ALBERT SPEER, who
died in early September in London, was Germany’s Minister of Armaments
and War Production from 1942 till the end of the war. He served
Hitler faithfully, but his heart was in architecture, not in
politics. In his memoir ’’Inside the Third Reich’’ (1970) - an
important source for the history of the Nazi era - he wrote that for the
chance to put up a great building, he would have, like Faust, sold his
soul. In the Nuremberg trials, in which he received a 20 -year sentence,
he was virtually the only defendant who did not attempt to deny his
personal responsibility.
His third book, called ’’The Slave State: My Altercations with the
S.S.’’ in Germany, has now been published in the United States under
a title that must be a close contender in the race for the most
meaningless title of the year. It is an important work nonetheless, even
though the student of 20th-century German history may find it
of more interest than the average reader.
Speer had originally intended to write about German armaments in
general. But because he found so much interesting material in the
archives about Himmler’s attempts to set up an industrial empire,
he decided to devote his book to this
specific
aspect of the larger topic. ’’Infiltration’’ is not a memoir but the
work of a historian who also happened to be involved as an actor in the
story. Speer had known much of the story before, but what he had not
known about the S.S. designs certainly changed his whole perspective.
What emerges above all from
’’Infiltration’’ is a picture of unending quarrels among various
contenders and rival bureaucracies in the Third Reich: Hitler’s
sidekicks schemed and conspired against one another and fought for power
and influence. There are bound to be tensions whenever people work
closely together; ’’Infiltration’’ provides fascinating
confirmation concerning this state of affairs in the Third Reich.
There is, however, the danger of making too much of this point. Among
some writers on Nazi Germany (and, incidentally, on the Soviet Union)
there has been a tendency to de-emphasize the role of Hitler (and
Stalin) and to describe their regimes as ’’pluralistic’’ or ’’polycratic,’’
thus denying their totalitarian character. It is, of course, perfectly
true that neither Hitler nor Stalin was omnipotent and
omnipresent, even though official propaganda tried to create the
impression that they were.
If Himmler wanted to
engage in one of his bizarre schemes, such as mass-producing high-octane
gas from firtree roots or geraniums, Hitler was unlikely to interfere.
But it is also true that any decision of major importance could not be
taken without consulting the Fuhrer. Speer notes in this context
that Himmler’s famous 1943 speeches, in which he promised the mass
destruction of the Jews, could not have been made without Hitler’s
permission.
That Himmler wished to dominate and eventually run the armaments
industry is not at first readily plausible. The Nazis’ attitudes toward
modern industry were always ambivalent. They understood that a modern
country could not function - let alone engage in modern warfare -
without a sound industrial basis, but their ideological inspiration was
romantic and thus anti-modern and anti-industrial. To Hitler,
physics was the ’’Jewish pseudoscience.’’ Until 1943, he had no interest
in jet propulsion or rockets. He rejected the jet fighter because he
thought that its extreme speed would impede its fighting capacity.
According to Speer,
the Fuhrer even opposed the tommy gun because he said it made soldiers
cowardly, and close combat impossible. It was not until the end of the
war, when it seemed that only some miracle could save his rule, that
Hitler was willing to give higher priority to the development of
modern technology.
If the S.S. nevertheless tried to build a major industrial
empire, it was because it distrusted the bankers and industrialists (and
capitalism in general) and, more importantly, because it desired
financial independence. The S.S. feared that, after Hitler’s death, it
would be starved by its many enemies inside Germany. According to
Speer, Himmler even told Hitler that much, and the
explanation seems quite believable.
’’Infiltration’’ contains detailed accounts of the
organization of Germany’s rocket program (the A-4) and of the
long struggle among the Armaments Ministry, the army and the S.S. over
whether able bodied Jews should be kept working for the German war
effort or sent to the gas chambers. The army and the Armaments Ministry
wanted to keep the Jews as laborers - not out of philo-Semitism, but
because Jews were excellent workers, and the Third Reich faced serious
manpower shortages during the war. And the prospect that an army of some
14 million slave laborers (such as the S.S. envisaged) would become
permanent if Germany won the war certainly did not gladden Speer’s
heart. In these as in most other respects, Speer was on the right
side in his controversies with the S.S., but the quarrels were not about
humanity but about efficiency.
There are many shrewd observations and vignettes in this book, and the
author’s self-criticism sounds genuine and honest. Yet the impression
emerges from ’’Infiltration’’ that Mr. Speer was not quite clear
in his mind what was wrong with Nazism - except, of course, that it
committed certain barbaric excesses and frequently made irrational
decisions. To give but one illustration of his attitude, Speer
describes the background of Nazi policies toward the Jews i n the
following terms:
’’(Hitler’s
anti-Semitism) had simply aroused a sharp fight by the Jews against
the National Socialists. Ultimately, the very existence of the Jews
was at stake. And it is astonishing that these Jews, who were
allegedly so powerful in Germany before 1933, were not even able to
struggle effectively against this petit bourgeois movement of the
National Socialists. The justified struggle of the Jews against
their arch-enemies increased the anti-Jewish hatred of the Party to
such an extent that it refused to make any exceptions or go back in
any way.’’
Speer no doubt tried
to be fair and to understand what really happened. He probably felt
sympathy for the Jews after the full extent of their fate had registered
with him. Yet how far from historical truth is his version of the
’’sharp fight by the Jews’’! Time and again, ’’Infiltration’’
shows its author’s disgust with the lack of rationality displayed by
Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. But this was not the basic issue.
Frequently Nazism was quite rational and methodical in the pursuit of
its aims. The problem was that its aims were not just irrational or
fanatical but profoundly evil.
