ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism, No.49, Autumn 1971, pp.33-34.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Inside the Third Reich
Albert Speer
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £3.50
Inevitably any book by an ex-Nazi must centre on the concentration camps. He cannot deny the horror of the ‘final solution’, yet he must explain why he did nothing to stop it. Albert Speer is a very special kind of ex-Nazi – a personal friend and favourite of Hitler, and from 1942 onwards Minister for Arms Production and effectively ‘the most important man after Hitler’. (p.186) At Nuremburg he was sentenced to 20 years, which he spent largely preparing this book. Arguably the time was well-spent, since he is reputed to have made in the region of £80,000 out of it.
Speer’s attitude to his own war guilt has the virtue of being totally contradictory. On the one hand in the finest public school tradition, he is determined to take his share of the blame and face it like a man:
‘Those who ask me are fundamentally expecting me to offer justifications. But I have none. No apologies are possible.’ (p.113)
On the other hand the rest of the book is very largely devoted to showing us just what a decent chap Albert was, underneath it all – he sent flowers to Hess’s dying father, he thoroughly disapproved of Boormann’s and Georing’s dissipation, and what’s more he was never really anti-Jewish – ‘I was not an anti-semite, I had Jewish friends.’ (p.16) When all is said and done what Speer is saying is this:
‘Ignorance of what went on is no excuse, and we must accept responsibility for the gas chambers. The reason I did nothing to stop them was that I never knew they existed.’
This confusion highlights not so much the defects of Speer’s character as the complex and ambiguous relationship between the Nazis and the class that drove them to power, the German bourgeoisie (and Speer was a fairly typical member of that class, his family owned the largest tool-making firm in Germany). In the economic chaos of the 1930’s the German ruling class turned to Hitler and the Nazis as the only political force that could save Germany from the ‘peril of communism,’ and keep their businesses in their own hands. As long as this was the case Speer and his class would remain loyal to the Nazis. But people like Speer were far from being ideologically convinced by National Socialism. Speer never read either Mein Kampf or Rosenburg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, and, although he must have been fully aware of the anti-semitism in Nazism, it was not this that committed him to Hitler. In fact this brand of mass agitation offended his delicate breeding – ‘the smashed panes of shop windows (in a Nazi anti-Jewish riot) offended my middle class sense of order.’ (p.111)
When the war began to go against Germany the difference in outlook between Hitler and the bourgeoisie in general, and Speer in particular, became even more apparent as Hitler’s dogmatic nazism threatened the efficiency of industry and of the state. Speer says his major fear was that ‘my efforts to organise an efficient ... economy had been ruined by Hitler’s vacillation.’ There had been sound economic arguments for using the Nazis to club the German labour movement, but there was no economic sense in gassing Jews. It wasn’t that Speer was not absolutely ruthless – he was the firmest advocate of transporting Polish slave labour (he now chooses to call them ‘foreign workers’ in his book) into the arms factories. It was just that butchering people when there was a labour shortage was not good business, and Speer was a good business man above all else.
The final irony comes on page 378, when Speer at last comes out with the classic excuse – ‘for in any case I was moving inside the system.’ What he doesn’t say, and what no liberal can fully admit, is that it was Speer and his class, faced with a ‘choice between a future Communist Germany and a future National Socialist Germany,’ who gave the Nazis the power to build that system. Perhaps the only thing to be said for this tedious book is that it teaches us just what we can expect from our own employing class, should things ever get that bad for it.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 19.2.2008