*
On 20 September 1954 he begins a project, obsessive yet inspired, which was to occupy him right up until his release twelve years later – his ‘Walk Around the World’. From his diary of 30 September 1954 we learn:
I have begun, along with the garden work, to walk the distance from Berlin to Heidelberg – 626 kilometres! For that purpose I have marked out a circular course in the garden. Lacking a tape measure, I measured my shoe, paced off the distance step by step, and multiplied by the number of paces. Placing one foot ahead of the other 870 times, thirty-one centimetres a step, yields 270 metres for a round.fn3
In this way – by doing around twenty-six circuits of the garden each time – he aims to complete seven kilometres a day, and so forty-nine kilometres a week. By 19 March 1955 he has completed this journey to Heidelberg (delayed somewhat by a swollen knee, he’s taken considerably longer than the planned eighty-nine days to do this walk), and now he decides he’s going to continue on, first to Munich, then down to Rome, on to Sicily, and from here further eastwards, towards Asia. Over the months and years, by scouring atlases and maps and reading the most detailed accounts of travel books and guides, this walk in his mind becomes a wonderfully rich experience. He is helped on his way by his friend and former colleague Rudolf Wolters, who, through their correspondence, lives the walk with him, sometimes telling him of places he knows. When Speer reaches Siberia, Wolters writes to him: ‘I am well acquainted with the Altai. It is the huge mountain chain near Novosibirsk where I spent a year. A famous mountain excursion is the Bjelucha,fn4 the goal of all Siberian climbers, as is the Elbrus in the Caucasus. Will you have time to climb them?’
For a man often spoken of as lacking in imagination, this becomes an astonishingly vivid experience. Take this, for example, from August 1955:
Shimmering heat waves over the puszta as I covered the stretch from Budapest to Belgrade, a few kilometres away from the Danube. The roads were sandy, there was seldom even a single shade tree, and the flies were a plague. From the nearby Havel I heard the sound of tugs, which I transformed into ships on the Danube. I plucked a stem of lemon balm from our herb bed and crushed the leaves between my fingers. The strong odour intensified the illusion of foreign places, tramping the roads, and freedom.
A few years later, Speer seems almost reconciled to the fact that any dreams of early release are now fading. He has achieved a kind of peace at Spandau, his ‘Trappist existence’, where, by the early 1960s, he’s only speaking for five minutes a day or so. On 7 May 1960 he watches five hawks practising their diving in the garden:
Finally a young pigeon came and perched on the lowest branch of the walnut tree, under which Hess and I had already been sitting for an hour in silence. Into the stillness Hess said, with almost a touch of embarrassment, ‘Like paradise.’ … Perhaps this was what life was like in the monasteries of the Middle Ages? Isolation not only from people, but also from the bustle of the world. Sitting on the garden bench today, for a moment I saw myself as a monk, and the prison yard as a cloister garden. It seemed to me that my family alone still links me to the outside. Concern with everything else that makes up the world is more and more dropping away from me, and the idea of spending the rest of my days here is no longer frightening. On the contrary there is great peacefulness in the thought.
But the outside world cannot be kept out. In May 1960, Speer, like many others, is riveted by the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and his upcoming trial in Israel, and notes that the world’s attention is now focussed again on the crimes of the Third Reich. In this context, ‘the desire for release strikes me as almost absurd’. He again ponders how he and others could really have thought Hitler’s antisemitism was ‘a somewhat vulgar incidental, a hangover from his days in Vienna … moreover, the antisemitic slogans also seemed to me a tactical device for whipping up the instincts of the masses. I never thought them really important … Yet, hatred of the Jews was Hitler’s central conviction.’ He then considers the fact he became Hitler’s architect – that is ‘excusable’. He can even ‘justify’ serving as his armaments minister:
I can even conceive of a position from which a case could be made for the use of millions of prisoners of war and forced labourers in industry – even though I have never taken that position. But I have absolutely nothing to say when a name like Eichmann’s is mentioned. I shall never be able to get over having served a leading position in a regime whose true energies were devoted to an extermination programme.
By 24 February 1963, more than eight years after starting the Walk Around the World, Speer is almost at Alaska:
In the immediate vicinity of Bering Strait, still craggy, hilly country, endless view of treeless, rocky landscape, as rough as the storms that prevail in the region. Sometimes I see creeping past me one of those Arctic foxes whose habits I have recently looked into. But I have also encountered fur seals and the Kamchatka beaver known as kalan. Bering Strait is seventy-two kilometres wide and frozen until the middle of March. Ever since I heard this from Bray [a prison guard], who comes from Alaska, I raised my weekly stint from fifty to sixty kilometres, for if I arrive in time I might be able to cross Bering Strait. I would presumably be the first central European to reach America on foot.
There’s something of remarkable beauty in this. As an expression of the ability of the human mind to conjure light from darkness, it seems to be almost unparalleled. A Zen-like patience, the placing of one foot in front of another, whether in sun or in snow. And the ability to summon wild animals into your mind, and to see ice and crags and trees. An act of creativity of stunning scope. And to have the contemplative energy to do this over years and years and years … Is it wrong to feel a kind of admiration for the Albert Speer who walked in the garden, as he walked through his mind?
And then, an extraordinary detail, which demonstrates Speer’s degree of self-containment. He’s walking with Hess around the path. He tells him he’s almost reached Alaska. Hess looks baffled. Speer then reminds him of how, in September 1954, more than eight years before, on the day he started the Walk, Hess advised him to count the circuits using beans from the garden, transferring them from one pocket to the other:
‘Right now … we are in the middle of the seventy-eight thousand, five hundred and fourteenth round, and there in the mist we can see Bering Strait.’
Hess abruptly stopped. His face now took on a really concerned expression. ‘You mean to say you’ve kept that up all this time?’ he asked. ‘Including leap years, up to today exactly eight years, five months and ten days … Up to this point I have covered twenty-one thousand, two hundred and one kilometres.’
Hess is astonished, and then – in a comical example of the pot calling the kettle black – looks rather pained, and asks Speer: ‘Doesn’t all this worry you? You know, it really is a kind of mania.’ Yet his Walk Around the World was, in addition to being beneficial exercise, probably the single most important reason why Speer retained his sanity in these last twelve years of imprisonment.
*
This is Speer’s entry for 9 March 1963: