And the power coming out of the wall three feet to my left, and travelling through the socket, through the copper of the plug, along a white cable and into the laptop with which I’m forming these curious patterns on a screen. Attempting to make sense of processes that I still don’t completely understand. The pathways in the brain that power the nerve endings that make my fingers move across these keys. As mystical to me as the transnational journeys of Chinese coal or American gas to the Liverpool docks, by rail and lorry to the power stations, by cables to the substation down the valley, and then the final journey here, to the cottage by the water. The invisible faces of all the human beings involved, all those I will never meet, and who, in all probability, will never read these words. The power of the hand. The power of the mind. All that we cannot yet connect.
PART FIVE
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Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders
12
The Architect on Trial
Albert Speer in his cell at Spandau. For twenty years. Seven thousand, three hundred and five days (including the five leap years). The cell 3 metres long by 2.7 metres wide. Working in the garden behind the prison walls. But also the place where he became free. Where he started his ‘Walk Around the World’. I return to him, in this situation, again and again and again. As if there’s a truth here, something tantalisingly at the edge of my reach, which is always pulling me back, saying ‘No, you haven’t seen it yet – keep looking, look harder’. To do this, I know we need to go beyond Speer’s public persona. Or maybe not beyond, maybe go between the lines of the words he so carefully spun, and then we might be able to see, or feel, or experience a deeper meaning. (As I’m writing this, outside my house, a tiny grey spider has just lowered itself rapidly onto the screen of my laptop, like a paratrooper landing; but already the thread he arrived on has become invisible.)
That phrase comes back to me – ‘like the survivors of a disaster’. The seven Nazi leaders who were not executed after Nuremberg, stumbling around, not really understanding why they were still alive. Yet Speer was isolated from his former colleagues, even as the trial was taking place, and this isolation only increased in Spandau. But, in his aloneness, something began to grow: an attempt to look at the truth, an attempt to deal with his own responsibility for the catastrophe that had been unleashed. (The spider now threads his way towards me, from the top corner of my screen, spinning his way relentlessly towards my face. I put a finger through the invisible thread behind him and lift him back onto the table.)
Speer was alone among the survivors – partly because he was the only one of them who had fully accepted collective responsibility at Nuremberg for what had happened under Nazism – as he repeatedly put it: ‘for being part of a government that committed such crimes’. This was something of an irony given that he was the least ideologically committed of all of the defendants. It could have been a high-risk defence strategy, but his acceptance of responsibility, and dignified behaviour at the trial (in contrast to many of his codefendants), saved him from the death sentence that most had expected at the opening of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Despite the closeness of his personal relationship with Hitler, throughout the trial he managed to separate himself (in the eyes of the judges) from his fellow Nazis, with their strain of thuggish fascism and crude antisemitism – coming across as the thoughtful, reflective architect he’d been at the outset of his career. This strategy, as well as saving his life, created his isolation, for his position gave him an air of moral superiority which deeply angered his fellow defendants, several of whom considered him a traitor. Many of them, unlike Speer, did not accept the legitimacy of the court; indeed Goering had spoken contemptuously of ‘victors’ justice’. But Speer’s polite demeanour of respect towards the tribunal, and penitence for the evils committed in the years of Nazism, could not have been more useful from the perspective of the authorities – who were trying to use the trial as a tool of re-education for the German people after the war. To have a top-ranking Nazi leader, at one stage the second-most powerful man in the Reich, accepting the legitimacy of the court and expressing remorse for what had happened, was invaluable for the organisers of the Nuremberg process.
However, it was far from sure that Speer’s defence would work; it was a high-wire act. It centred on him admitting responsibility – as a senior member of the Nazi government – without ever admitting guilt (because guilt implied knowledge of atrocities, which Speer always vehemently denied). Hence Speer, like all his codefendants at the opening of the trial, pleaded ‘not guilty’ to all the indictments. But he was completely frank about accepting responsibility, as he reflected later in life, interviewed in English for a BBC documentaryfn1:
I stated … that I am responsible for all those things, for all the slave labour – I didn’t avoid telling clearly to the judges what I did. And even I felt responsible when it were [sic] orders of Hitler. Others of the accused they always were claiming it were orders from Hitler. I didn’t do that.
Indeed his definition of ‘responsibility’ seemed to go even further than many would have expected:
There was another question which was occupying my mind very much – this was how much of a responsibility I have to carry from all those things which I didn’t know … I also am responsible for everything which happened, and even if I didn’t know it, in the time when I was a leading man of the government.
This, at first sight, appeared to be a highly principled position, a clear acceptance of responsibility, and yet (as so often with Speer) things are not quite as they appear. As Reich minister for armaments and war production he had had ultimate authority over the requisitioning of millions of workers for the factories building tanks, weapons and munitions (14 million by 1944). Many of these, an increasing number as the war situation deteriorated, were ‘forced’ labour from occupied countries (often a euphemism for slave labour), where people worked in appalling conditions, and life expectancy was often only a matter of weeks or months. Speer had also authorised the use of concentration-camp inmates and prisoners of war as forced labourers, which was against the Geneva Convention.
So, faced with this extremely serious charge sheet, how would Speer now approach the question of his ‘complete responsibility’? With breathtaking sleight of hand, which a master magician would have been proud of, he transferred most of the responsibility for the policy of recruitment of forced labour, and its dubious legality, onto his far less powerful deputy, Fritz Sauckel, who had been plenipotentiary for labour deployment from 1942 onwards. And, remarkably, the judges seemed to accept this defence. Even the American prosecuting counsel, Robert Jackson, appeared to have swallowed Speer’s line, making a distinction between Sauckel – who he called ‘the greatest and cruellest slaver since the Pharaohs of Egypt, [who had driven] foreign peoples into the land of bondage on a scale unknown even in the ancient days of tyranny in the kingdom of the Nile’ – and Speer, who had simply ‘joined in planning and executing the programme to dragoon prisoners of war and foreign workers into German war industries’. The distinction was not merely a matter of the rhetoric of legal argument, however – for the defendants it was a question of life or death. At the end of the trial, Sauckel was given the death penalty, Speer twenty years’ imprisonment. His strategy had worked; he was still alive.