Speer: Nazi leader who repented

Press, 3 September 1981, Page 6

Speer: Nazi leader who repented

NZPA-Reuter London Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Industrial Production during World War Two, died in a London hospital yesterday. Speer, who was 76, suffered a stroke at a London hotel and died a few hours later. He was in London to take part in a. 8.8. C. TV programme on Nazi looting of art treasures during the war. Unlike other leading Nazis, Speer admitted his guilt of war crimes at the fourPower Allied Nuremberg tri- : bunal.in 1946. He built up Germany’s I huge war machine, spent 20 i years in Spandau Prison in : Berlin, and . later published i memoirs which became the I best known German account of the Nazi ora. .. i . -.A tall, .handsome man l trained to bean architect, he I 4

was Hitler's trusted friend until the Fuehrer’s suicide on April 30, 1945. Speer said in his memoirs, published in 1970, that he was unable to atone for his actions but preferred to regard them as errors in judgment. He was jailed for, among other things, using slave labour from Naziconquered countries. In May, 1971, he told an American magazine: “I do not believe there can be any atonement in this lifetimes for sins of such huge dimensions/.’ In the magazine interview’, he claimed ignorance of German concentration camps, he said he was too busy building up the Nazi war machine to know about them. "I would have thought only., in terms of efficiency anß the waf effort," he.said. “The killing of' Jews would have

seemed to me a waste. A crime perhaps if I had though about it abstractly — but first and foremost a waste.” At the Nuremberg trial, Speer was shown a photograph of a Jewish man with his wife and chidren being led to a gas chamber. “I could not rid my mind of that photograph,” he said 25 years later. “I would see it in my cell at night. I see it still. It has made a desert of my life.” The credibility of. Speer, who turned against Hitler only in the final days of the war, has been doubted by some historians. As Armaments Minister from 1942, he trebled German aircraft production and controlled more than 80 per cent of the country’s war industry. , was one of. the few men on sufch<good terms with. £

Hitler that he was able to tell his chief in 1944 that he thought Germany was losing the war. Speer wrote in his memoirs that before Hitler

committed suicide, he had planned to kill the Nazi leader with poison gas injected into the ventilation shafts of the massive concrete bunker where Hitler had established his final Berlin headquarters. By chance, the ventilators were closed before he tried to implement th& plan. ’ : Speer had no recriminations about the Nuremberg judgement: “It was not a judgment against the German people. Its advantage was precisely that it made a distinction between the German people and those Nazi leaders responsible individually.” His ability to survive 20 years in prison without harm to his physical or mental health he attributed to the fact .that he accepted the Nuremberg verdict as. just. For 20 years at Spandau.

the prisoner wore “number five” in large letters painted on the back of his jacket. While in prison he returned to his first love, architecture, and read dozens of books on city planning. The son and grandson of architects, Albert Speer was born on March 19, 1905, at Mannheim. After studying at Karlsruhe, Munich, and Berlin, he began his career as an architect. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and became its chief architectural planner. He built Hitler’s Berlin - Chancellery as well as the huge stadium in Nuremberg where Hitler held his mammoth military rallies. For a week after Hitler’s death, Speer served as. Economics Minister in the Government of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. who surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces.