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Posted 10/29/97
In the late summer of 1946, Henry King, a 27-year-old member of the American team prosecuting war crimes at Nuremberg, first encountered Albert Speer. Speer, along with other leaders of the Nazi regime who had not been killed or committed suicide, was on trial for his actions during World War II.
Since arriving in Nuremberg six months earlier, King had interviewed many of the other major defendants in the trial. He immediately sensed there was something unusual about Speer. "He was a different caliber from the others," King recalls. "He came from an upper class background and was very intelligent. But the thing that really struck me from our interviews was how he was able to manipulate Hitler. I soon saw that he knew Hitler better than any of the other (defendants)."
That first interview formed the basis for a relationship that was to last through the trials and continue through two decades of Speer's imprisonment and until his death in 1981. King -- now a professor at Case Western Reserve University's School of Law and United States director of the school's Canada-USA Law Institute -- recounts their relationship and his impressions of Speer in his recently published memoir The Two Worlds of Albert Speer: Reflections of a Nuremberg Prosecutor.
The book's title, King explains, is meant to reflect the successive changes in Speer's psyche from his first encounter with Hitler until the end of the war, when he saw Hitler for what he was.
In the beginning, Speer's overwhelming ambition, combined with his blind allegiance to Hitler, led him to a top position in the most monstrous regime the world had ever seen. In this phase he was a participant in the largest slaving operation in human history. King describes this phase of Speer's life as the "eminent specialist," wherein Speer's only concern was moving up in Hitler's esteem so as to gain more power.
As the war progressed, however, Speer saw Hitler ordering the needless destruction of industrial facilities in the countries Germany occupied and in Germany itself, and blaming the German people for losing the war. In this second phase, the "questioning spirit," Speer experienced a spiritual awakening and began questioning -- and sometimes standing up to -- Hitler, in order to prevent further destruction and loss of life.
Apart from his background, the main thing which set Speer apart from his fellow defendants was his willingness to take responsibility for his actions during World War II.
An architect by training, Speer had met Hitler during the latter's rise to power in the early 1930s and had become a close confidant. He had, under Hitler's direction, drawn up grand plans for the redesign of Berlin to be carried out after the expected German victory in the war.
Hitler appointed him minister for armaments and war production in February 1942, and under Speer's leadership, the productivity of the German war machine increased vastly. But so did the use of slave labor taken from captive nations. Many of these people died from starvation, brutality, and overwork.
Despite the strenuous objections of his lawyer, Speer readily acknowledged his responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. "I remember clearly in his statements to the court Speer saying that Hitler was no longer there to blame, and that he would take responsibility for his own actions," King says. While many of the other defendants received the death penalty, Speer's sentence was 20 years in prison.
King was prohibited from talking to Speer while the latter was incarcerated in Berlin's notorious Spandau prison. In 1966, shortly before his release, King wrote an article about Speer for a German magazine. The two met again in February 1967.
"At that point he indicated he would cooperate if I wanted to write about him, but I just didn't have the time," King recalls. But he did continue corresponding with and interviewing Speer in hopes of eventually writing the book. The last encounter took place in July 1981, a few weeks before Speer died.
"We had long conversations about life in the Third Reich and about Hitler," King remembers. "He told me that Hitler was a mesmerizer. The problem with a mesmerizer, of course, is that they take your will away, and Speer thought that's what happened to the German people."
Speer himself was a source of endless fascination for King, in part because he saw Speer as "a window into the soul of Hitler." In addition, Speer's brilliance and instinctive grasp of human nature enabled him to manipulate and stand up to Hitler in ways no one else could.
For example, King says, Hitler's deputy Martin Bormann had prepared a plan for destroying all industry in France and the Low Countries as the Germans prepared to evacuate them. Speer got wind of the plan and realized the only way to prevent it was to appeal to Hitler's vanity. "He (Speer) went to Hitler and said, 'We will be coming back (to the occupied countries). You told us so yourself. And when we do, we will need those factories.' Hitler agreed and rescinded the order."
Later, when it became clear that Germany had lost the war, Hitler ordered the destruction of all remaining factories in Germany. Speer personally visited as many sites as he could and countermanded the order. When he told Hitler what he had done, Hitler said, "If you were not my architect I would take the appropriate action" and have him executed.
King believes the lesson of Speer's life lies in the effects of ambition. "Too much ambition can lead to a lack of concern for the effects of one's actions on one's fellow humans," King says. "Speer's ambition was vertical and laser-like. He closed his eyes to the world around him, and the result was terrible."
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