[All images and
captions added by this website] Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Photo:
Albert Speer shares a jest with a well-known writer
at Frankfurt Book Fair, 1979
Wartime
reports debunk Speer as the Good Nazi By Kate Connolly in
Berlin ALBERT Speer, Hitler's architect
and munitions minister, was fully aware of and
involved in the mass murder of Jews despite his
lifelong claims to the contrary, new documents have
shown. David
Irving comments: FINALLY
the conformist historians are catching up
with the real facts about their former
darling, Albert Speer. I first reported
in my Goebbels
biography (London, 1996) that Speer
was the initiator of the program to expel
Jews from their Berlin housing, so that he
could take over their 5,000 luxury
apartments for himself and his Nazi
cronies. His original, and undoctored,
office diary revealed that he had set up a
special department in his office as
Generalbauinspector for Berlin to
handle this step in 1941 - long before the
Wannsee
conference. Speer donated a
sanitized version of his diaries to the
German federal archives, omitting such
passages, and sent a set to me too; but I
was
not taken in! Unfortunately, thanks to
Deborah Lipstadt and her lying
friends who accused me of
Holocaust
denial, this Goebbels book never
saw the light of day in the USA as
St
Martins Press and Doubleday (and
subsequently Random House too) were
intimidated into dropping it in April
1996. I have a few quibbles
with this article. The breathless Miss
Willems conducted "further research"
showing "that on the day of Desch and
Sander's visit, 900 Polish Jews were
murdered in the gas chambers." If her source was the
infamous,pompously named Auschwitz
Kalendarium compiled by communist
writer Danuta Czech, the further
research is almost worthless, as the book
relies largely on train manifests and
timetables, without proper evidence as to
what happened to the passengers. I also doubt that the
document quoted actually refers to a "Prof
Speer special programme" to "expand the
Auschwitz camp so that it could serve as a
death camp," as this journalist
writes. I have read most of the
Himmler/
Speer correspondence in either
Himmler's files in the Library of Congress
or Speer's at the Bundesarchiv. A passage
like that would have, ahem, caught even my
"holocaust
denier" attention. I have today posted on this website images
of the only items in the Himmler files
that match the newspaper description, and
challenge readers to find the quotation
referred to. [Link] I have also posted also
his note in Gabelsberger shorthand,
scribbled on the obverse of Speer's
report, and I invite somebody to
transcribe it: it may yet surprise us
all. As I wrote in a letter
published in The Times ten years
ago, however, in my view Albert Speer
could count himself lucky not to have been
hanged at Nuremberg. He certainly deserved
the rope more than others like General
Alfred Jodl -- but my book
"Nuremberg,
the Last Battle" reveals the
horse-trading that went on behind the
scenes over names and sentences: Speer had
made himself the darling of the Americans
at Nuremberg by his submissiveness, and he
was spared, though not as much as he had
hoped. FOOTNOTE:
IT IS amusing to see that that shriveled
little toad Gita Sereny
(above, by Gary) is even now trying
to salvage Speer's reputation; we wonder
sometimes what went on between them, that
she should persist in this
necrophilia. | Speer's reputation in Germany as the "Good Nazi"
who stood by Hitler only because it enabled
him to fulfil his dreams to become an architect of
international acclaim, has been blackened by the
disclosures that he was fully
informed of the human destruction in
Auschwitz,
the largest of the Nazi's
murder factories.His insistence that he knew nothing about
Auschwitz or the crimes against Jews, meant that he
was the only leading Nazi to escape execution
following the Nuremberg trials. Instead he was
sentenced to 20 years in prison and after his
release in 1966, went on to become the best-selling
author of books such as Inside the Third
Reich and Spandau: Secret Diaries. He
died in 1981, spending his last years in
London. His insistence that, despite being the closest
Nazi to Hitler, he knew nothing of the Holocaust,
led to many Germans adopting a similar stance of
denial. The new disclosures have formed the backbone of
a documentary drama called Speer and Him,
the first part of which was broadcast this week,
the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World
War in Europe. It debunks the myth of the benign
family father who happened to fall in with the
wrong crowd. The film's director, Heinrich
Brelör, said: "[He created] a
market for people who said 'believe me, I didn't
know anything about it. Just look at the
Führer's friend, he didn't know about it
either'." The documents uncovered by the Berlin historian
Susanne Willems include a Third Reich report
from May 1943 that refers to a "Prof Speer special
programme" to expand the Auschwitz camp so that it
could serve as a death camp. The report, on which
Speer made copious handwritten notes in the margins
and over the text, refers to the fact that
Auschwitz's role as a work camp had "recently been
expanded to include the solution to the Jewish
question". The gassing of Jews began at the latest in the
spring of 1942. The report was compiled after
Speer, who as the head of armaments for the Third
Reich was responsible for overseeing the
distribution of building materials, dispatched two
of his advisers, Desch and Sander, to
investigate a number of concentration camps around
Germany and Poland, including Auschwitz. They
reported being shown "everything" at the camp by
its leader, Rudölf
Höss, right, who gave them a
"short report on the erection and purpose of the
whole concentration camp site". Further research by Miss Willems has shown that
on the day of Desch and Sander's visit, 900 Polish
Jews were murdered in the gas chambers. Following the visit and resulting report,
Speer
approved the shipment of a thousand tons of steel
to the camp to enable its expansion. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler,
wrote to Speer to thank him "very much". Brelör argues that Speer was more than just
a "cog in the works". He said: "He was not only
entangled in the works, he was the terror
itself." The drama also concentrates on Speer's plans to
expel thousands of Jews from their homes in Berlin
to free building space [SEE
PANEL AT RIGHT]. Gita Sereny, the London-based author of
the 1995 book Albert Speer: His Battle with
Truth, yesterday accused Brelör of
stripping Speer of "the honesty he always showed".
In an interview with Die Welt, she said:
"The Jewish question, for which he carried no
personal guilt, was for him a huge psychological
strain," she said. "We have to ask ourselves first and foremost
what did he feel about Jews? I'll tell you:
nothing. He was anything but an active hater of the
Jews. They were irrelevant to him." She added that Speer had had "no time" to
concern himself with the workings of the Holocaust
machine. "Speer had no time, he had an unbelievable
amount to do, what one would nowadays call a
workaholic. The most important thing for him was
Hitler -- Hitler filled and fulfilled his
life." I -
In Die Welt, Berlin, Historian Götz Aly
deals a blow to the reputation of Albert Speer,
and admits Mr Irving's role in exposing him:
Warum
es heute nichts mehr kostet, die Lügen
über Hitlers liebsten Architekten
auffliegen zu lassen
-
Flashback: David Irving: Table
Talk with Albert Speer, October 10,
1979
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