sábado, 30 de marzo de 2013

On Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer

SIMON WIESENTHAL: "About ten years ago I had several conversations with Albert Speer.... It had always interested me how such an ingenious man could serve such a criminal. And he told me: “I was a young architect and all of a sudden I saw before me the chance to do something big. So I joined the [Nazi] party, was promoted from one position to the next, and then I lost all control…. I recognized quite late that the man [Hitler] wanted to pull the entire nation down with him in his demise”…: Speer admitted more at Nuremberg than he was charged with. I said to him, “I was at your trial, I saw your defense counsel’s despair when you suddenly said you wanted to account not only for yourself and what you had done, but also for the actions of the government of which you had been a member. Without this testimony, you would have gotten ten years at the time; however, if everything we now know from available documents and other sources, had already been disclosed then, you would have been sentenced for life or even to death. But,” I told him, “our legal system would be absolutely meaningless, if someone who admitted his guilt and served his sentence were not allowed to make a new beginning. For me, Mr. Speer, you are a new-born baby.”" (Lecture at the Technical University of Vienna, June 1988. Trans. from German.)

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