Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth by Gitta Sereny

Author:Gitta Sereny [Sereny, Gitta]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781509853267
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2017-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

Even in this dreadful speech, as in the others he delivered on this subject, Himmler carefully avoided describing the method of these murders–the words “gas chamber” never appeared–and the probability remains that all those who heard him, most of whom already knew about the shootings in Russia, thought that this continued to be the way the Jews were killed. The existence of the gas chambers, in which half of these millions died, and which the so-called revisionists have so busily denied ever since, was apparently unmentionable even for Himmler, Hitler’s master of death.

Himmler’s speeches revealing to the Reich’s leadership the genocide of the Jews are, of course, part of the historical record. No one who has studied the period can fail to have read them (parts even survive in recordings made at the time) and to realize that here, on Hitler’s orders, the Rubicon was crossed.

I had always believed that, given Speer’s presence in Posen that day, his presence at Himmler’s speech was inevitable. But I had specifically planned to avoid this necessarily disturbing subject, and the whole question of his denial of knowledge about the Jews, until the last few days of our first concentrated three weeks of conversations.

When he brought it up, the last morning of our second week together, it was, curiously enough, the first day when there was no sun and, with snow falling thickly and covering the window, the kitchen where we sat was strangely dark.

We were going to Munich the next day where a book entitled Albert Speer, Controversies about a German Phenomenon, edited by Adelbert Reif, with contributions from writers around the globe, was to be launched.

Had I heard of the Gauleiter conference in Posen? he asked. I said, yes, I had, but why not talk about this after our return from Munich?

He shook his head. I reached out to turn on a small lamp on the table, but he stopped me. “Leave it for a bit,” he said, and added that he wanted to tell me about something before we went to Munich; it was a controversial subject and as there was something about it in the Controversies book, he thought it was likely that it would be brought up by journalists at the launch.

Six and a half years earlier, in October 1971, a Harvard historian, Professor Erich Goldhagen, had launched a bitter attack on Speer in the American magazine Midstream. In an article titled “Albert Speer, Himmler and the Secret of the Final Solution”, Goldhagen had claimed that Himmler’s direct address to Speer in his Posen speech was clear proof that he was present when it was given, thus giving the lie to his continuing claim of ignorance about the murder of Europe’s Jews. Goldhagen said it established his full complicity and the hypocrisy of his admission of generalized rather than specific guilt at Nuremberg and ever since. In the notes section at the end of his article, Goldhagen added what purported to be an additional sentence from Himmler. “Speer,” he quoted Himmler as saying, “is not one of the pro-Jewish obstructionists of the Final Solution.

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