Albert Speer Essay

1747 Words7 Pages
Albert Speer To what extent does history present Albert Speer as “The Good Nazi”? A man responsible for the death of millions, a man responsible for World War II lasting as long as it did, a man responsible in using slave labour, a man responsible for suppling armed forces with more weapons, how is it a man of such bad reputation was labelled “The Good Nazi”? Albert Speer was an average German man who tried to avoid the Nazi’s, Speer was successful until 1930 when he is “sucked” in by a speech by Hitler. Afterwards he went and joined the Nazi Party. After joining, Speer’s knowledge in architecture earned him high places in the party and he quickly became quite close to Hitler. Speer soon became responsible for large roles and given short amounts of time to solve problems, he was chosen for these roles due to his technocratic attributes and his effectiveness to get things complete. As mentioned above Speer was responsible for many horrific accounts that happened at the time including slave labour and making the war last longer killing hundreds of thousands. When the Nazi’s lost Speer tried everything he could to look as innocent as possible and as well as admitting to what he had done and saying sorry for what he had done at the Nuremburg trials and because of this Albert Speer was soon labelled, “The Good Nazi”. The first to label Speer as “The Good Nazi” was Joachim Fest, who worked with Speer personally. It was Fest who told Speer to publish his memoirs into the book now known as; Inside the Third Reich. During the time that Fest and Speer worked together all information that Fest heard about Speer he accepted uncritically and from reading Speer’s memoirs Fest claimed that Speer was “The Good Nazi” for Speer’s apparent attempts to make things better for the inmates in slave labour, that Speer knew nothing of the anti-Semitism against the Jews and Speer’s

More about Albert Speer Essay

Open Document