The Relevance of Albert Speer: Decent Citizens in an Indecent Society?

The Imaginative Conservative ^ | Apr 26, 2013 | Matthew Anger

[don-o]

Albert Speer’s career is a microcosm of the decent (but philosophically agnostic) citizen living in an indecent (and ideologically fanatical) society. Speer served as Hitler’s chief architect, and during the Second World War was Germany’s minister of armaments.

As such, Speer was a leading technocrat in a totalitarian state. While 21st century America is a far cry from the death camp regime, totalitarian aspirations are no longer a fringe phenomenon.

Ideological despots are increasingly mainstream, and many individuals in power are bent on controlling the “totality” of national life. Their politicized morality is opposed to traditional beliefs, and it is growing more brazen and assertive.

So if we are to avoid the desperate choices that faced people like Speer, we should be aware of these trends before they become “inevitable,” as they did during Hitler’s seizure of power.

[cornelis]

Any attempt to portray him as a decent man in a tough moral position and nothing more is a lie

Yes, he was a decent man in a tough moral position. And he was something more. John Lukacs held this view about Hitler. Hitler was not all monster. He was also normal. He was good and evil and the same time.

[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

Speer was certainly brilliant at Nuremberg. Of all of the defendants on the Nuremberg docket, after Goering, Speer was certainly the closet to AH. Fritz Sauckel, in comparison, was a relatively mid-level cog in the Nazi hierarchy yet he received the death penalty and the much higher up Speer got off with a 20 year prison sentence. One can only conclude that Speer’s brilliant performance at Nuremberg saved his skin and his strategy of contrition and admitting to the evil of the regime won over the judges at the IMT. After release from prison, Speer went on to write books and became a media personality and turned his Nazi past into a very lucrative career in which he made millions and the myth of the “good German” was fabricated.

[Chainmail]

I’m with you: Speer was a war criminal and he deserved to be hanged but got off lucky. He was only too happy to use concentration camp and POW labor, only too happy to facilitate the building of V-1s and V-2s to be fired at civilians, and When all was finished he suddenly posed as a “good German”.

I for one am sick of the Nazi lovers that seem to come out of the woodwork. All of the German people of that period except for a very few heroes - the White Rose and Von Stauffenberg - wore the swastika and facilitated global war at an inhuman scale. Tens of millions died for no damn reason and that crime is laid at the feet of Albert Speer and the others.

[katana]

Based on evidence which was discovered over the years following but unavailable during the trial at Nuremberg Speer should have been hanged with the rest. He very cleverly presented himself as a penitent and avoided the noose. He was later able to recover, hold on to, and become wealthy from the sale of stolen treasures looted from the Jews and the occupied parts of Europe. The difference between him and Goering was scale of the theft and acting ability during the trial.

[ek_hornbeck]

. All of the German people of that period except for a very few heroes - the White Rose and Von Stauffenberg - wore the swastika and facilitated global war at an inhuman scale

So in order to be "decent" one has to be a martyr. That seems to be a rather tall order.

Do you really expect people to leave their homes, their friends, and their families behind in order to make a statement about how much they disapprove of a regime, or risk their lives to make such a statement? What of ordinary people who don't feel strongly one way or another about the regime, but just want to get on with their lives as normally as possible? Such people have no desire to be martyrs, nor should they.

You see the same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale here. A lot of people on this site despise Obama and everything he stands for, and rightly so. How many of them have left the country in protest, or have risked their lives to start a coup against him? Close to zero, I'd guess. So why are you demanding moral perfection and martyrdom from Germans or any other foreigners?

[Talisker]

And yet that’s what it takes, and when it doesn’t happen, horror ensues.

Take it up with God.

I have.

[x]

Quite a cast. Everybody from John Gielgud and Trevor Howard to Mort Sahl and Randy Quaid was in that.

The movie (and play) Good dramatized the same theme, though with fictional characters.

As a film, it wasn't all that ... uh ... good, but it did provide food for thought.

[ek_hornbeck]

There's a good 1980s-era TV movie on Speer based on his book, Inside the Third Reich, out on YouTube with Rutger Hauer and Blythe Danner, the 7th-Heaven molester guy as well, and the 2nd best Hitler-imitator I've seen (next to Bruno Ganz' often-seen turn from Downfall). Worth a watch.

That was Derek Jacobi (of I, Claudius fame) as Hitler, and I agree that he really had the mannerisms down. The rest of the movie was uneven, many of the actors were good but somewhat miscast.

[Chainmail]

When Obama starts rounding up people and murdering them or enslaving them to be worked to death or when Obama starts firing thousands unguided missiles at the centers of cities just to kill civilians or when Obama just seizes vast tracts of other people's lands for "leibensraum", we have a moral duty to resist with everything we have including our lives.

As it is, we are resisting his attempts to circumvent our Constitution by trying to elect opposition politicians and we are pursuing every legal avenue to resist his attempts at greater executive fiat.

It's a shame the Germans didn't do the same back when they could. Given that "ordinary Germans" were members of Einsatzgruppen whose only duty was murdering innocents to the rear of the combat troops and ordinary Germans executed hundreds of Belgian civilians and American POWs just because the got in the way in the Ardennes and so on.

People choose how they will be judged, even in a war.

[JacksonCalhoun]

That was Derek Jacobi (of I, Claudius fame) as Hitler, and I agree that he really had the mannerisms down. The rest of the movie was uneven, many of the actors were good but somewhat miscast.

I had never heard an actor play Hitler speaking English, so that was interesting. You're right, not exactly an all-time great, but there's something about low-budget TV movies that I miss. I've never seen I, Claudius, I was a tad young when that first was on PBS.

[JacksonCalhoun]

Yes, Randy Quaid as "Putzi". Not quite as memorable as Cousin Eddie or an Amish bowling prodigy. Being a biography-turned-film (which generally aren't very good, even The Theory of Everything had issues), as well as a TV-movie definitely wouldn't put it in the hall of fame.

[ek_hornbeck]

Basically, you're demanding that people take up arms against their own country and their own countrymen (including members of their own family) in time a war, or else be considered "criminals." One could equally well argue that the honorable thing to do is to fight for your own country in time of war even if the ruling regime is despicable, because it's still your country. A lot of Germans, including the Prussian military aristocracy, did precisely that even though they personally despised Hitler.

Similarly, many members of the German middle class supported the Nazis because with the basic implosion of the Weimar Republic it looked as though the Nazis were the only alternative to Communism in Germany. If it's a choice between a totalitarian regime that confiscates all of your property and one that lets you keep your land and your business (assuming you're an ethnic German), it's not too hard to figure out why small business owners supported Hitler over Thaelmann.

[x]

There is certainly a lot of room between taking up arms against one's country and fighting in its army in an unjust war of conquest for a tyrannical regime.

In this case in particular, it was those officers who "fought for" Germany who opened the door to the country's total destruction.

Civil disobedience, even at the cost of one's life would be the "honorable thing to do."

If some kind of moral calculus is possible, Franz Jägerstätter was worth a thousand Prussian officers.

[Skooz]

I've never seen I, Claudius, I was a tad young when that first was on PBS.

I highly, highly recommend buying the DVD version and setting aside a few nights to watch it. It's excellent.

The sets are ultra low budget but the cast is absolutely top notch. It may be the best thing ever on TV.

[ek_hornbeck]

They could have made an effort to find actors who at least slightly resembled the individuals they were portraying. Other than being short, Ian Holm looks absolutely nothing like Goebbels, nor does Rutger Hauer look anything like Speer.

Jacobi didn't look much like Hitler, but his style of speech and gesture was so convincing that you almost didn't notice.

[Chainmail]

Didn't anyone learn anything? Sure, you can see why the German people wanted something different than the collapse after the First World War and sure, they wanted to overcome the humiliation and enormous payments of Versailles. But Brownshirt thugs wandering the streets threatening and beating people? Kristallnacht? How many warning signs did people need to recognize that something dangerous, hideous was taking power?

I don't accept the "well, we were defending our country" excuse. It's one thing to renounce an unjust treaty, it's another thing entirely to launch an aggressive war. How could a traditionally Christian country launch into such barbarity? It wasn't just Himmler or Heidrich or Eichmann or Mengele - it was tens of thousands of inhuman, sadistic butchers augmented by millions of young men who supported or at least didn't oppose the cruelty.

War to protect your country or war to defend an ally is justified. War of aggression or territorial conquest or the extermination of people is never justified.

War that causes your opponents to have to use desperate, barbaric methods to defeat you is also never justified.

I was given a tour of the Bastogne battlefields a number of years ago and while we were looking at the different sites of battle, my guide would point out the pockmarks in the wall where the local mayor and the priest and some of the villagers were lined up against a wall and shot. Later in the day, we visited the graveyards and at the field of the German dead, my guide - an officer from the US Embassy in Belgium - said "look at all those fine German boys lost". I told him that there should be more there: if they had stayed on their side of the border, they may have still been alive today with their grandchildren. As it was, they were invading someone else's country and they butchered innocents and prisoners. Well over 500 Belgian civilians casually murdered and an estimated 350 American prisoners of war. Which is of course nothing compared to the untold millions murdered in Russia.

There were too many people lost all over the world thanks to Hitler's aggression and the generations of survivors brutalized for me to mourn those German dead in Belgium.

[DPMD]

What they did outweighed anything they were or weren’t.

[cornelis]

Sure, virtues don’t cover for any vice. What’s important to see, I think, is that normal people do evil things.