ABSTRACT
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:
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:
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 account, Speer sought resolution with his guilt, but remained essentially solitary. He could not ultimately get there, but his effort in seeking to do so was what Sereny admired. In a newspaper interview, she states that ‘to me, there was one extraordinarily redeeming thing, that his sense of personal guilt was so deep’ and that through this guilt, he regained ‘some of his morality’ (The Guardian, September 1995). This is a compelling and sympathetic account of Speer, a man whom Sereny admits she ‘grew to like’ (Sereny, 1995, p 3).
