Albert Speer: Inside the Third Reich. Richard and Clara Winston translation. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Reissued by Simon and Schuster, 1997.
No founder of the American republic would not instantly have recognized Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler as loathsome tyrants. Albert Speer was less discerning. Speer could tell himself, and his prosecutors, that he did not know about Nazi death camps because he so much did not want to know that his knowledge stayed penumbric, a whiff of ash from distant crematorium. “Would you help me become a different man?” Speer asked the priest, not without reason but rather too late.
The Americans had been bred to politics, a politics of self-government jealous of encroachments, alert to the designs of despots. Speer grew up among a sort of gentry rendered useless by modern life. An apolitical youth left him susceptible to an all-consuming politics in maturity—precisely because he’d never matured at all. Had he been fortunate, he might have found his ‘missing’ father in God, but such wholesome devotion was less likely in the new Europe, the Europe of the Church Militant of Modern Ideology. Father Hitler—who so cared for, so loved, German youth, who had such power, omniscience, and glory—fulfilled Speer’s longings. Chesterton (whose record on these matters was far from spotless) writes that when men stop believing in God they don’t start believing in nothing; they believe in anything. Or (more relevantly here) anyone—even the implausible little Austrian with a suggestion of syphilis in his eyes. Hitler won Eva Brann too, that Gretchen with her sense of danger pithed, vulnerable to Mephistophelian seduction, and therefore not sufficiently good to save her Faustian friend, Speer. Speer’s real father sensed the evil on contact. Like most German liberals of the time, like the Weimar Republic itself, he shuddered and withdrew.
“All I wanted was for this great man to dominate the globe.” With so many good works behind him—the resurrection of German pride, a reinvigorated economy, a rebuilt military—and surely so many more ahead of him, to culminate in the reunification of the Germanic peoples at the geopolitical center of the World Island–only a fool or a coward would demur, yes? For who would oppose him? The decadent French? The slavish Slavs? The Bolsheviks? The nation of shopkeepers?
As for doubts, Hitler himself made “an absolute refusal to listen to bad news.” Neither does “the authoritarian state” itself seek to hear criticism. Nor do its subjects. Even the very minimally realistic Speer—who wondered, in 1943, whether it might be better to put the German economy on a war footing—could make little headway. (Fortunately so. Their mindset kept Hitler and his I-venture-to-say eccentric band well away from the potential applications of Einstein’s ‘Jewish physics.’) As for the Germans, “If we couldn’t believe in Hitler, what was there for us?” a woman asked, I suppose rhetorically.
He left the Germans behind, Speer among them. The Prince of War attaches his followers to himself by implicating them in the crimes that underlie his new modes and orders. When that regime crumbles and the Prince dies, so much of the worse—if, ultimately, much better—for the survivors. What there was for the Germans after Hitler was the potential to recover the self, in pain, or to find some new formula for self-deception. They did both. Speer did both. Thanks to the common sense of their conquerors from the west, they did so in the stable and decent regime of the German Federal Republic. From the east, conquerors came who were not so sensible.
Are we all Albert Speer? We all tend to believe what we want to believe, and to disbelieve things that reflect poorly on ‘our own.’ A main justification for the commercial republican regime is to make it harder for its citizens to do that, by making them know that they will do it, and by checking them from acting too comprehensively when they do. So we all are, and are not, Albert Speer. We share his inclinations but are less likely to act upon them so unimpededly.
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