SPANDAU: THE SECRET DIARIES by Albert Speer -

I found this in my father’s bookcase. It is diaries written during Speer’s twenty years spent in jail after the second World War. It’s one thing when you have just your regular crimes, but Speer was in for crimes against humanity. I mean, how many people in high school ever think: I’m going to be famous for crimes against humanity? It must come as a surprise, after the fact, because while you are busy being crazy you probably never think your behaviour rises to anything beyond but I-did-what-I had-to.

This is certainly Speer’s argument. He was a highly ambitious, but not highly successful, architect when he met Hitler. Hitler offered him the opportunity to build buildings for his thousand year Reich. I’ve heard of the thousand year Reich, but always thought it was propaganda. Apparently not – he genuinely thought this was what he was creating. Eventually Speer became Minister of Armaments, and was thus crucial to the Nazi war effort.

While other Nazis (I guess you could call them smart Nazis) ran away in the last days of the war, Speer stayed around, not thinking the Nuremberg trials would go bad for him. After all, it was a war, and etc. The judges didn’t look kindly on his use of forced labour (also called slavery) in the armaments factories, and he was sentenced to twenty years. (Interesting side point: unlike the Allies, Germany refused to use women in its factories, preferring slaves. Morality aside, how dumb is that? Obviously slaves will sabotage you every chance they get, versus your wives who you would at least assume are on your side)

His twenty years he has to serve with seven other leading Nazis. You would think he would think he might find that comforting, but this turns out to be pretty much like it would be for anyone condemned to spend decades with their work colleagues, right after a business went bankrupt. There is a lot of re-fighting the war, and trying to argue that more submarines would have made a difference, or more Aryan purity or whatever.

Speer also wrestles a lot with how he got there. Here he is on when he first saw Hitler:

Students had taken me along to a mass meeting on Berlin’s East Side. Under leafless trees young people in cheap clothes poured towards one of the big beer halls in Berlin’s Hasenheide. Three hours later I left that same beer garden a changed person. I saw the same posters on the dirty advertising columns, but looked at them with different eyes. A blown-up picture of Adolf Hitler in a martial pose that I had regarded with a touch of amusement on my way there had suddenly lost all its ridiculousness.

He spends a lot of time trying to explain the appeal. He also tries to excuse himself, claiming he didn’t know the Holocaust was happening. For example:

(Hilter) was capable of tossing off quite calmly, between the soup and the vegetable course, ‘I want to annihilate the Jews in Europe. This war is the decisive confrontation between National Socialism and world Jewry.’ .. That was how he used to talk, in military conferences and at table. And the entire circle . . . and I myself, all of us would sit there looking grave and gloomy. . . . No one ever contributed a comment; at most someone would sedulously put in a word of agreement.

He claims that when Hitler said exterminate, he didn’t know he meant ‘exterminate.’ Just like you can say you will crush your enemies but don’t mean ‘crush’. I wasn’t quite sure how to take all this, as he went on about this for quite some time (and let’s face it he had a lot of time to go on about things, like about twenty years). Wikipedia tells me I shouldn’t trust a word of it and that there is evidence he knew very well what was going on, and indeed helped build the camps. Though no one claims he was actively involved in what happened there.

It was interesting to read this book and try and understand how far it is a cynical effort at self-promotion and how far a genuine effort to explain how he got to where he was. Also very interesting – probably more interesting – was seeing how someone deals with twenty years of nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever quite understood how long twenty years is, or what prison truly means, before I read this book. Death is obviously the end of life, but in so far as life is just a series of experiences, you can see how prison is the next best thing to death, because it really does deprive you of experiences.

It reminded me of (strange bedfellows alert) Nelson Mandela’s LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, where you see how prisoners will create drama and event out of nothing. For example, Speer starts doing long walks back and forth in the prison yard every day, and then gets an Atlas, so he can imagine that he is walking around the globe. He writes about it as if he is really in India, or wherever, and in the end of his dairies focuses very much on how much he ‘hopes he can make it to Guadalajara’ before he is let out. He is eventually given a garden, and this transforms his life. He is there so long that he plants tree seedlings knowing he will live to sit in their shade. He’s probably a monster, but damn, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him.

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