September 10, 1981 NEW SOLIDARITY Page 7

Albert Speer―Nazi Mass Murderer

by Molly Kronberg

Albert Speer with Adolf Hitler in Paris: no apologies.

Last week in London there died one of the most successful villains of the 20th century: Albert Speer, the man who ran Hitler's World War II slave labor-based economy. Speer's villainy brought him to the dock at Nuremberg in 1945, where he was tried for Crimes against Humanity and sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison as a war criminal. His "success" was to be found in his post-imprisonment career, from 1966 through 1981, in inventing a reputation as "the only moral Nazi," to paraphrase his New York Times obituary Sept. 2.

After his release from prison, Albert Speer became a millionaire by publishing one after another a series of fraudulent "memoirs" of the Nazi period: Inside the Third Reich; Spandau: The Secret Diaries; and the just-

released Infiltrations. In each and every one, Speer repeated that he had "accepted his guilt" and was atoning therefor; that he now realized–through the time afforded him for reflection during his prison years–that he had "played Faust to Hitler's Mephistopheles. . . . He [Hitler] seemed no less engaging than Goethe's"; and that he personally had taken no part in the vast depopulation of Europe, the Holocaust which murdered many millions of Jews, Slavs, and others in the six short years of World War II.

Miscarriage of Justice

Every word Speer uttered was a lie. As the Nuremberg war tribunal opened the trials in 1945, the Soviet Union demanded the death penalty for Albert Speer. It should have been carried out. Speer was responsible for the hideous slave labor structure the Nazi war effort reared over all of occupied Europe. Through that machine passed millions of Jews, Frenchmen, Scandinavians, almost countless numbers of Slavs―and Germans. Inside Speer's machine millions died.

What saved Speer at Nuremberg was the interest Anglo-American intelli-gence took in this well-educated, well-spoken young man, who told the court with seeming candor, "If Adolf Hitler ever had a friend, I was that friend," and "Whether I knew or did not know, is totally unimportant. . . . No apologies are possible." Speer would be very useful, these intelligence circles thought, on "their team." And so he was.

Speer's subordinates, like the infamous Fritz Sauckel, were hanged for war criminals at the conclusion of the trial. They had not the advantage of their superior―the man who issued their orders―of being such a presentable spokesman for fascist energy and population policy.

Speer's Second Career

Almost upon his release from Spandau in1966, Speer's star began to rise in Anglo-American political operations. Over the past decade Speer became entirely respectable. In 1977, when Jimmy Carter announced his policy of destroying nuclear energy and substituting a synthetic fuels program modeled on Nazi Germany's (a program which could be carried out only with a slave-labor economy underlying it) Speer commented favorably; Carter's policy somewhat resembled his, and Hitler's, he said, except that Carter was doing too little too late. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe all ecstatically reported the "expert's" endorsement.

On Sept. 1, 1977, the fortieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, Albert Speer wrote a column for the Op Ed page of the New York Times. In this he warned of the dangers of "uncontrolled technology, technology divorced from morality," as the great disease of the West which (by the way) Carter's energy policy would set out to solve. He also recalled Hitler's evaluation of the collapse of Western civilization, and remarked that, when all's said and done, "Hitler was not wrong."

You could have scanned the letters to the editor of the New York Times, but not a soul protested that a convicted war criminal was allowed to write in the pages of the New York Times that "Hitler was not wrong."

Infiltrations

In 1979 ABC-TV announced that Albert Speer had been retained as a consultant to the network in its mini-series Inside the Third Reich. The liar's lies were to be broadcast on American TV as the "truth" about the Second World War.

At the time of his death Speer was preparing for British television a documentary, another Anglo-American forum for his lies. Two months ago, the American publishing company Macmillan released his book Infiltrations, which is a very filthy lie. In that book Speer "explains" that his war machine, his war industry, was not really predicated on slave labor and was not conceived as the means of depopulating Europe. That, Speer says, was Heinrich Himmler's plan, not his. Infiltrations portrays an entirely fictitious story of the "greatest battle of World War II―that between Speer and Himmler"!

When you read his books, you will read lines like those in which he describes a visit to a slave-labor-manned mine and says, "I should have seen in that laborers face that he was marked for death―but I did not." In your mind's eye you see once again the calm, characterless face of the 40-year-old Speer at Nuremberg: "Yes, I freely admit my guilt. Perhaps as one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich I should have done something. Well, but let me live so that I may modernize fascism, so to speak, give it a new face, and promote zero-growth, destruction of nuclear energy, destruction of technology."

The obituaries that have appeared since Speer's death Sept. 1 have been terrifying in their enthusiasm. Particularly the New York Times, which printed Paul Montgomery's obituary of Speer: "Mr. Speer was the only Nazi

leader at Nuremberg to admit his guilt. There were those who thought he spent the rest of his life trying to expiate the horrors of the concentration camps and slave-labor factories."

When Americans face, as we do now, grave crises of moral and political life, like the danger that our government may lead us into World War III or a series of genocidal "little wars" across the world, it is imperative to get our sense of morality in history straight. Albert Speer oversaw mass murder. He should have hanged at Nuremberg.