who insisted on personal loyalty and fawning "advisors" who would tell him only what he wanted to hear:
"In keeping with his character, Hitler gladly sought advice from persons who saw the situation even more optimistically and delusively than he himself."
"Hitler said that he could not do without Keitel because the man was loyal as a dog" to him. Perhaps Keitel embodied most precisely the type of person Hitler needed in his entourage."
"Even during the period between 1933 and 1939, when his position made life easier for him, he was visibly refreshed by the daily procession of admirers who came to pay homage to him at Obersalzberg. The rallies in the prewar period had also been a stimulant to Hitler. They were part of his life, and each one left him more incisive and self-assured than he had been before."
A leader who totally ignored facts and relied instead entirely on his intuition and his immediate feelings (which could change day by day, or even hour by hour):
"Hitler actually knew nothing about his enemies and even refused to use the information that was available to him. Instead, he trusted his inspirations, no matter how inherently contradictory they might be, and these inspirations were governed by extreme contempt for and underestimation of the others." "In saying this Hitler was flatly reversing himself, for as I knew from Himmler, he had decided only a few days before that Dorsch would be entrusted with this work. As so often, he brushed aside the view he had only recently expressed and ignored Dorsch's feelings as well. This inconsistency was still another proof of his profound contempt for people."
"By this original device, the men ceased to exist for the draft boards. On the list drawn up by Hitler and Goebbels, however, architects and sculptors occupied little space. The overwhelming majority of those thus exempted were singers and actors. The fact that young scientists were also important for the future was not discovered until 1942, and then with my help."
"Amateurishness was one of Hitler's dominant traits, he had never learned a profession and basically had always remained an outsider to all fields of endeavor. Like many self-taught people, he had no idea what real specialized knowledge meant. Without any sense of the complexities of any great task, he boldly assumed one function after another."
"Thus, Hitler's decisions led to a multiplicity of parallel projects. They also led to more and more complicated problems of supply. One of his worst failings was that he simply did not understand the necessity for supplying the armies with sufficient spare parts."
"As the situation deteriorated further, Hitler closed his mind more and more to any word against his decisions. He proved to be more autocratic than ever in this crisis.
"Hitler, however, continued to be exceedingly skeptical. He was filled with a fundamental distrust of all innovations which, as in the case of jet aircraft or atom bombs, went beyond the technical experience of the First World War generation and presaged an era he could not know."
"As early as August 1942, Hitler had assured the naval leadership that the Allies could not make a successful invasion unless they were able to take a sizable port."
"Sometimes he could realize the hopelessness of a situation, but he could not be shaken in his expectation that at the last moment Fate would suddenly turn the tide in his favor. If there was any fundamental insanity in Hitler, it was this unshakable belief in his lucky star. He was by nature a religious man, but his capacity for belief had been perverted into belief in himself."
"Hitler seemed to be the only one in the company who was drunk without having taken any stimulating beverage. He was in the grip of a permanent euphoria."
[Compare these statements to the recent Presidential announcement, "I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me."]
In INSIDE THE THIRD REICH by Albert Speer (ISBN 978-0-684-82949-4), Speer comments on various aspects of the war itself, particularly the technical issues:
"Even though our programs had top priority, in September 1941 the amounts of fuel assigned to them had to be reduced by a third, and by January 1, 1942, to a sixth of our needs. That is just one example of how greatly Hitler had overextended his resources by embarking on the Russian campaign."
"Actually, Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction. Hitler was plainly not I delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be I transformed into a glowing star."
"On the suggestion of the nuclear physicists we scuttled the project to develop an atom bomb by the autumn of 1942, after I had again queried them about deadlines and been told that we could not count on anything for three or four years. The war would certainly have been decided long before then."
"Peenemunde was not only our biggest but our most misguided project."
"The whole notion was absurd. The fleets of enemy bombers in 1944 were dropping an average of three thousand tons of bombs a day over a span of several months. And Hitler wanted to retaliate with thirty rockets that would have carried twenty-four tons of explosives to England daily. That was equivalent to the bomb load of only twelve Flying Fortresses."
Speer is frank about his own culpability:
"For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences--from the very beginning."
"It has repeatedly surprised me, in later years, that scarcely any anti-Semitic remarks of Hitler's have remained in my memory. Out of the scraps that remain, I can reconstruct what crossed my mind at the time: dismay over the deviation from the image I wanted to have of Hitler, anxiety over the increasing deterioration of his health, hope for some letup of the struggle against the churches, a certain puzzlement at his partiality for utopian-sounding remote goals, all sorts of odd feelings--but Hitler's hatred for the Jews seemed to me so much a matter of course that I gave it no serious thought."
"But in the final analysis I myself determined the degree of my isolation, the extremity of my evasions, and the extent of my ignorance."
"Whether I knew or did not know, or how much or how little I knew, is totally unimportant when I consider what horrors I ought to have known about and what conclusions would have been the natural ones to draw from the little I did know. Those who ask me are fundamentally expecting me to offer justifications. But I have none. No apologies are possible."
"Hanke must have been speaking of Auschwitz. During those few seconds, while Hanke was warning me, the whole responsibility had became a reality again. Those seconds were uppermost in my mind when I stated to the international court at the Nuremberg Trial that as an important member of the leadership of the Reich, I had to share the total responsibility for all that had happened. For from that moment on, I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes."
"But what preys on my mind nowadays has little to do with the standards of Nuremberg nor the figures on lives I saved or might have saved. For in either case I was moving within the system. What disturbs me more is that I failed to read the physiognomy of the regime mirrored in the faces of those prisoners--the regime whose existence I was so obsessively trying to prolong during those weeks and months. I did not see any moral ground outside the system where I should have taken my stand."
"Much as I believed in principle that as one of the leaders of the regime I must take responsibility for its crimes, it was hard for me at first to adjust to the reality."
"I have always thought it was a most valuable trait to recognize reality and not to pursue delusions. But when I now think over my life up to and including the years of imprisonment, there was no period in which I was free of delusory notions. The departure from reality, which was visibly spreading like a contagion, was no peculiarity of the National Socialist regime. But in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over. No external factors disturbed the uniformity of hundreds of unchanging faces, all mine."
"But since then I had been bribed and intoxicated by the desire to wield pure power, to assign people to this and that, to say the final word on important questions, to deal with expenditures in the billions. I thought I was prepared to resign, but I would have sorely missed the heady stimulus that comes with leadership."
Speer is even critical of his work in his own area of specialty, architecture:
"Nowadays, when I leaf through the numerous photos of models of our one-time grand boulevard, I see that it would have turned out not only crazy, but also boring."
"Whenever, nowadays, I look through the plans and the photos of the models, even these varied parts of the avenue strike me as lifeless and regimented. When on the morning after my release from imprisonment I passed one of these buildings on the way to the airport, I saw in a few seconds what I had been blind to for years: our plan completely lacked a sense of proportion."
"Designs of such scale naturally indicate a kind of chronic megalomania, which is reason enough to dwell on these grandiose plans. Yet that broad boulevard, those new central railroad stations with their underground communications, are not so excessive by present-day standards when skyscrapers and public buildings all over the world have reached similar proportions."
"During my imprisonment, this design, with its red mosaics, its pillars, its bronze lions and gilded silhouettes, had assumed in my memory a bright, almost pleasant character. But when I once again saw the color photographs of the model, after a lapse of more than twenty-one years, I was struck by the resemblance to a Cecil B. De Mille set. Along with its fantastic quality I also became aware of the cruel element in this architecture. It had been the very expression of a tyranny."
"The more technical the world imposed on us by the war, the more dangerous was this indifference of the technician to the direct consequences of his anonymous activities."
"Witness my ironic reaction to the destruction of the Ministry in the air raid of November 22, 1943: "Although we have been fortunate in that large parts of the current files of the Ministry have burned and so relieved us for a time of useless ballast, we cannot really expect that such events will continually introduce the necessary fresh air into our work.'"
At the same time, Speer also tries occasionally to make himself less culpable than some might think:
"[In] November and December 1943, I addressed a letter to all Gauleiters in which I recast most of my prewar philosophy: no more pretentious artistic notions, but economy-mindedness; broad-scale transportation planning to save the cities from traffic congestion; mass production of housing, cleaning up the old quarters of the cities, and establishing businesses in the city centers. There was no longer any talk of monumental buildings. My enthusiasm for them had faded, and so in all probability had Hitler's, for he let me describe this new planning concept to him without the least protest."
"At first the factory managers complained that the prisoners arrived in a weakened condition and after a few months had to be sent back, exhausted, to the regular camps. Since their training time alone required several weeks and instructors were scarce, we could not afford to train a new group every few months. In response to our complaints the SS made considerable improvements in the sanitary conditions and rations of the camps. Soon, in the course of my rounds through the armaments plants, I saw more contented faces among the prisoners and better fed people."
And the Allies seem to have provided some basis for his feelings, since he writes of the period while he was awaiting trial after the war:
"Although this meant that I was facing charges of the gravest sort, one would never have known it from the behavior of the guards toward me. The Americans said cheerily: 'You'll soon be acquitted and the whole thing forgotten.' Sergeant Williams increased my rations so that, as he said, I would have my strength for the trial, and the British commandant invited me for a drive the day we met."