Albert Speer: The Nazi who said Sorry

in september 1946 the nuremberg tribunal reached its climax the 22 most senior nazis captured by the allies on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity were about to be sentenced one of the accused was albert while the others clung to their plea that they had nothing to answer for in this victor's show trial spare alone of them all was going to become the nazi who said sorry officially what he said i i didn't know i should have known i could have known but i didn't spare the survivor and strategist had succeeded yet again it was a skillful defense and he got away with it it saved his life instead of the hangman's rope he got 20 years to be served in spandau prison on the outskirts of berlin with nothing to do but tend the garden and remember spare was determined the world would know his story he wrote it all down on thousands of scraps of paper which was smuggled out of prison here in what later became his memoirs lay his version of the truth about albert baer the brilliant technician who had known nothing about atrocities and who'd become the third reich's major penitent published after his release as inside the third reich it was a best seller here was spares brilliant career as architect and war minister he was the technician a pragmatist with no interest in ideology or anti-semitism who had loved hitler and been too ambitious his sin had been to turn away from the unpleasant truth to have shunned what he should have known his penance would be to confess this to the world this was the albert bear that spare presented to the world whenever the media gave him the chance i was thinking as a specialist and not singing as a human being and was so specialized in my job as an eye detector and other one [Music] humanity is a most important part of life he was a very intelligent escapist from the truth including the truth of his own career and if that's uh qualifies a man to be called a fraud then he was others found spare to be more complex guitar cerrini of veteran writer on nazism spent years trying to probe the enigma he was constantly tempted to tell the truth and he was constantly trying to make someone like me to force him to tell the truth i pushed him as closely as he could be pushed he joined the party in 1931 two years before hitler assumed power he was studying architecture when fellow students persuaded him to attend a speech by the would-be chancellor he expected hitler to rant and rave but was shocked to discover that he didn't he spoke to them about love love for their country love for each other love for work you know they sat there petrified and spare said i thought am i going home no i'm not going home he just walked through the woods and he told me i thought and thought this was a man who understood us and who loved us next morning he joined nazi was born in 1905 to a wealthy patrician family he grew up in heidelberg a prosperous university town and he was only nine when the great war broke out far too young to feel the pain of defeat his family was rich enough to survive the years of depression and the young albert wanted for nothing his mother was elegant but stern his father was an architect and read liberal newspapers but didn't get on with albert schmer was still in his twenties when he married the equally upper middle class margarita [Applause] two years later hitler took power after politics architecture was his obsession hitler had big plans for the buildings and cities of the new germany albert spare newly qualified as an architect became part of those plans his first major project for the new nazi government was his cathedral of light hundreds of searchlights pointed up into the night sky above the vast outdoor nuremberg rallies hitler was thrilled nazi's symbolism had found its visionary and the ambitious young spear would discover this was a good time and place for him to be an architect bear now enjoyed what his nazi rivals prized most the power bestowed by hitler's personal favor relied on his direct relationship with hitler hitler's empire over these people was personal and absolute and they competed among each other of course and he competed with the rest but he could rely on this personal link which very few others couldn't i mean even himmler couldn't spare feelings told hitler were i can't say they were mixed feelings because he didn't have mixed feelings he loved hitler no doubt hitler responded to that i mean there is no doubt that spare had hitler wished for a son this is the son he would have wanted [Music] um his second big challenge was to do in concrete what he had done before with searchlights build a permanent shrine for nazi rallies at nuremberg sphere understood what was required of nazi architecture this was mein kampf built out of gold mosaic and white german stone perfectly adapted to the dynamics of furo worship [Music] [Applause] [Music] spares next commission was to build hitler a new rice chancellery in the heart of berlin hitler's faith in his architect was more than vindicated [Music] organized [Music] was to be given what for years had been hitler's dream the complete rebuilding of berlin to be renamed germania other architects had produced designs none came close to what hitler wanted and then hitler totally without preparation or anything else gave him the plans that look at this tear them up build berlin create it [Music] spare built this model of what germania future capital of the world would look like over a hundred feet in length and built with astonishing detail it stood in its own special room where hitler would come and inspect it at its heart was this vast north-south axis culminating in a dome to be sixteen times the size of rome's and peters and prison is hitler would never realize his berlin plans instead he was to plunge europe into six years of war while hitler's advisors urged caution spare was thrilled poland the low countries and now france all fell to hitler's blitzkrieg germany would soon have its empire spare was at hitler's side to gloat over their greatest prize together they inspected the arc de triomphe and eiffel tower over paris about to be dwarfed by the garmanya berlin was to become by 1942 the war had changed the lightning strikes that had annihilated most of continental europe had ground to a halt on the vast plains of russia was about to change utterly the head of german war production fritz tort was killed when his plane mysteriously exploded in midair he was given a hero's funeral who would replace him going wanted the job but hitler gave it to his architect spare was now minister for arms production at the very heart of the german war machine and one of the most powerful men in the right he had no power base originally and his appointment was an astonishment to him and to everybody else german military production needed a complete overhaul and spare set about his new task with characteristic zeal hitler's faith in spare was once again justified the architect proved he had a cool organizational mind just what hitler needed now that he was fighting a war on two fronts the german war economy was geared for blitzkrieg and this was fine basically till the end of 1941 when the vermont was stopped at the gates of moscow and what spare had to do at the beginning of 1942 when he got the job was to wrench the german economy round from the instant gratification approach of blitzkrieg to the long haul [Music] but not even spare could persuade hitler to use civilian workers as happened in britain women were not recruited into the german war machine as they were in the united states and britain there were still house servants more as many at the end of the war as at the beginning there were very few factories worked at night he used an alternative workforce slave labor the millions of conquered civilians and prisoners of war gathered at his request by his deputy fritz saucer the rice his greatest arms projects were the v1 and v2 rockets here he proved he could literally move mountains the raf completely destroyed the v2 plant on the baltic coast sphere simply moved the factories lock stock and barrel into 10 miles of specially excavated tunnels in old mine shafts beneath the hearts mountains in the middle of germany with buchenwald concentration camp nearby spare had unlimited labor for his rockets [Music] little bow dora as it came to be called grew into spares largest labor camp complete with its own electric fences and crematorium and they could be worked to death literally i mean they didn't have to worry about them you didn't have to provide anything they just slept where they could on the ground in these terrible underground factories while dora was no concentration camp it was run by the ss as though it was [Music] and while dora was the largest of spares factories it was by no means unique spares ministry now ran camps all over the right ted michels was in his teens when he was taken from his polish home and made to work in one of spares labor camps on alderney in the channel islands we arrived in alderney on in in june 1942 and this started working straight away i started in a quarry and we just quarried the stones for the concreting it was exhausting it was debilitating and all the other things you know even denigrating and so on fully fed food was very bad inadequate but it was in accordance with german philosophy that provided you last six months you're expendable because you'll bring some more people to to to work so eventually you could see them walking skeletons just pure skeletons you know if walking in if they fell down they stayed down you know they this extermination through labor made no sense to spare the technocrat he heard that they were starving they were being given starvation rations and that he went immediately to hitler and said these people are being given starvation uh rations and that hitler ordered that they should be properly fed and so i said well did you do this out of human compassion he said no because i needed them after the catastrophic german defeat at stalingrad and with the allies pulverizing spares factories day and night it was only a matter of time before the war was lost by the beginning of 1945 sphere knew it was all over hitler had his own plans for defeat to take the whole of germany down with him he gave orders for every last factory bridge railway line and power station to be blown up for spare the conscientious manager it was an act of economic and national insanity he spent the last weeks of the war desperately crisscrossing the rice countermounting these so-called scorched earth orders an act of treason for which he ran the very real risk of summary execution [Music] berlin was on the brink of falling to the russians when spare leaving hitler to his lonely suicide made the perilous flight out of the capital joining dernitz on the danish border both of them nursing the fantasy that the allies would give them positions of power in post-nazi germany but he and donuts were rudely awakened to discover they were to be taken to nuremberg and charged with war crimes in common with all the defendants he pleaded not guilty or survival strategy was not to deny his association with hitler he admitted that because he couldn't deny that not to deny the pride he had as a young figure in the third reich he couldn't deny that but to separate himself this is very central to his strategy to separate himself from the other high nazis whom we he knew we would discover were a bunch of thugs only then did he break ranks with the others spare gave his judges what they wanted most penitence he was prepared to shoulder his share of the blame even for those atrocities he claimed had been kept secret from him the tribunal determined not to become just a show trial was delighted to have a defendant a senior spare recognize its authority co-defendants were appalled spare made a very plausible defense its plausibility was shown by the hatred which he aroused in guring who was trying to mobilize the defendants they wanted uh to deny everything and to stand firm and spare said yes the regime was criminal and i therefore accept that i am guilty along with all the rest that of course didn't please them for a kind of collective guilt of supporting criminal acts which we imperfectly at best understood i stated him when i was in the fitness box said i am responsible for all those things for all slave labor i didn't i didn't avoid telling clearly to the churches what i did and even i felt responsible when it were orders of hitler others accused of the accused say always were claiming that it were orders of hitler i didn't do that he never said i'm guilty he said i am responsible and i accept the responsibility as a member of that government there was another question which was occupying my mind very much this was how much of a responsibility i have to carry from also things which i didn't know and i added to this first statement that i also am responsible for everything which happened and even if i didn't know it in the time when i was leading men of the government but at nuremberg the charge against him was quite specific the criminal use of slave labor here his strategy was more straightforward he would offer up a scapegoat fritz saukal deputy and now co-defendant who unhappily for him had none of spares winning eloquence or social polish does i think he won a lot of sympathy from the western judges not the russians the russians wanted him hanged but the the americans and the british at any rate um i think somewhat fell for the line of the the the quran bourgeois who would not have got his hands dirty in the real crimes of the regime for some present at the trial the tribunal's treatment of spare seemed to go beyond sympathy for his middle-class demeanor some kind of understanding seemed to have been reached religious the tribunal sentences you to death by hang defendant albert sparr the tribunal sentences you to 20 years imprisonment his relief was ambiguous however his counsel dr flexner he had a distinct feeling he said bear never said this to me but my feeling was that he was almost disappointed he had he had brought himself to expect this in a in a euphoria of guilt as he called it and when they said 20 years and others got death here it diminished him in his own eyes whatever spares feelings about his sentence and how it had been reached he now had 20 years alone with his conscience once again he took a different course from his co-prisoners and struck up a relationship with the french army chaplains who conducted weekly sermons the first was georges casales say [Music] you [Music] country guilt was so enormous that it was unmanageable you considered [Music] [Music] a wider recognition for the new man hitler's brilliant technician had become and for the world to judge his career as both nazi and penitent over the course of one feverish year he wrote down his life story onto 25 000 scraps of paper smuggled out of prison edited and typed up by close friends ready for him to publish on his release finally at midnight on the 30th of september 1966 20 years after beginning his sentence albert bear was free reunited with the world once again his future looked bright but i can tell you that i'm quite glad to be outside here foreign this is as it turned out there was to be no architecture instead he returned to his comfortable heidelberg home and became a best-selling author publishing his inside the third reich to huge acclaim hitler's brilliant architect and minister for war production had now become germany's most successful penitent even in failure he had found a way to thrive this was the albert bear that spare wanted the world to understand the nazi with enough integrity to cast an honest eye back on those terrible years but while there was contrition there was also pride albert bear was still thrilled by his earlier achievements though he was now a reformed man when he found something deeply compelling about spares formula of guilt by proxy his willingness to shoulder his share of nazi responsibility while at the same time maintaining ignorance of atrocities is [Music] but how credible was spare's position could hitler second in command whose memoirs flaunted the pride their author took in his unparalleled command of detail who worked for months in the occupied eastern territories whose trains were commandeered as transports to the camps whose department supplied steel for construction work at auschwitz could he really be telling the whole truth when he claimed to have known nothing accusations pursued him but still he persevered with his version of the past the final solution was only declared in 1941 you had been with hitler for 10 years when that that happened but uh you know that's the final solution was a secret and there was a secret to me too of course he certainly made hateful remarks about the truth as they are in the table talks but not more and it's very difficult to find out such a secret in even if you are in the government that's wonderful it's really it's a problem becoming [Music] and then in 1971 a bombshell exploded that appeared to shatter spears carefully argued version of events a harvard academic eric goldhagen argued that the details of the final solution had not been kept a secret from in october 1943 himmler head of the ss attended a four-day conference of senior nazis in posen poland he was one of many to give speeches including spare himless speech however was no routine party harang so as i began to read it i realized the significance of the speech because uh scheper had just published his memoirs in which he denied ever having known of the examination of the jews and there in that speech himmler announces the examination of the jews [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] anyone who was present at the speech knew everything i mean him enumerated very carefully always avoiding the word gas chambers but he he enumerated very carefully that the jews of europe were being exterminated including the women children it was the worst speech that anybody has ever given i think himmler repeated his speech two days later on the 6th of october the day of spare's own address this time however there was a change to his text a change discovered by eric goldhagen himmler appeared to single out a member of his audience war production minister albert in that speech him complained that there were german generals and german administrators who were sabotaging or resisting the examination of the jews back by uh by arguing the jews are indispensable in certain factories and so on then he turned to spare and said you are not one of those implying that he is a fine nazi who would not would not conspire to to frustrate the so-called final solution spare responded immediately to goldhagen's accusations claiming he had left poison before the speech and that himmler who was short-sighted must have failed to notice that he had gone believe it or not he spent two years uh in the archives searching for material to prove that he was not there and he um uh produced a piece uh manuscript you circulated in germany which was after was published in the book to give together with my article in which he said that he was indeed present at that meeting but he left before him that delivered the speech and he also succeeded in obtaining affidavit from the one of the officials who organized that meeting that uh indeed he had left the meeting i don't know whether he was there it cannot be established for absolutely certain that he was there or that he was not there but of course it makes no difference whether he was there or not because um his friends the gow lighters who had all been there those of the gaulettes who is who were his friends there were three he saw the very next day at hitler's headquarters and spent most of the day with them and with hitler and of course they told him if he hadn't if he wasn't there they told him it makes absolutely no difference whether he's there or not from that day he knew after goldhagen's accusation it became harder and harder for spare to maintain his defense even to himself i believe that spare blocked what he could not take now alexander mitchelly the psychologist uh called this spares lifeline lebensluge and i agree with this entirely from the goldhagen point on spare had to lie consciously lie about his knowledge he now knew he knew he now knew he had known and somehow he had to live with this further revelations since his death however have suggested that spares complicity went deeper the latest research has shown that spares berlin housing office had used the ss to evict thousands of berlin jews between 1938 and 1942 first to make way for spares ambitious rebuilding project and later to re-house those non-jews who had lost their homes to bomb damage from 1941 these evicted jews were being loaded onto trains and [Music] showed the east was no place to be a jew amateur footage showed the full horror hundreds of thousands of russian and polish jews had been rounded up and shot by the date of spares last deportation in january 1942 these mass executions had become official policy from now on the so-called final solution would include all of europe's jews including those deported from berlin in other words 75 000 jews were expelled from their homes on spares orders now that doesn't put him in the the engine room of the holocaust if you like but it puts him in the ante chamber doesn't it and he he starts these jews on the road to petition in later years spare would go to extraordinary length to seek peace of mind over what his nazi regime had done to the jews he even approached his old spandau chaplain georges casales with a difficult request [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] responsible he corresponded regularly with the jewish nazi hunter simon wiesenthal [Music] next it was through wiesental that he came as near as he ever would to an admission of greater knowledge about the holocaust i'm the resides i have an email sale that's [Music] inside africa and he just sat on the clocked hat and a anti-semite group the i think what he did finally agree to to say or to let me learn by showing me this affidavit that he had given to the south african board of deputies where he said that what he regretted most was his tacit agreement biligong in germany his tacit agreement to the murder of the jews and then when this is published in german in the site he added a footnote which said not through knowledge but through looking away and i phoned him and i said well what does this mean you cannot look away from something you don't know if you looked away then you knew and he said let us never talk about this again it was the closest to an admission of guilt he would ever give then towards the end of his life he found a different way to deal with his past after 50 years of marriage he began an affair with a younger woman it was the first time he had fallen in love physically and the person we fell in love with him who we fell in love with um i believe was also in love with him for me it was sad because this young woman who who was very nice but she understood nothing she told him why should you why should you always feel guilty you are wonderful you have never done anything terrible in your life you have never willingly knowingly hurt anybody in your life you are wonderful forget it and so he gave in and he forgot it spear had worked hard at his guilt it had been his last great project but at the end it was his pride that appeared to have won the upper hand and then comes this phone call which came quite late in the evening and here was a voice different from the voice i knew so well and he said oh my i'm very happy he said after all he said if you come to think of it i haven't done so badly have i after all i was hitler's architect i was hitler's minister of production elements i did then serve 20 years at shpanda and i did then come out and make a second career as a writer it's pretty good isn't it i have done so badly troll have i albert carried on talking about his life and times right to the end it was after completing this interview for a 1981 bbc documentary that he was taken ill in his london hotel he died later that night he was 76. of spares architecture there remains very little his rally building too big to dynamite crumbles at the edge of a lorry park the guard houses he built at the foot of bismarck's victory column and our public toilets his street lamps still stand safe in the anonymity his greatest building the chancellery survived the war but not the victorious soviets who demolished it though not before cannibalizing the marble as cladding for an underground station and more symbolically for their great berlin war memorial of his reputation there remains the ghost of an apology which he spent 35 years persuading himself and the world that he had meant find out what it's like living without a memory come inside and be me monday at 9 on uk tv documentary in a real italian pizzeria the pizza has rich toppings and a crispy thin base and that's exactly how pizza ristorante is wherever you are ristorante the pizzeria taste mr ante by dr utko to become a great actress you need to play lots of different characters and be exceptional every time my secret guess i choose the most exceptional hair color for me it's preference by l'oreal paris sophisticated subtle color at home which doesn't fade exceptionally soft and shiny hair preferenced by l'oreal

Channel: The History Room

Views: 1,761,800

Keywords: Albert Speer (Author), Gitta Sereny, Adolf Hitler, World War II (Event), Third Reich, Nazism (Idea), Germany, Ww2, Nazi Germany (Country), Nuremberg Trials (Event), Spandau Prison (Prison)

Id: AtHEuU50S8M

Length: 47min 26sec (2846 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/PatricioINTP]

To use celebritytypes.com, here is some quotes. He is also examined in the book The Secret Lives of INTPs

"Hitler was the first [dictator] to be able to employ the implements of technology to multiply crime.... The more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology.... Consequently this [Nuremberg] trial must contribute to laying down the ground rules for life in human society."

[On his sentence at the Nuremberg Trials:]

"20 years. Well... that's fair enough. They couldn't have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can't complain. I said the sentences must be severe, and I admitted my share of the guilt, so it would be ridiculous if I complained about the punishment."

Joachim Fest: "It remains a mystery how such a rational character could develop the naive faith that was a prerequisite for belonging to Hitler's inner circle."

[u/phySi0]

There's a whole section on him in "The Secret Lives of INTPs", by Anna Moss. Very interesting guy!

[u/neogeek23]

Can we talk about how the real villain on our page is Lincoln? And how he is probably entp not intp?