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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...
Having done extensive research in the Nuremberg Trial documents, I tend to concur with Speer that he did numerous things for the workers. He increased rations, provided clothing and relieved overcrowding. This was one of the reasons his life was spared...
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...