Killing Hitler (45 page)

Then, in early February 1945, Speer was visited by a colleague from the electrical industry, Dr. Friedrich Lüschen. Lüschen asked him if he knew that certain passages of
Mein Kampf
’were being widely quoted by the German people, and then handed him a slip of paper with Hitler’s own words from two decades earlier:

The object of diplomacy must not be to see that a nation goes down heroically but rather that it survives in a practical way. Hence every road that leads to this goal is opportune and the failure to take it must be looked upon as a criminal neglect of duty.
⁵⁰

In silence, Lüschen then handed Speer a second quote from the same source:

The authority of the state can never be an end in itself; for, if that were so, any kind of tyranny would be inviolable and sacred. If a government uses the instruments of power in its hands for the purpose of leading a people to ruin, then rebellion is not only the right but also the duty of every individual citizen.
⁵¹

Lüschen then departed without a word. Speer was left to contemplate the significance of the two passages, which, though dated, had been taken from a book lauded in Nazi Germany as the work of the modern-day prophet. He was stunned.

Here was Hitler himself saying what I had been trying to get across during these past months. Only the conclusion remained to be drawn: Hitler himself—measured by the standards of his own political programme—was deliberately committing high treason against his own people….

That night I came to the decision to eliminate Hitler.
⁵²

As Speer himself confessed, his plotting to murder Hitler had a “touch of the ridiculous” about it.
⁵³
For one thing, he had somewhat ambitiously hoped to eliminate Bormann and Goebbels as well, considering them “more dangerous without Hitler than with him.”
⁵⁴
For another, he was no natural assassin. Born in 1905, he had been too young for service in World War One and had had nothing to do with the military thereafter. Indeed, coming from solidly middle-class stock, and being of a somewhat fragile constitution, it is doubtful whether he even had a schoolyard brawl to his name. Thus, having resolved to kill Hitler, he had very little idea of how he should proceed.

Though he still had access to his target, Speer decided against a frontal assault. Rather, he opted for a much safer, more remote method. While walking in the Reich Chancellery gardens that spring, he had noticed the ventilation shaft for Hitler’s bunker. As he recalled in his memoirs, it was “camouflaged by a small shrub, level with the ground and covered by a thin grating.”
⁵⁵
There were no special security measures and no guards. It would not be difficult, he mused, to introduce poison gas into the bunker.

A few days later, as an air raid was pounding Berlin, Speer was in a shelter in the basement of the Armaments Ministry when he fell into conversation with one of his colleagues, Dieter Stahl, the head of munitions production. He knew Stahl well—and most important, trusted him—having already intervened to rescue him from the clutches of the Potsdam Gestapo after he had been reported for making defeatist comments. The two naturally discussed the coming collapse and the policies that, in their view, were hastening Germany’s demise. Speer grew agitated, venting his frustration at the regime, saying: “I simply cannot stand it any longer and be witness to government by lunatics.”
⁵⁶
He went on to outline his plan to Stahl:

I asked him whether he thought he could get hold of some of the poison gas tabun for me and when, not surprisingly, he looked at me questioningly, I told him that I wanted to try to introduce it into the Reich Chancellery bunker. He seemed neither surprised nor alarmed.
⁵⁷

Speer’s choice of weapon was an interesting one. Tabun had first been developed before the war as an insecticide, but it had proved itself to be such a lethal nerve agent that its further development had been handled by the German military. A colorless, tasteless liquid, with a slightly fruity odor, tabun was effective by contact or inhalation of vapor, and worked by inhibiting the function of the enzyme cholinesterase, which is crucial to the transmission of nerve impulses to the muscles. Those affected lost all muscular control. The first symptom was the contraction of the pupils, which, in all but the brightest conditions, would induce near-blindness. Thereafter, increased saliva production would lead to frothing at the mouth. Increased nasal discharge and labored breathing would then be followed by vomiting and incontinence. Within an hour or so of exposure, most victims suffered violent convulsions and died, in effect, of asphyxiation.
⁵⁸

By 1942, tabun was being produced in a state-of-the-art plant in eastern Germany. It was synthesized on-site and loaded into aircraft bombs and shells in an underground facility manned by concentration camp inmates. The shells were then stored to await the order for deployment, an order that, perhaps because of Hitler’s experience of gassing in World War One, never came. By 1945, however, Germany had a stockpile of some 12,000 tons of weaponized tabun.
⁵⁹
Speer, as minister of armaments, would have been well aware of its existence and its potency.

When Stahl reported back to Speer some days later, however, his response was negative. After making inquiries, he had learned that liquid tabun was dispersed through the explosion of the shell and that it did not naturally evaporate or form smoke.
⁶⁰
He concluded that tabun was not a suitable medium for Speer’s plan, but promised instead to procure “one of the traditional types of gas.”
⁶¹
In the meantime, while the two men investigated the possibilities, Speer was to be frustrated again: “Even if we could have obtained the gas,” he wrote,

those days would have passed fruitlessly. For when I invented some pretext at this time to inspect the ventilation shaft, I found a changed picture. Armed SS sentinels were posted on the roofs of the entire complex, searchlights had been installed, and where the ventilation shaft had previously been at ground level, there now rose a chimney more than ten feet high, which put the air intake out of reach. I was stunned.
⁶²

Nonetheless, it would appear that it was not merely this purely technical hitch that deflected Speer from his task. It is said that he visited the Rhineland around this time, and one night sat incognito with a number of miners in an air-raid shelter. Listening to the conversations going on around him, he realized the extent to which these ordinary Germans still believed unreservedly in Hitler and his ability to save them from catastrophe. If he were to pursue his plan, he thought, he would be destroying their last vestige of hope, removing the one politician in whom they still had faith. With that realization, he abandoned his plot to assassinate Hitler.
⁶³

Given that so few of Speer’s biographers make mention of this tale, one might assume that it is apocryphal. Speer was, after all, the poster boy of the Nazi regime and was unlikely to have passed incognito anywhere in the Reich. But the story might also be seen as a parable to explain Speer’s own feelings toward Hitler at that time. Whatever its precise provenance, it is indicative of the mental and emotional turmoil with which Speer was wrestling.

This is a point that is confirmed by Speer’s adjutant, Manfred von Poser. During a trip to Berlin that March, the two stopped on the
Autobahn
for a rest. Poser recalled:

[Speer] and I walked across some fields and climbed a hill. It was misty but sunny; we sat down, the earth around us smelling richly, and looked across the hills and that beautiful countryside. It was to be the only time I ever saw Speer give way to deep depression. “How can he do it?” he said, drawing a semi-circle with his arm. “How can he want to make a desert of all this?”
⁶⁴

So if one believes Speer’s memoirs, the assassination plan was abandoned. Beset by fears of detection and its potential consequences for his family, Speer was relieved to be able to throw off the uncomfortable mantle of assassin. As he recalled: “The whole idea of assassination vanished from my considerations as quickly as it had come. I no longer considered it my mission to eliminate Hitler, but to frustrate his orders for destruction.”
⁶⁵

Yet Speer did not, it appears, abandon his plotting completely. Under interrogation by the British late in 1945, Dieter Stahl revealed that there was more to the plot than later appeared in Speer’s memoirs, or indeed in the vast majority of works related to his life. In the second half of March 1945, Stahl alleged, he had been called once more to see Minister Speer:

[Speer] explained to me that he had now thought of a different plan. Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann, the three most dangerous and mischievous, gathered almost every evening in the Reich Chancery for the purpose of hatching their fiendish plans…. During night air raids all three drove in their cars…to the suburbs of Berlin and such a moment was to be used for an ambush.
⁶⁶

Speer went on to explain that he had found “a few brave men” to assist him, and added that he himself would “take on” one of the three cars. He asked Stahl to supply him with machine guns, pistols, ammunition, and a number of flares with which to blind his targets. Stahl duly delivered the required weaponry to Speer’s office the following day, but as he had no further opportunity to speak to Speer alone, he could shed no more light on what, if anything, was undertaken.

Though Stahl is clear in his deposition that Speer was planning to murder his targets, it is possible that the plot mutated into a later conspiracy to kidnap Bormann, Himmler, and the Reich labor leader Robert Ley. In early April 1945, after Hitler had made it clear that he intended to meet his fate in Berlin, Speer apparently became disquieted that all the senior personnel
of the Nazi movement were planning suicide. He claimed that they had a “moral duty to face trial by the enemy” and to answer directly for their actions.
⁶⁷
Moreover, their prosecution, he thought, would “offer a chance to deflect the hate and anger away from the German people [and] on to those who really deserved it.”
⁶⁸

Accordingly, Speer hatched a conspiracy, in concert with the Luftwaffe ace Adolf Galland, to kidnap the “terrible trio” and thereby prevent them from committing suicide. As he recalled, they would ambush their targets in the Berlin suburbs:

Our plan was simple: When the enemy night bombers dropped white parachute flares, every car stopped and the passengers fled into the fields. Flares fired by signal pistols would undoubtedly produce similar reactions. Then a troop of soldiers armed with submachine guns would overpower the six-man escort squads…. In the general confusion it would have been possible to bring the arrested men to a secure place.
⁶⁹

Though he decided against this course of action, Speer, it seemed, was still plotting. And his plotting was not all entirely altruistic, for he was not above seeking to save his own skin. In the dying days of the war, he devised a fanciful plan to escape to Greenland, where, he thought, he could hide out until the dust settled and write his memoirs. He and another Luftwaffe officer, Werner Baumbach, commandeered a seaplane, loaded it with provisions, skis, fishing tackle, kayaks, and of course “good wines,” and prepared their escape, but the plane was destroyed in an Allied air raid. Speer himself was later dismissive of the plan, describing it as “rank romanticism” and “fantasy, but fun while it lasted.”
⁷⁰
In the event, he eschewed all such notions of escape and meekly surrendered to arrest in mid-May 1945.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Speer’s activities as a conspirator and would-be assassin have attracted much attention, not all of it flattering. The root of this hostility is the conundrum of Speer himself. Most liberal commentators see Speer almost as one of their
own: a solidly middle-class intellectual, in stark contrast to the rabble of psychopaths, thugs, and careerists that made up the remainder of the Nazi hierarchy. Thus, they are appalled that he could operate in such company—”among murderers,” as Speer himself put it in retrospect
⁷¹
—and place his genius at their disposal. In short, they would argue that he, of all the senior Nazis, should have known better. The damning verdict offered by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper is perhaps typical. Speer, he concluded,

is the real criminal of Nazi Germany; for he, more than any other, represented that fatal philosophy which has made havoc of Germany and nearly shipwrecked the world. For ten years he sat at the very centre of political power; his keen intelligence diagnosed the nature and observed the mutations of Nazi government and policy; he saw and despised the personalities around him, he heard their outrageous orders and understood their fantastic ambitions; but he did nothing.
⁷²

Following from this unease is a profound suspicion of Speer’s motives in his apparently Damascene conversion at Nuremberg, where he was the only one of the Nazi hierarchy to express his contrition openly and confess his share of the collective responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name. Though he thereby avoided the death penalty and invoked Göring’s wrath, he scarcely earned the respect of the Allies. Rather, he was viewed with intense skepticism. He was seen as a dissembler, a manipulator, and (in that curious English phrase) too clever by half. As Airey Neave warned his colleagues at Nuremberg, Speer was “more beguiling and dangerous than Hitler…we must not come under his spell.”
⁷³