Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only exception is Hitler. Speer's thoughts turn time after time to his Fuehrer; he even dreams about Hitler, years after the end of the war. But he has few new insights into Hitler's character. In 1960, he arrives at the conclusion that "hatred of the Jews was Hitler's central conviction. The man I served was not a well-meaning tribune of the masses, not the rebuilder of German grandeur, and also not the failed conqueror of a vast European empire, but a pathological hater." Other observations are more original and interesting, such as his discussion of Hitler...
...long thought that all these formations, processions, dedications were part of a clever propagandistic revue. Now I finally understood that for Hitler they were almost like rites of the founding of a church... he was deliberately giving up the smaller claim to the status of a celebrated popular hero in order to gain the far greater status of founder of a religion...
Even after years of contemplating Hitler's atrocities, Speer exhibits no genuine revulsion. His few denunciations of Hitler are either rhetorical or trivial. He never resolves the secret of his attraction to Hitler. Such attempts at explanation as "I regarded Hitler above all as the preserver of the world of the nineteenth century" are hardly adequate...
...ring because Speer has no moral system, still less an allegiance to one. If he ever tried to confront the problems of moral philosophy or religious faith, it is not apparent in these diaries. He contents himself with lip service to the trite idea of the basic wickedness of Hitler and Nazism, but fails to consider why they are evil...
...would like: a cold-blooded, amoral man, lacking the most basic concepts of right and wrong, who even now cannot grasp the horror he did so much to perpetrate. Historian Eugene Davidson was wrong when he wrote of Speer, "whatever he lost when he made his pact with Adolf Hitler, it was not his soul." Albert Speer did lose his soul. Worse yet, he never missed...