Despite Karski’s devastating testimony – which he hopes, in Feiner’s words, will help ‘to shake the conscience of the world’ – and despite the pleas of several Jewish leaders in the West, no Allied intervention to stop, or even temporarily halt, the ongoing mass murder of the Jews is forthcoming.
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While Karski is being tested beyond human limits, fighting with every shred of his being against fascism and for the survival of his country, Speer’s career is going from strength to strength. In the same week in June 1940 that Karski is recovering in hospital following his torture by the Gestapo and attempted suicide, Speer is accompanying Hitler on a triumphal tour of Paris, being photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower as the Führer’s right-hand man (quite literally so). In his huge office in the Academy of Arts he’s creating the vastly bombastic masterplans for the new Berlin that Hitler has ordered, with the Kuppenhalle – ‘The Great Hall of the People’ – designed to dwarf St Peter’s in Rome and hold 180,000 spectators. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between the selflessness of Karski – risking his life repeatedly for his country, giving up his links even to his own family and friends to work in the underground – and the career-driven vanity of the other, providing first the visual identity for Nazism and later the military means by which it would fight.
When Karski is meeting Feiner and Kirschenbaum in the ruined house on the edge of Warsaw, and then witnessing the appalling realities of the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1942, Speer is at the zenith of his powers in his new job as Reich minister for armaments and war production. In this month, Speer is basking in the glory of having achieved, in only six months, huge increases in output – 27 per cent in weapons production, 25 per cent in tank manufacture and 97 per cent in ammunition production. On 19 August Speer is meeting Hitler to discuss how ‘a further million Russian labourers’ can be supplied to the German armament industry, using ‘any necessary compulsion’ to achieve this end. In September, when Karski is at Izbica, we know Speer and Sauckel and others are deliberating on how to improve productivity among workers, Speer suggesting that the SS and police start taking more serious action ‘and putting those known as slackers into concentration camps’.
Perhaps, though, the starkest difference between these two men can be seen after the war, in the way they spoke about their experiences. At the end of 1944 Karski published his Story of a Secret State, a rallying cry for Polish resistance and Allied co-operation, but also an attempt to make sense of all that he’d witnessed in the war. An attempt maybe to heal his shattered self and, by sharing some of his most appalling experiences, perhaps to try to exorcise the power of those memories. But, although the book was successful, and in many respects Karski was seen as an archetypal hero of the Polish resistance, he had a far more bitter view of himself and his war years. All he could see was the futility of his efforts to inform the West of what was happening, the total inaction of Allied governments in the face of the knowledge he brought them about the Holocaust. Now, in the post-war years he vowed he would try to forget what had happened and never speak of his experiences again: ‘At that time I hated humanity, I broke with the world … I imposed on myself a pledge never to mention the war to anybody.’
All of this could not contrast more starkly with Speer. Or rather, the Albert Speer of his later years, following his release from Spandau prison in 1966. The Speer who had secretly written his autobiography in jail, then negotiated lucrative book deals for Inside the Third Reich on his release. The Speer who milked the media circus that followed him for most of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Speer who never tired of telling his story to anyone who’d listen, to any magazine or broadcaster who’d pay. The flood of books and articles and TV appearances; a torrent of self-justification and vanity masquerading as humility. Hoping the key questions of knowledge and responsibility would get lost in the sheer volume of words. Elusiveness disguised as openness.
‘Political Events Did Not Concern Me’
What is that famous phrase of St Augustine’s? ‘Hate the sin, but not the sinner’. Well, we can try. Although Speer may be a deeply troubling figure, he is also central to any enquiry into the psychology of the leadership of the Third Reich. Why is this? How to explain the fascination of Speer, the compulsion, against better instincts, to be drawn in to him, like moths to flame? At the Nuremberg Trials after the war he was virtually alone among the senior Nazis in condemning Hitler and accepting collective responsibility for what had been done, including the mass murder of the Jews, Roma and many others – even though he strenuously denied any direct knowledge of that. Whether this was a genuine position or an extremely manipulative strategy, it certainly helped to save him from execution. His release from Spandau in 1966, after twenty years in prison, coincided with a period when there was a significant increase in interest, both from historians and the wider public, in the Third Reich and the war years. It also occurred at the height of the 150 ‘NS Verbrechen trials’ (Nazi Crimes trials) held between 1958 and 1968.fn6 So he became a figure of fascination for many; an embodiment of living history – a senior Nazi on television screens in the 1970s. A person who had known Hitler more intimately than anyone else. And, most importantly, a senior Nazi who had publicly recanted, who had accepted that Hitlerism, at least by the end, had become insane. A Nazi who had, to a great extent, appeared to atone for his criminal responsibility. It seemed almost as if he had wanted to take the sins of Germany of those years onto his own shoulders, and try to expiate them.
But I think there are other important aspects to Speer which explain why so much has been written about him. The first is his undoubted intelligence. While not possessing the analytical skills or the capacity for scepticism to be a real intellectual, he was, nevertheless, capable of exceptional insight and was vastly more reflective than any of his colleagues in the leadership of the Third Reich. And certainly a world away from the gallery of Nazi monsters like Goering, Himmler and Goebbels that has been passed down to us since the war. However, this of course is double-edged; precisely because of his mental abilities, many people found it even more shocking, even more of an enigma, that someone so intelligent could become involved in such a barbaric enterprise. Indeed Georges Casalis, the minister in Spandau prison who was to play such an important part in Speer’s post-war life, confronts him directly about this after his first service in the prison:
I told him that I considered him more blameworthy than any of the others. First of all, because he was the most intelligent. But secondly, he was, to my mind, not only more responsible than the six other prisoners, but perhaps more than anyone in Germany, except for Hitler himself, for extending the war. Thanks to his efforts, I told him, this terrible war had lasted at least a year longer than it might have.
Casalis here is referring to Speer’s work as Reich minister for armaments and war production, which he was appointed to by Hitler after the death of Fritz Todt in a mysterious plane crash on 8 February 1942.
As minister for war production, Speer also proved himself to be a remarkable organiser, co-ordinating both weapons and construction programmes with brilliant management skills (skills which he’d already demonstrated as head of the Baustab Speer, his organisation for building and construction). In his capacity as Hitler’s chief architect, by autumn 1941 he was already directing tens of thousands of building workers across the whole of Europe. However, this position was minor in comparison to the responsibilities he inherited in his new position as Reich minister; when he took over this role he had responsibility for 2.6 million workers; by 1944 this had risen to 14 million (not including workers in occupied countries), making him one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany. As Casalis said, he has often been credited (if that is the right word) by historians with extending the length of the war by at least a year, because of his abilities to increase weapons and tank production dramatically, even under the most adverse circumstances.