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.)

Finally the conformist historians are catching up with the real facts about their former darling, Albert Speer.

DAVID IRVING: "...I first reported in my Goebbels biography (London, 1996) that Speer was the initiator of the program to expel Jews from their Berlin housing, so that he could take over their 5,000 luxury apartments for himself and his Nazi cronies. His original, and undoctored, office diary revealed that he had set up a special department in his office as Generalbauinspector for Berlin to handle this step in 1941 - long before the Wannsee conference... Speer donated a sanitized version of his diaries to the German federal archives...As I wrote in a letter published in The Times ten years ago, however, in my view Albert Speer could count himself lucky not to have been hanged at Nuremberg. He certainly deserved the rope more than others like General Alfred Jodl -- but my book "Nuremberg, the Last Battle" reveals the horse-trading that went on behind the scenes over names and sentences: Speer had made himself the darling of the Americans at Nuremberg by his submissiveness, and he was spared, though not as much as he had hoped."

Cae el mito de Albert Speer, el influyente arquitecto de Hitler

Araceli Viceconte. Corresponsal, CLARIN.COM Algunos historiadores afirman que él era el único por quien Adolf Hitler sentía una amistad y una admiración casi erótica. Porque no era un proletario ni un fanático más del Partido Nacionalsocialista, sino un hijo de buena familia, elegante y educado. Y era además un arquitecto genial que no tenía límites para sus proyectos megalómanos. El mito de Albert Speer, condenado a 20 años de prisión en los juicios de Nüremberg y muerto en libertad en 1981, acaba de caer definitivamente con la publicación de documentos desconocidos de las SS. Se trata de archivos sobre la construcción de Auschwitz que indican que el arquitecto de Hitler y ministro de Armamento y Municiones del Tercer Reich sabía perfectamente de los asesinatos en las cámaras de gas. En los juicios de Nüremberg, Speer afirmó hasta el último minuto que no sabía nada del Holocausto y fue condenado a veinte años de prisión. Entonces no se contaba con los documentos ni las pruebas encontradas a lo largo de las últimas seis décadas, que según los historiadores le habrían valido la pena de muerte. Speer quedó libre en 1966 y se volvió a integrar sin problemas en la socie dad alemana. De las actas encontradas por la historiadora Susanne Willems se desprende que Speer fue informado al detalle por los dos colaboradores que envió a Auschwitz en mayo de 1943. El mismo día que los funcionarios Desch y Sander estuvieron en el campo de exterminio fueron asesinados un millar de judíos del gueto polaco de Sosnowiec. Los colaboradores de Speer "tienen que haber visto el humo que salía de las chimeneas", declaró la historiadora Willems. Según sus conclusiones, no sólo fueron testigos del genocidio, sino que además recibieron datos precisos sobre las masacres de judíos por parte del comandante de Auschwitz, Rudolf Hö. Desch y Sander regresaron al ministerio de Armamento con una carpeta llena de fotos y elaboraron un amplio informe sobre su visita. Los archivos que analizó la historiadora hablan además de la ampliación de Auschwitz como "Programa especial Profesor Speer". El ministro de Armamento del Tercer Reich fue quien aprobó las partidas de acero y otros materiales para las obras en el campo de exterminio. Pero en sus memorias —escritas en la cárcel berlinesa de Spandau—, Speer asegura que las obras fueron una medida "humanitaria", porque se instalaron cañerías de agua y se protegió mejor a los trabajadores forzosos y a los vigilantes de enfermedades como el tifus. "Eran medidas de higiene para la fábrica de la muerte", comentó Willems. También la miniserie "Speer y él", que emite esta semana la televisión pública alemana ARD, se basa en la bien documentada premisa de que el arquitecto estrella del nazismo fue un gran simulador, un cínico que promovió la explotación de trabajadores forzados para mantener en marcha la industria armamentística del nazismo. En la película, una mezcla de documental y ficción, dan testimonio tres de los seis hijos de Speer, y se ven imágenes suyas de chiquitos, disfrutando las gracias y escuchando los cuentos que les contaba el Führer en el paisaje idílico de Obersalzberg. Varios libros publicados recientemente dan detalles desconocidos sobre la vida de este personaje clave del Tercer Reich. Historiadores como Willems desentrañaron también el vínculo entre las deportaciones masivas de judíos berlineses y los planes de Speer para transformar la capital alemana en Germania. En Berlín —escribe Willems— "Speer era quien daba las órdenes a la Gestapo" para que vaciara casa por casa.

Wartime reports debunk Speer as the Good Nazi By Kate Connolly

Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and munitions minister, was fully aware of and involved in the mass murder of Jews despite his lifelong claims to the contrary, new documents have shown. Speer's reputation in Germany as the "Good Nazi" who stood by Hitler only because it enabled him to fulfil his dreams to become an architect of international acclaim, has been blackened by the disclosures that he was fully informed of the human destruction in Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi's murder factories. His insistence that he knew nothing about Auschwitz or the crimes against Jews, meant that he was the only leading Nazi to escape execution following the Nuremberg trials. Instead he was sentenced to 20 years in prison and after his release in 1966, went on to become the best-selling author of books such as Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: Secret Diaries. He died in 1981, spending his last years in London. His insistence that, despite being the closest Nazi to Hitler, he knew nothing of the Holocaust, led to many Germans adopting a similar stance of denial, The new disclosures have formed the backbone of a documentary drama called Speer and Him, the first part of which was broadcast this week, the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. It debunks the myth of the benign family father who happened to fall in with the wrong crowd. The film's director, Heinrich Breloer, said: "[He created] a market for people who said 'believe me, I didn't know anything about it. Just look at the Führer's friend, he didn't know about it either'." The documents uncovered by the Berlin historian Susanne Willems include a Third Reich report from May 1943 that refers to a "Prof Speer special programme" to expand the Auschwitz camp so that it could serve as a death camp. The report, on which Speer made copious handwritten notes in the margins and over the text, refers to the fact that Auschwitz's role as a work camp had "recently been expanded to include the solution to the Jewish question". The gassing of Jews began at the latest in the spring of 1942. The report was compiled after Speer, who as the head of armaments for the Third Reich was responsible for overseeing the distribution of building materials, dispatched two of his advisers, Desch and Sander, to investigate a number of concentration camps around Germany and Poland, including Auschwitz. They reported being shown "everything" at the camp by its leader, Rudölf Hoss, who gave them a "short report on the erection and purpose of the whole concentration camp site". Further research by Miss Willems has shown that on the day of Desch and Sander's visit, 900 Polish Jews were murdered in the gas chambers. Following the visit and resulting report, Speer approved the shipment of a thousand tons of steel to the camp to enable its expansion. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, wrote to Speer to thank him "very much". Breloer argues that Speer was more than just a "cog in the works". He said: "He was not only entangled in the works, he was the terror itself.'' The drama also concentrates on Speer's plans to expel thousands of Jews from their homes in Berlin to free building space