Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, by Gitta Sereny. Albert Speer, as Adolf Hitler's architect, designed many of the gargantuan architectural monstrosities of the Third Reich and orchestrated some of the massive and spectacularly eerie Nazi rallies, such as the 1934 Nuremberg Party Congress, which as been dubbed *The Cathedral Of Light.* However Speer's greatest contribution to Nazi Germany came when Hitler appointed him Reichminister of Armaments and Munitions. Speer used his organizational genius to keep the Nazi war machine running full throttle long after it became obvious Germany could not win WWII. Sereny's biography examines Speer's accomplishments in these areas, but, of course, as in any account of a high-ranking Nazi, it is his relationship with Hitler and his knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of *The Final Solution to the Jewish Question* that becomes the dominant area of inquiry.Today, when one hears the term *revisionism* in association with Nazi Germany, one immediately thinks of those strange little lunatic fringe historians who insist through their poorly written pamphlets that the mass extermination of the Jews did not take place. But there is another form of *revisionism* as well. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Sereny's 800 page biography (first published in 1995) is that it corrects the commonly accepted revisionist error that Nazi Germany is solely to blame for the mass murder of the Jews. While Germany must perform an endless penance, the other guilty parties have never truly faced their responsibility for their crimes against humanity. This is one of the privileges of being on the winning side of war. So while it is true, of course, Germany must accept the overwhelming majority of guilt, it is also true other nations, including America, England and Switzerland, must also be held accountable—for they denied Hitler his *first solution* to the Jewish question. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, and continued to advocate for most of the 1930s, his preference was to deport all Jews from Nazi territory. But as Sereny notes:
Developments between the late 1930s and the beginning of the war in Russia led Hitler to the dreadful Final Solution of his problem. The first, recognized before the outbreak of war, was that, given the refusal of other nations to accept anything but minimal numbers of Jewish immigrants, an enforced total emigration of Jews from Greater Germany would be impossible. Alternative means would have to be found to get them out of Germany (p. 251-252).
And even in the actual murder of Jews, the first mass killings were not done by Germans, but by Lithuanians and Ukrainians. As Nazi Germay rolled through the Baltic countries:
They found that there were in these countries many wildly anti-Semitic locals thrilled to have license to kill Jews. While this in no way diminishes Hitler's responsibility, it now seems probable that the first wholesale killing, particularly of women and children, began in the Baltics and was welcomed but not originated by the Germans. It started the night of June 25 - 26, 1941 in Kovno, Lithuania's second city, four days after the Germans invaded (p. 254).
These Lithuanians:
With encouragement but without German cooperation launched the first post-occupation pogrom in Kovno on the night of June 25, in the course of which the killings began. By the end of July these men had proved themselves so effective that the German command organized them into what ended up being twenty police battalions. About 8400 men, all volunteers, were charged with the wholesale murder of the Lithuanian Jews, under the supervision but not necessarily active participation of the Eleventh Battalion of the German Reserve Police. These particular Lithuanian units were considered so outstanding that by the end of 1941, by which time all but a fraction of Lithuania's 265,000 Jews had been killed, they were posted to Belorussia and then Poland to continue their work. Thus, most significantly, it was the Lithuanians on their home ground who, one might say, pioneered the killing of women and children. In Kovno, German SS Gruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jecklin, taken aback by the ruthlessness of the Lithuanian units which, he reported, surpassed anything the Germans had so far envisaged, ordered films to be made of the Lithuanian actions so as to 'make clear it was the local population who spontaneously took the first steps against the Jews' (p. 255).
Unfortunately, however, Sereny's book fails in its essential form: as biography of the man Albert Speer. Sereny was a European journalist who had largely made her career by investigating and researching Nazi Germany. Though undeniably an outstanding and fair historian, she has one glaring weakness, and it is a weakness which, in the final analysis, ruins her biography of Speer. And it is the same weakness that was evident in her earlier and better *Nazi book* about Treblinka kommandant Franz Stangl, Into That Darkness: Sereny insists her subjects are lying if they do not confess to the sins which she judges them guilty. Thus, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth is reduced to Gitta Sereny's Battle With Truth, for in Albert Speer, Sereny repeatedly states as fact, without offering a shred of evidence, that Speer knew of *The Final Solution,* though Speer always maintained he was not aware until the Nurember War Crimes trial (indeed, there are eyewitnesses who have given sworn affidavits that Speer was not at the 6 October 1943 assembly of Nazi Party Ministers at which Heinrich Himmler revealed *The Final Solution* to the Nazi Party hierarchy. The purpose of this meeting:
Was part of Hitler's determination to make sure that his supporters were all implicated in the catastrophe he was bringing on Germany. Hitler had told his closest army advisors months before that the 'bridges behind us are burnt,' but he now charged Himmler with making the most faithful in the party privy to the guilty knowledge (p. 388).
At Nuremberg, Speer readily admitted his guilt that:
As Reichminister for Armaments and Munitions he bore responsibility for the decision to recruit by force, and for the use under brutal, inhumane and degrading conditions of foreign civilians and prisoners of war in the manufacture of armaments and Munitions, the construction of fortifications, and in active military operations (p. 303).
For this crime, Speer was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. Speer also accepted guilt in a general sense for the crime against the Jews, because, as he always maintained when asked about *The Final Solution,* he "should have known, he could have known, but he hadn't known."
He knew Jews were being transported from all over Europe, and he sensed "dreadful things were happening" (p. 706), but he always maintained, and with a high degree of support from the available historical records, he was never aware of the specifics of those "dreadful things."
This is not enough for Sereny, who harangued Speer throughout their four year collaboration for a confession to knowledge of the gas chambers. What is most revealing in this book is Sereny's surprise at one of her final letters from Speer in which he stated:
He had been terribly hurt by my article, he had expected me to have a different attitude from all 'those others' who had been trying for so long to 'catch him out and pass judgment' on him. The question of his 'knowledge' was absolutely central to his life, he said, and it was a great disappointment to find that after all the time we spent together, I had tried to accuse him of 'knowledge' without mentioning any of his counter-arguments (p. 709).
Sereny's surprise at Speer's reactions shows her to be as blind to her own peculiar *historian's vanity* as Speer was blind to the "dreadful things."
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