The Candor & Lies of Nazi Albert Speer, Arms Minister, Hitler Confidant-Henchman: Holocaust, Slaves

- Adolph Hitler and Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich, 1943.
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- 'The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert Speer.' The Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 8, *2013. Ed. The minister of armaments was happy to tell his captors about the war machine he had built. But it was a different story when he was asked about the Holocaust.

On April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought toward the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in street-to-street combat, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and fired. Berlin quickly surrendered and World War II in Europe was effectively over. Yet Hitler’s chosen successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, decamped with others of the Nazi Party faithful to northern Germany and formed the Flensburg Government. As Allied troops and the U.N. War Crimes Commission closed in on Flensburg, one Nazi emerged as a man of particular interest: Albert Speer, the brilliant architect, minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich and a close friend to Hitler.

Throughout World War II, Speer had directed an “armaments miracle,” doubling Hitler’s production orders & prolonging the German war effort while under relentless Allied air attacks. He did this through administrative genius & by exploiting millions of slave laborers who were starved & worked to death in his factories. Speer arrived in Flensburg aware that the Allies were targeting Nazi leaders for war-crimes trials. He—like many other Nazi Party members & SS officers—concluded that he could expect no mercy once captured. Unlike them, he did not commit suicide. The hunt for Albert Speer was unusual. The U.N. War Crimes Commission was determined to bring him to justice, but a U.S. government official hoped to reach the Nazi technocrat first. A former investment banker named Paul Nitze, who was then vice chairman of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, believed it was imperative to get to Speer.

As the war in Europe was winding down, the Americans were hoping that strategic bombing in Japan could end the war in the Pacific. But in order to achieve that, they hoped to learn more about how Germany had maintained its war machine while withstanding heavy bombing. Thus Nitze needed Speer. In May 1945, the race was on to capture and interrogate one of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen. Just after Hitler’s death, President Donitz & his cabinet took up residence at Murwik, overlooking the Flensburg Fjord. On his first evening in power, the new leader gave a nationwide radio address; though he knew German forces could not resist Allied advances, he promised his people that Germany would continue to fight. He also appointed Speer his minister of industry & production.

On May 15, American forces arrived in Flensburg & got to Speer first. Nitze arrived at Glucksburg Castle, where Speer was being held, along with the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also working for the Strategic Bombing Survey, & a team of interpreters & assistants. They interrogated Speer for 7 straight days, during which he talked freely with the Americans. Each morning Speer, dressed in a suit, would pleasantly answer questions with what struck his questioners as remarkable candor- enough candor that Nitze & his associates dared not ask what Speer knew of the Holocaust, out of fear that his mood might change. Speer knew his best chance to survive was to cooperate & seem indispensable to the Americans...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-candor-and-lies-of-nazi-officer-albert-speer-324737/



- Hitler's Henchmen: The Architect Albert Speer (WW2 MILITARY HISTORY DOCUMENTARY). Profile of Albert Speer, who masterminded Nazi propaganda and helped Hitler draw up plans for a new Berlin. Despite professing no interest in politics & being thought to be the most impartial member of the Third Reich, he was an ambitious man who eventually became minister of armaments & munitions, and is alleged to have known earlier than most about the Fuehrer's plans for a mass extermination of Jews. ~ Not 'A Technocrat,' 'Good Nazi' or Country Squire.
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- 'Speer’s image as a ‘good Nazi’ was built on pure lies,' The Times, May 6, 2017. Germany is trying to dismantle any lasting notion that Albert Speer, Hitler’s arms minister, was a “good Nazi” by showing that he gained wealth and recognition by duping West Germans, Britons and Americans into believing that he was unaware of the Holocaust. An exhibition in Nuremberg aims to debunk the myth that Hitler’s chief architect cultivated about his role. Speer kept the arms industry running with forced labour and was sentenced to 20 years at the Nuremberg trials but escaped a death sentence by claiming that he knew nothing of the genocide...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/speers-image-as-a-nice-nazi-was-built-on-pure-lies-tcxst3knc



- May, 1945: Speer is arrested along with Karl Donitz and members of the Flensburg government.