Word: hitler
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Speer offers a special insight into Hitler's strength and weakness. He sees the man as a gifted amateur: "He arrived at the core of matters too easily and therefore could not understand them with real thoroughness." At the outset of the war, Hitler surprised his enemies with tactics they did not expect. But, Speer adds with a professional's disdain, "as soon as setbacks occurred he suffered shipwreck, like most untrained people." Speer became the miracle man of German war production simply by unifying a system fragmented by the conflicting demands made upon it by Hitler...
Magnetic Power. The inefficiencies and inconsistencies of the modern world's most savagely totalitarian state were staggering. Hitler's satraps ran separate duchies of their own, and the supposedly all-powerful Fuhrer often found his orders circumvented by his lieutenants-even by Speer, who, as Armaments Minister in the waning months of war, quietly sabotaged Hitler's scorched-earth policy for territories about to be lost to the Allied armies. Hitler sometimes found his close associates absurd. When SS Chief Heinrich Himmler sought through archaeological excavations to demonstrate the early growth of German culture, Hitler scoffed...
...Hitler had special quirks and phobias...
...such details, Speer compels attention because the man does not avoid the question of personal guilt. At first, he writes, "political events did not concern me." As a good technocrat, he agreed to the use of forced labor in order to bolster armament production. After the plot to assassinate Hitler failed on July 20, 1944, Speer briefly toyed with ways to kill his Führer. But, he admits, "I could never have confronted Hitler pistol in hand. Face to face, his magnetic power over me was too great up to the very last...
...want to know what was happening there." The camp was Auschwitz. "Because I failed at that time," Speer writes, " Istill feel responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense." Speer does not defend himself by arguing that he did not know what was happening. "By entering Hitler's party, I had already, in essence, assumed a responsibility that led directly to the brutalities of forced labor, to the destruction of war and to the deaths of those millions of so-called undesirable stock-to the crushing of justice and the elevation of every evil...