WITH Speer 16 years dead this year, there does not seem to be a great deal of point in fighting over his corpse or raking over ashes which ceased to smoulder long ago. The present weight of opinion is that he was lucky to escape a death sentence at the Nuremberg Trials immediately after the second World War - a view already stated authoritatively by the late Airey Neave, who wrote as an official observer at these trials. Spoor, who was abler and brighter than most of the leading Nazis and could also think well on his feet, adopted a more in sorrow than in hatred approach which appears to have softened the Allied judges, while possibly incriminating others. He kept up this penitential front during his years of captivity in Spandau, and continued it after his release.
Speer cast himself in the role of the loyal subordinate and technocrat who simply took orders, carried them out with impersonal efficiency and sometimes reluctantly, and was never an ideologue nor a racist. In effect, he presented himself as a public servant first and a Nazi last. The facts appear to be otherwise; Speer had hitched himself on to Hitler's shooting star early in his career. He became his official architect, though as this book shows he had little talent in that field and his lack of taste seems almost to have rivalled his master's.
His record in organising slave labour to support the Reich's wartime industry was quite damnable in itself, while his famous organisational gifts almost certainly prolonged the war by as much as two years. This did not save Germany from ultimate defeat, and even contributed to its systematic devastation by Allied bombing when the war had obviously been lost and some sort of surrender terms, however abject, were essential to save further slaughter and destruction.As a man, Speer emerges precisely as you would expect - calculating, secretive, cold, a supple intriguer, obsequious to those above him and demanding with those below; the child of a loveless home who in turn was a distant parent to his own children. In spite of his show of public penitence, there is no indication that he suffered any genuine remorse, and he lacked even the sacrificial loyalty to Hitler which made Goebbels and others die in the Berlin bunker with their demonic leader. Speer took enormous pains, both in captivity and after his release, to propagate a favourable image of himself, but this book effectively strips away the self created mask.
The ethos of the Nuremberg trials has been argued over and over, and the legal and moral issues involved were clear from the start to a farsighted minority. With the revelations of Nazi mass murder, the gruesome discovery of the death and internment camps, the glaring evidence of German devastation in the East and of the sufferings of the various subjugated nations, a reckoning was due and the call for it was irresistible. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels had seen this coming and had killed themselves; so vengeance, or justice, had to fall on the remaining leaders and even on the lesser fry.
Nevertheless the legality of Nuremberg was always suspect. A fair trial, if that was ever possible and assuming that the surviving top Nazis deserved one anyway, could only have been valid if carried out by neutral courts and judges; but as it was, the victors sat in judgment on the defeated. Of the prosecutors the Russians, who had suffered the worst, were predictably the most virulent, while the French were probably the most moderate and humane, followed by the British. For the US, President Truman chose as chief counsel Robert H. Jackson, whose official brief was unclear and whose career seemingly never quite recovered from the massive strains and publicity involved.
Goering, as is well known, took poison rather than be an exhibit in what he regarded as a propaganda Just obeying orders: Albert Speer circus. Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl (the last unjustly, in the general view), Seyss Inquart, Rosenberg, Streicher, Frank, Sautel, all went to the gallows - the Allies had refused them a firing squad - while the "old fox" von Papen was acquitted and Scheer, Hess, Donitz etc. went to imprisonment in Spandau. Some of the actual hangings, carried out by US servicemen, were botched and a faulty springing trapdoor badly smashed the faces of several of the condemned men as they dropped through it.
MEANWHILE, the crimes of Stalin and his underlings still go unpunished, the bombings (incinerations, rather) of Hiroshima and Dresden have been relegated to history, and genocide of one kind or another continues to haunt our cotlective conscience and to mock the quest for a New World Order. Nuremberg, as David Irving says at the end of his well researched book, set no real precedent in international law: "A resolution presented in 1946 to the United Nations Organisation relating to the codification of the principles established at Nuremberg was referred to the organisation's International Law Committee, and buried without ceremony." Soon the era of the Cold War began, dividing the former Allies into two hostile camps, and the moral rhetoric and fanfare of the trials receded as Germany became a crucial pawn in the new power politics between East and West.