Many of those who have written about Speer believe, wrongly in my view, that he expected to be sentenced to death. Sereny, for instance, felt that after the verdicts were handed down, he was ‘almost disappointed – he’d brought himself to expect this [the death penalty] in a “euphoria of guilt”, as he called it, and when they said 20 years, and the others got death, it diminished him in his own eyes’.1 But this cannot be right, for two reasons. The first is that, with one or two exceptions, Speer was absolutely contemptuous of his fellow defendants, regarding most of them as ‘criminals’ and thugs – so to have been sentenced to the same fate as them he would have regarded as the final insult. But the second reason can be found in a revealing comment that Speer made three months into the trial. He was speaking to Dr Gustave Gilbert, an American psychologist and former military intelligence officer who had been appointed as the prison psychologist at the Nuremberg Tribunal, and had free access to the prisoners throughout the trial. In this capacity, he gained the trust of many of the former Nazi leaders, and Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary, published in 1947, contains some remarkable insights into the psychology of these men.
We learn from Gilbert that on 9 February 1946 he was with Speer in his cell reflecting on his architectural career, and friendship with Hitler. They were discussing the moment (in January 1945) when Speer knew that the war was lost, and told Hitler so. But his Führer said Germany would continue fighting anyway – this was the moment when Speer realised ‘he was bent on utter destruction of the German nation’. Then Gilbert did something very ingenious – he showed Speer his own photographs of ‘beautiful German countryside … Germany as it was before Hitler; and then by contrast some photographs of lines of German prisoners (destroyed manpower), the ruins of Munich (destroyed cities), a dynamited bridge (destroyed architecture), and murdered prisoners in Dachau … He grew more and more grim as he looked at the pictures.’ And this then provoked Speer into an uncharacteristically emotional outburst:
Some day I would just like to cut loose and give a good piece of my mind about the whole business without pulling any punches! I would just like to sit down and write one final blast about the whole damn Nazi mess and mention names and details and let the German people see once and for all what rotten corruption, hypocrisy, and madness the whole system was based on! I would spare nobody, including myself – we are all guilty. I ignored the bare truth too!
After this, we learn from Gilbert that he ‘asked Speer whether he wouldn’t care to write about all of this?’ And Speer’s reply reveals quite clearly that he expected to avoid the death penalty: ‘He said he would feel freer to do it after the trial was over.’
*
There were three days at Nuremberg which Speer found particularly devastating – the days when documentary film footage of the concentration camps and atrocities committed on the Eastern Front were shown to the court, and when Holocaust survivors gave testimony. The first of these was on 29 November 1945, when a film, Nazi Concentration Camps, was projected in the courtroom, showing graphic images which Allied military photographers and cameramen had taken at the end of the war, when the camps were liberated – including twisted bodies left all over the ground or hanging from barbed-wire fences, and diggers piling up corpses. Speer later described this as an absolute turning point for him. What had been abstract up to this point suddenly had form, generalised ‘victims’ became breathing people who had suffered barbarically because of the Nazi regime – the regime he had served so conscientiously. One such person was Samuel Rajzman, one of the very few survivors of Treblinka, who testified on 27 February 1946.3
He took the witness stand that afternoon, short, bespectacled, smartly dressed, looking exactly like the accountant he had been before the war. He spoke with measured, simple sentences, but what he said – describing the year he had spent in the Sonderkommando at Treblinka from August 1942 to August 1943 – silenced the courtroom:
At first my work was to load the clothes of the murdered persons on the trains. When I had been in the camp two days, my mother, my sister, and two brothers were brought to the camp from the town of Vinagrova. I had to watch them being led away to the gas chambers. Several days later, when I was loading clothes on the freight cars, my comrades found my wife’s documents and a photograph of my wife and child. That is all I have left of my family, only a photograph.
The Russian prosecutor, Smirnov, asked Rajzman at one point, ‘How long did a person live after he had arrived in the Treblinka camp?’
Rajzman: The whole process of undressing and the walk down to the gas chambers lasted, for the men eight to ten minutes, and for the women some fifteen minutes. The women took fifteen minutes because they had to have their hair shaved off before they went to the gas chambers.
Smirnov: Why was their hair cut off?
Rajzman: According to the idea of the masters, the hair was to be used in the manufacture of mattresses for German women.
At this point the president of the tribunal, Lord Justice Lawrence, intervened. Like many in the courtroom, he cannot take in what he is hearing. Even in the stark economy of the trial transcripts you can detect the astonishment in his voice as he asks the question:
Lawrence: Do you mean that there was only ten minutes between the time they were taken out of the trucks [sic] and the time they were put into the gas chambers?
Rajzman: As far as the men were concerned, I am sure it did not last longer than ten minutes.
Rajzman also described what he had witnessed at the ‘Lazarett’, the mockery of a ‘hospital’ (complete with Red Cross flag outside) – the place where those too young, or old, or ill, to walk to the gas chambers were shot. This killing ground was the fiefdom of Scharführer Menz:
They brought an aged woman with her daughter to the building. The latter was in the last stage of pregnancy. She was brought to the ‘Lazarett’, was put on a grass plot, and several Germans came to watch the delivery. This spectacle lasted two hours. When the child was born, Menz asked the grandmother – that is the mother of this woman – whom she preferred to see killed first. The grandmother begged to be killed. But, of course, they did the opposite; the newborn baby was killed first, then the child’s mother, and finally the grandmother.
Rajzman estimated that ‘an average of three transports of sixty cars each arrived every day’ during 1942, when the train transports were at their peak – ‘on an average, I believe they killed in Treblinka from ten to twelve thousand persons daily’. In a detail that must have made Speer shudder, Rajzman also revealed that some Jews, from the towns and villages closer to Treblinka, were brought there by truck, and the trucks were stamped ‘Spedition Speer’ (‘Transport Speer’).
On these days of the trial, at such moments of personal witness, Speer felt something shift within him:
When one hears of a thousand or a million people murdered it is out of scale, it’s unimaginable. But this … it was the first time I could visualise what happened, what was done. And yes, it made me feel personal guilt.
Perhaps he also understood for the first time something of the enormity of the barbarism which had been unleashed. That he had been living in a state of criminal ignorance for years. And that, for all his generalised talk of ‘responsibility’, he was only at the beginning of a process of tortuous reflection that would occupy him for the rest of his life.