Word: speer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Speer Was Spared...
...review of Albert Speer's new book Spandau: The Secret Diaries [Feb. 23], Stefan Kanfer writes: "Speer, who displayed no discernible sympathy for workers during the '30s and '40s, grows hungry...
...fact, it is clear that Speer is not a believer, in either God or much of anything. In metaphysics as in religion, he is fundamentally an agnostic. Though he decries the lack of morality in Nazi Germany, Speer can offer no alternative. He writes in 1952, "Much too late I am beginning to grasp that there is only one valid kind of loyalty: toward morality," but the remark has an empty 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...
THERE ARE OTHER signs that Speer's professed contrition is not completely genuine. On more than one occasion he wonders how the Allied powers could pass judgment on him and his fellow Nazis, in view of what he sees as their many hypocrisies. Near the end of his term, he writes, "I have been deformed. Granted, my judges sentenced me to only twenty years' imprisonment to make it plain that I did not deserve a life sentence. But in reality they have physically and mentally destroyed me. Ah, these spokesmen of humanitarianism! Only twenty years!" Is this the predictable lament...
This book leads inexorably to the latter conclusion. What emerges from all the cant and posturing is a very different picture of Albert Speer from what he 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...