Speer: The Final Verdict
Harcourt
by Joachim Fest

Albert Speer was a man of many talents: an accomplished architect, an organizational genius and a master of career advancement. He rose early and quickly through the ranks of the Nazi leadership, first as Hitler's choice for remaking Berlin and later as the minister of armaments. As a member of Hitler's inner circle, Speer's education and professionalism set him apart from the majority of German leaders, men with little understanding of the world beyond their own ideologies and self-interests.

Speer was nevertheless a deeply flawed individual. Intelligent and driven, he was also narrow-minded and uncritical. Indeed, as German historian Joachim Fest concludes in "Speer: The Final Verdict," he was the archetype of the organization man, that stalwart symbol of industrial capitalism and the bedrock of middle classes the world over. And it's this quality, more than anything, that allowed Speer to follow Hitler and the Nazis through peace and war.

But unlike Hermann Göering, Heinrich Himmler and others, Speer had turned against Hitler by early 1945; as Allied troops advanced on Berlin, he dashed around the country, trying to block implementation of the Führer's "scorched earth" diktat. And thanks to his admission of guilt during the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent publication of his memoirs "Inside the Third Reich," even today observers see Speer in a different light from other Nazis, as an example of how ordinary people could get swept into the fray and, confused or frightened, find themselves in a position of moral culpability. Speer proves for many that the majority of Germans who participated in the Third Reich should bear little blame for the decisions of a cabal of men who knew how to take advantage of them.

Fest, however, rejects the apologist track in favor of a more complicated reading. Fest, who helped Speer write "Inside the Third Reich," agrees that Speer was less immoral than simply blinded by his own ambition. But Speer lacked the moral compass we expect to find in people; he was, for Fest, an "incomplete person." And what he lacked in moral, critical faculties, he made up for in a laser-like focus on the goals set before him:

He had turned into one of the machines that he had produced: hi-rev, insensitive, and purely mechanical. It was a kind of autism that had taken hold of him. Incapable of seeing things in perspective, he no longer questioned the goals he was so feverishly working toward, and stifled all moral doubts, if indeed any arose, in the ethos of pure functioning.

For instance, despite his later disavowals, strong evidence indicates Speer knew of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Jews being shipped off to camps. While there is little indication he knew of the industrial slaughter going on, he also knew of Hitler's annihilationist anti-Semitism; only a man whose morals have been blinded by his own ambition, Fest concludes, would have failed to connect the dots.

Eventually, Speer did turn against Hitler, and it was this 11th-hour change of heart that saved him from execution at Nuremberg (this despite heavy opposition from the Soviet prosecutor). Nevertheless, Fest is unconvinced the turn had anything to do with a sudden moral awakening; rather, it was rooted in Speer's fear of watching Hitler destroy the infrastructure and economy he had helped build (and, Fest ventures, that he hoped to oversee as a part of whatever post-war government emerged).

Fest argues from almost the first page that one cannot understand Speer without understanding his relationship with Hitler, and the majority of his analysis revolves around dissecting their odd relationship — at times homoerotic, at times verging on emotionally sadistic. Hitler saw himself in Speer: an artist, a visionary, someone with both a deep appreciation of culture and a knack for leadership. At one point Hitler even hinted at Speer's succeeding him as Fuhrer. In all likelihood, Hitler envied Speer's success as much as he valued his friendship. In any case, by the middle of the war, Speer's growing frustration with Hitler's increasingly erratic prosecution of the war allowed other members of the Nazi elite, in particular Himmler and other pretenders to the throne, to push Speer out of the inner circle.

"Speer: The Final Verdict" is a misleading title — though to be fair, it is not the title of the original German edition (simply called "Speer: A Biography") — because it is very much Fest's own take on the man and his career. He pays little attention to Speer's architectural aesthetic, and instead tries to answer a specific question: how could Speer, who was undoubtedly less ideological than his cohorts, nevertheless fail to see the horrors driving the regime? In concluding Speer's culpability lay less in conscious decisions than in his personality type, Fest does more than condemn a man — he condemns an entire way of living. Speer simply did his job and never asked questions, for fear of being confronted with the truth. And while the truth in Speer's case was more horrible than most of us will ever confront, Fest nevertheless sees a disturbing universal analogue in his subject. While men like Hitler are rare, men like Speer are common. And yet it is precisely men like Speer who make the horrors that lie in the minds of dictators into reality.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)