Nazi who said sorry

Albert Speer died due to a stroke on the 1st of September aged This essay was written by a fellow student. You may use it as a guide or sample for writing your own paper, but remember to cite it correctly. Choose skilled expert on your subject and get original paper with free plagiarism report.

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Their friendship having made him untouchable, Speer grew rich through kickbacks from munitions suppliers. A veteran historian at Simon Fraser University, Kitchen brings to this book an unrelenting appetite for the truth and a piercing style. But Speer was more than a corrupt sycophant manoeuvring upward. First he lied within the German government. He had a talent for organization, and a parallel talent for public relations.

As munitions minister he managed to improve productivity, partly by using slave workers drawn from concentration camps and prison-of-war camps.

The workers were starved and often worked to death, but the result was respect for Speer as a manager. As Kitchen persuasively recounts, Speer encouraged the myth of Speer as industrial miracle worker.

His own statisticians kept announcing that the Speer regime had raised production to staggering heights. Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, who knew something about lies, was on to him. He makes us all drunk with his figures. They found him wonderfully co-operative. The charm offensive worked again and members of the committee reported that he was indeed a miracle worker for the Nazis, just as he said. When he appeared before the Nuremberg war crimes trial, he had to come up with a more complicated story.

He testified that he had only a vague idea what happened in the death camps. He admitted a limited guilt: He had failed to learn what was really going on during the Holocaust. But he said he knew nothing about killing millions of Jews. Educated Germans did not want to accept that someone so sophisticated as Speer could been willing partner in genocide. His lies, Kitchen says, were believed by many who needed to believe.

They liked knowing that this man, closer to Hitler than anyone else, nevertheless maintained his own integrity. He spent those two decades in Spandau prison burnishing his alibis and dreaming that he could have designed a building to equal the Parthenon if he had not become armaments minister. He tended a prison garden and made notes for his best-selling autobiography, Inside the Third Reich. In , a Harvard historian, Erich Goldhagen, wrote that Speer had to have been aware of the death camps.

There, they planned, would sit a Great Hall larger than any other indoor space on Earth and an imposing stone arch big enough to fit the Arc de Triomphe beneath it.

They wanted to know the secrets of the Nazi war machine — which endured despite relentless Allied bombing campaigns — in the hope that it might help the US beat Japan in the Pacific War.

Speer was a senior Nazi, a close confidant of Hitler and responsible for a brutal regime of slave labour. And yet he insisted to the court at Nuremberg that he had always been unaware of the Holocaust. When on trial, Speer recognised his role in the Nazi war machine, even apologising to the court for his use of slave labour. Unlike many other senior Nazi officials , and even Party workers who had acted under his authority, Speer escaped the death penalty at Nuremberg.

Instead, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity, primarily because of his role in the use of slave labour. Nonetheless, he scrawled secret notes in his cell, eventually turning the writings into an eyewitness account of the Nazi Government. Speer toiled to distance himself from the Nazis. This assertion left the other Nazi defendants in the courtroom in fits of laughter.

Throughout his later life, Speer upheld his remorse for the actions of the Nazis and insisted he had been isolated from the realities of the Holocaust.