I doubt that Browne would see the parallels, but in the quasi-religious zeal of this language – seemingly expressing overwhelming faith in the ability of technology and productivity to solve everything, in the way technology is viewed as somehow separate from society, from human beings – I hear echoes of Speer’s detachment, his way of thinking.
The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper – writing immediately after the war, when he’d been given exceptional access to intelligence material in Berlin relating to Hitler and the Nazi leadershipfn9 – came to believe that ‘in a political sense, Speer is the real criminal of Nazi Germany, for he, more than any other, represented that fatal philosophy which … made havoc of Germany and nearly shipwrecked the world. His keen intelligence diagnosed the nature and observed the mutations of Nazi government and policy … he heard their outrageous orders and understood their fantastic ambitions; but he did nothing.’ He then goes on to say this, about Speer’s fatal decoupling of technocracy from political reality:
Speer was a technocrat and nourished a technocrat’s philosophy. To the technocrat … politics are irrelevant. To him the prosperity, the future of a people depends not upon the personalities who happen to hold political office, nor upon the institutions in which their relations are formalised … but upon the technical instruments whereby society is maintained, on the roads and the railways, the canals and the bridges, the services and factories wherein a nation invests its labour, and whence it draws its wealth. This is a convenient but ultimately fallacious philosophy.
Trevor-Roper’s assessment of Speer is confirmed later by Speer himself, describing how he felt able to separate his work life completely from all the wider aspects of Nazism. And how, driving in to his office in the centre of Berlin from his villa on Schwanenwerder, by the lake in Wannsee, he was able to focus entirely on the business that lay ahead that day, and not concern himself with anything beyond it.
Politics to me was noise and vulgarity. If I thought of it at all, it was only as an interruption to the quiet and concentration I sought … fanaticism of any kind simply had no place in it.
*
The most frightening aspect of Albert Speer is that he never really died. We are appalled by Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering, but – like children needing to be comforted by the deaths of the ‘baddies’ in films and books – we can see the images of their dead bodies, shudder and mutter ‘never again’. But Speer has never left us. We can see him everywhere today. He’s there in every micromanaging CEO, in every workaholic government minister, in every technocrat who turns away from the human consequences of their work, in everyone who decides not to see something that they know may cause moral discomfort. In the last months of the war, the Observer, presciently, wrote this:
Speer is, in a sense, more important for Germany today than Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels or the generals. They have all, in a way, become the mere auxiliaries of an organising genius who alone leads the massive fighting machine. He is very much the successful average man, well dressed, civil, uncorruptable, very middle class in his lifestyle, with a wife and six children. Much less than any of the other German leaders does he stand for anything particularly German, or particularly Nazi. He rather symbolises a type which is becoming increasingly important in all belligerent countries: the pure technician, to whom politics is of no importance … Therefore not actually a Nazi … pure technical and managerial ability, and it is this lack of psychological and spiritual ballast and the ease with which they handle the terrifying technical and organisational machinery of our age that make this type go so far nowadays … We may get rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but the Speers will be with us for ever.
PART TWO
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Silences of the Fathers
3
My Father and His Silence
The photograph is not more than an inch and a half square, and yet it expresses so much of the man I remember. So much contained in that downward look and gentle smile. It’s one of two images of my father which I keep with me. The picture was taken when we were on holiday in Germany in summer 1973, staying with friends just outside Bamberg. Strange to realise that he was then the same age that I am now. Such a comparison makes me feel uneasy somehow. Perhaps all comparisons with parents are like this.
There are a hundred things I could say about this second picture. But perhaps words are unnecessary. I return to my father’s gaze, and the sensation of him being there, at my shoulder, which I miss most, and which sometimes think I can still feel.
*
This picture I saw for the first time only recently. My mother was clearing out old boxes and came across one containing assorted remnants of Mark’s past. Among these was a carrier bag full of papers and photographs to do with his two years in the Royal Anglian Regiment. It was taken in Korea, where he was unfortunate enough to do his national service, including more than a year fighting in the Korean War, between 1951 and 1952 – the first war sanctioned by the newly-formed United Nations. Together with a few tiny black-and-white photographs of smudged hillsides and jeeps and clusters of comrades, there was a diagram showing drawings of ‘Mortar Shell Crater Analysis’ and ‘Typical Ricochet Markings’. And dusty maps, browned with the years, showing the curve of the River Imjin-Gang, and two lines marked in red pencil, presumably the front-line positions of the UN forces and the North Koreans. Amongst the close contours of the hills (Mansok-tong, Kawang-son, Simgok), circles in pencil, with arrows, possibly showing lookout positions or planned reconnaissance missions. There were also a couple of small notebooks, a soldier’s service and pay book, and a little army diary for 1952, blue leather, traces of Korean mud on the spine, which I’m holding in my hands today. It tells me that 9 February, in 1952, was a Saturday. I can see Mark has written, in his characteristic neat italics, ‘14.30 – conference Brigade HQ am’. Then there’s a note on another page, ‘Mess bill £3’ and ‘10.30 – A Coy C br B Patrol’. I scan each day, hoping for a trace of life lived, but find mainly jotted codes, impenetrable to my civilian eyes: ‘16.00 – All MMG lpt at CP’, ‘0500 – Coy IBW for “Swift”’, ‘1000 Pr 183 w OCD’. Occasionally there’s something comprehensible – on 5 February he’s written in pencil, ‘am. Take Sgt CLOUGH and Cpl PUGH to their WYOMING posns’; on 29 April, ‘leave 0900 Kansas recce’; and, among all the patrols, recces and briefings, on 13 July a rare invasion from another world – ‘12.30 – Tom’s birthday, booze’. It is almost impossible to see the war in these pages; you would need a specialist to decode what much of these abbreviations must have meant. Just once, on 12 May, the meaning is clear: ‘Flynn killed Sexton wounded’.
Korea was a particularly dirty war. In some respects it was the prototype for Vietnam, with carpet-bombing, the first widespread use of napalm and many civilian deaths. I try to imagine the hell of those months, and I fail. He was a first lieutenant with command responsibility for a platoon. Unimaginable – this boy just out of school, nineteen, twenty years old (though he looks even younger in this picture), responsible for twenty men in total, many of them older than him. I find a typed list of their names – O’Higgins, Roger, Wilson, Blewitt, Guyer, Kennedy, Brand, Corbett, Marshall, Barrett, Bunch, Collins, Emanuel, McBrien, Ormsby, Pickersgill, Roche, Ross, Hussey and Thomas. When soldiers in his platoon were killed it was his responsibility to write to their parents. My eyes pass over that list of names again, and wonder how many of them survived this war.