Spandau : the secret diaries

551 Pages·2010·19.27 MB·English

by  Speer

ALBERT
SPEER
author of
INSIDE THE THIRD REICH
Albert Speer
ALBERT SPEER'S SECRET PRISON DIARIES
For twenty years Speer secretly wrote his memoirs in a minuscule
scrawl on tobacco wrappings, pages of calendars, and toilet paper.
Under constant peril of cell searches, he concealed his notes in the sole
lining of a shoe and in the bandage wrapped around his leg to relieve
his phlebitis, and managed to persuade sympathetic guards to
smuggle them to the outside world.
After being convicted in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, the
prisoners were not allowed to have writing paper. However, they were
allowed to have toilet paper. So, on thousands of squares of toilet
paper, Albert Speer wrote his diary in tiny letters.
Albert Speer was a brilliant writer and the world should be forever
grateful to him for leaving us this work, that addresses and attempts
to answer questions the world will always be asking, including:
1. How was Adolph Hitler, an obvious madman, totally insane, able to
attain and keep such great power?
2. Why did the German people not recognize what was happening and
do something about it long before the destructive end?
3. Most importantly: Can this happen again? Could and will another
Hitler arise, perhaps not in Germany again? Perhaps in the United
States of America? What assurance do we have that a lunatic
madman could nIoSt BenNte r t4h-e8 W7h1i8te7 H-8ou7se9 -a1nd do much worse than
Hy Hitler ever did?
978-4-87187-879-1 ISBN T76-4- A71S7 - 1
5349 5
ISHI PRESS
INTERNATIONAL
SPANDAU
The Secret Diaries
ALBERT SPEER
Translated from the German by
RICHARD and CLARA WINSTON
ISHI PRESS
INTERNATIONAL
Spandau
The Secret Diaries
by Albert Speer
First Published in German in 1975 as
Spandauer Tagebiicher
by Verlag-Ullstein GmbH in Frankfurt/Main - Berlin
This Printing in February, 2010
by Ishi Press in New York and Tokyo
with a new foreword by Sam Sloan
Copyright © 1975 by Albert Speer
Copyright © 2010 by Sam Sloan
All rights reserved according to International Law. No part of this
book may be reproduced by for public or private use without the
written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 4-87187-879-1
978 4 87187 879-1
- - -
Ishi Press International
1664 Davidson Avenue, Suite IB
Bronx NY 10453-7877
1-917-507-7226
Printed in the United States of America

Foreword by Sam Sloan
Spandau
The Secret Diaries
by Albert Speer
This is one of the most amazing books ever written. After being
convicted in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, the prisoners were
not allowed to have writing paper, were not allowed to write their
memoirs and were allowed only limited visits from their relatives.
However, they were allowed to have toilet paper.
So, on thousands of squares of toilet paper, Albert Speer wrote his
diary in tiny letters so small that they could hardly be seen, which he
was then able to pass to his relatives when they visited him.
By the time Speer was released on September 30, 1966, twenty
years later, there were more than twenty thousand pages of secret
diaries just waiting to be edited and published, but it took him
another ten years before he could bear to look at them.
Albert Speer was a brilliant writer and the world should be forever
grateful to him for leaving us this work, that addresses and attempts
to answer questions the world will always be asking, including:
1. How was Adolph Hitler, an obvious madman, totally insane, able
to attain and keep such great power?
2. Why did the German people not recognize what was happening
and do something about it long before the destructive end?
3. Most importantly: Can this happen again? Could and will another
Hitler arise, perhaps not in Germany again? Perhaps in the United
States of America? What assurance do we have that a lunatic
madman could not enter the White House and do much worse than
Hitler ever did?
As to the proof that Hitler really was crazy, Speer provides
Foreword by Sam Sloan
numerous examples. After the Battle of the Bulge, the last great
German counter-attack, which ended in the defeat of Germany, it
was clear that the war was lost. A sensible leader would have dug in
and attempted to negotiate a truce or a surrender under favorable
terms. This is much the way that the First World War had ended.
Instead of doing that, Hitler ordered the Sixth SS Tank Division
that had just been defeated in the Battle of the Bulge to start an
attack on the Balkans to the South East by advancing through
Hungary. Hitler always wanted to attack. The idea of taking
defensive positions was completely foreign to him. This is not to
mention the fact that the army that he wanted to launch this attack
no longer existed.
As to the question of why the German people did not do something
about Hitler, once they realized what was happening, Speer laments
about the Kennedy Assassination:
“I feel that the Kennedy assassination is not just
an American tragedy, but a tragedy for the world. And I
could not help thinking that here only one confused
loner was at work, so it seems; he conceived the plan
and the assassination was successful. But the attempts
on Hitler's life - how many undertakings there were,
planned with the precision of a General Staff operation
by circumspect cool-headed people, year after year, and
never did they succeed, that is the real tragedy.”
Albert Speer was unlike any other defendant, in that whereas the
others all said that they were innocent of the charges, he admitted
his guilt. As to why he did this, Speer explains:
“I assumed responsibility for all the orders of Hitler that
I had carried out. I took the position that in every
government orders must remain orders for the
subordinate organs of the government, but the leadership
on all levels must examine and weigh the orders it
received and is consequently co-responsible for them,
even if the orders have been carried out under duress.
Foreword by Sam Sloan
“What mattered more to me was to assert my collective
responsibility for all the measures of Hitler, not
excluding the crimes, which were undertaken or
committed in the period from 1942 on wherever and by
whomever.”
It is a common and seriously mistaken belief that the Nuremberg
War Crimes Trials were concerned with the Holocaust and the
exterminations of millions of Jews and others deemed undesirable.
This was not the case. None of the defendants at Nuremberg were
charged with having to do with the Death Camps. The real criminals,
such as Bormann, Himmler and Dr. Josef Mengele, may have
escaped to South America and were not present at Nuremberg. The
case against Albert Speer was weak. He was charged with planning
an attack and using slave labor to run his munitions factories.
Neither of these are crimes. See if you can find them in law books.
Speer wrote that he was “duty-bound to face this tribunal, in view
of the fate of the German people”. He notes that in view of the fact
that millions of people died because of decisions made by the
leadership, a sentence of twenty years in prison, even though he did
not commit any crime, seems “fair enough”!!
What is also remarkable is what Speer tells us about the six other
prisoners in with him. It appears that all of them were average men,
with wives and children, who simply happened to rise to positions of
leadership. With the exception of Rudolph Hess, who does
sometimes seem crazy, sometimes because he really is crazy, other
times because he is simply malingering, these are just average men
who, on the one hand, are lucky still to be alive after a war in which
so many died, and yet are unlucky in that, due to their positions in
the Nazi German Government, wound up as defendants in the
Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
Sam Sloan
New York NY
February 17,2010
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