Will The Real Albert Speer Please Stand Up

Sebastian Haffner, Nazi historian, declared: “[Speer] rather symbolizes a type which is becoming increasingly important in all belligerent countries: the pure technician, the classless bright young man with background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world and no other means than his technical and managerial ability. It is the lack of psychological and spiritual ballast, and the ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational machinery of our age which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays…they first find it very difficult to earn a living and then find it very easy to run the world. This is their age; the Hitlers and the Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers… will long be with us”.

As Speer later confessed to Sereny, “I was blind by choice…I was not ignorant”.

As Sereny points out to him, “…you cannot ‘sense’ in a void; ‘sensing’ is an inner realization of knowledge. Basically if you ‘sensed’, then you knew”. To this Speer replied, “Thank God you weren’t Robert Jackson,”

Speer had the foresight to save some documents and deposit them in a bank vault at Hamburg, later using them during his trial and for his defence. As Van Der Vat quipped, “they helped to save his life”.