Law and the Beautiful Soul by Norrie Alan;

Author:Norrie, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

The two Speers of Gitta Sereny

In her book on Albert Speer, Gitta Sereny sought to understand the ‘origin of Hitler’s evil’ and ‘Speer’s realisation of – and participation in – it’. Part of Hitler’s genius was to corrupt others, and corruption is insidious, so that ‘Speer, in the course of his growing relationship with Hitler, inevitably became – although for a long time unwittingly – a part of it’ (Sereny, 1995, p 9). This is how Sereny describes Speer at the beginning of her book:

Speer, I was already convinced, had never killed, stolen, personally benefited from the misery of others or betrayed a friend. And yet, what I felt neither the Nuremberg trial nor his books had really told us was how a man of such quality could become not immoral, not amoral but, somehow infinitely worse, morally extinguished. (Ibid, p 10)

If he became ‘morally extinguished’, then his ‘struggle with the truth’ (the title of Sereny’s book), must have been a struggle to recover that which had been lost. At the very end, Sereny writes as follows:

I came to understand and value Speer’s battle with himself and saw in it the reemergence of the intrinsic morality he manifested as a boy and youth. It seemed to me it was some kind of victory that this man – just this man – weighed down by intolerable and unmanageable guilt ... tried to become a different man. (Ibid, p 720, emphasis added)

Sereny summarises the process from moral extinction to awareness. She details Speer’s growing recognition of ‘Hitler’s madness’ through two formative war time experiences. The first was at Posen, where in a speech in October 1943 Himmler directly confronted all the top Nazis with what had been done to the Jews. The second concerned his own personal visit in December 1943 to the ‘Dora’ project, the underground rocket factories built with slave labour, where Speer was again directly confronted with what was happening. After the war, Speer was subject to the ‘revelations of Nuremberg’ and was confronted ‘with the reactions of the civilised world’. He came to realise the ‘horror of what had been done’ and to experience ‘feelings of personal guilt’ which were illuminated by, most importantly, a pastor at Spandau, Casalis, and his daughter, Hilde. In the context of the solitude of a 20-year sentence at Spandau, Speer experienced a ‘continuing and tormenting awareness of guilt’ and ‘out of all this, there came to be another Speer’. This is Sereny’s summary (with a crucial part of one sentence missed out) of the ‘other’ Speer, a man who sought with all seriousness to come to terms with his past:

In this Speer, obsessed with a history he understood perhaps like no other man, I found a great deal to like over the four years I knew him. This, I feel, had become the real Speer ... This was a very serious man who knew more about that bane of our century, Hitler, than anyone else. This was an erudite and solitary man

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