Killing Hitler (46 page)

Naturally, these suspicions have also been extended to Speer’s alleged assassination plot. When he first aired the plot at Nuremberg, Speer claimed somewhat disingenuously that he had intended “merely to mention [it] in order to show how dangerous Hitler’s destructive intentions had seemed.”
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It soon became
the centerpiece of his defense, however, and one of the highlights of the entire trial. He began modestly, suggesting that the matter was perhaps too technical or detailed to be of interest to the court. When pressed, he continued, apparently under duress, because “there is always something repellent about such matters.”
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He went on to outline his plan, citing the role played by Dieter Stahl—whose independent testimony gave him vital corroboration—and concluding that the changes to the ventilation system of the bunker had rendered the plan impossible.

The revelation of the plot caused some considerable excitement. Speer’s fellow defendants were appalled. Jodl considered it “bad taste,” and Rosenberg took the view that Speer should have kept his bombshell to himself. Göring was predictably outraged, audibly commenting that “if Speer was not hanged by this court then a kangaroo court would have him assassinated for treason.”
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The Allied prosecutors, meanwhile, merely wondered why Speer had chosen not to mention the matter when he gave his original statement.

Historians and commentators have been no less skeptical. Though his accomplice, Dieter Stahl, certainly thought Speer to be genuine and “never doubted his intentions,” he is in the minority.
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A former colleague, for example, described Speer’s plot to kill Hitler as “a dream—for that was all it ever was.”
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One later biographer, meanwhile, described the idea of Speer the assassin as a “surrealistic absurdity.”
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Another dismissed the plot as “feeble,” characterizing it as “bunker bunkum” and asking, with vicious sarcasm, if Nazi Germany had “run out of ladders” with which to scale the raised air intake to the bunker.
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Some writers are more indulgent, usually relating the bare details given by Speer and Stahl without necessarily questioning their veracity. The German historian Joachim Fest, for instance, regards the plot as “romantic” and likens it to a game of “cops and robbers.”
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So did Speer really want to kill Hitler? In assessing this issue, three charges are usually leveled. The first is that, given his apparently unrestricted access to his target, Speer’s failure even to make an attempt is evidence of his lack of credibility. This argument seems at first sight to be persuasive, yet it fails to take account of
a number of important factors. It ignores, for example, the uncanny power that Hitler could exercise over those around him. Speer himself wrote of Hitler’s “hypnotic persuasiveness” and his “personal magnetism,”
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and confessed in his memoirs: “Quite aside from any question of fear, I could never have confronted Hitler pistol in hand. Face to face, his magnetic power over me was too great.”
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His reluctance to risk a frontal assault, therefore, was as much due to fear of dissuasion and capture as pure cowardice.

Furthermore, the extent of the access that Speer enjoyed, though undoubtedly greater than that of the other would-be assassins, is still questionable. It has been suggested that Speer had numerous opportunities to shoot Hitler and that he was able to come and go in the bunker, as he pleased, without being searched.
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However, in the aftermath of the 20 July plot, this would appear more than a little implausible. Speer’s meetings with Hitler in the final months of the war were limited to the regular situation conferences, which he attended along with many other senior Nazis. The days of intimate soirees poring over building plans alone in Hitler’s quarters were by that stage long gone.

Moreover, this suggestion also contradicts a number of accounts that detail the security regime then in place. Major Freytag von Loringhoven, for instance, one of the circle of adjutants that were ever-present in the bunker, was unequivocal. “Nobody was allowed into the bunker without being searched for weapons,” he stated, describing a “very carefully designed” security system in which coats and sidearms had to be surrendered and briefcases searched before gaining access to Hitler’s conference room via up to three SS pickets.
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This is a point that has been echoed by many others. Whereas security procedures for Hitler’s inner circle had formerly been unevenly and inconsistently applied, after 20 July 1944 all staff were subject to the same strict regime, regardless of their status. Walter Warlimont, for example, who had been very close to Hitler and had been injured in Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, recalled that “from [then] on, I was one of those officers whose briefcase was searched by the SS guards before entering
the map room…my every movement was watched.”
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Speer clearly enjoyed an exalted position within the Nazi hierarchy, but in the dying days of the Third Reich, it is highly doubtful that he would have been able to engineer himself into a situation where he could assassinate Hitler.

Second, it has been suggested that Speer’s apparent planning for the use of poison gas was a cunning deception. Speer himself, it appears, had authorized modifications to the ventilation system two years previously, intended to thwart just such an attempt. In designing the bunker in the spring of 1943, it is alleged, Speer was privy to a memorandum redrawing the ventilation fittings with a gravity trap, so that “war agents injected into them will run out again downwards.”
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This is indeed intriguing, but not necessarily damning. After all, one could counter that it was knowledge of this fact that led Speer to reject the liquid tabun as a suitable medium for the attack and seek a more traditional gas, which might escape the gravity trap.

Lastly, the plot is often portrayed as being part of a “charm offensive” cooked up with his defense attorney at Nuremberg to save him from the gallows. Though his performance in the dock probably
did
save his life, Speer later attempted to propagate the idea that he made no attempt to “play” Nuremberg to his own advantage.
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He feigned embarrassment when divulging details of his plot, coyly sketching the story “with reluctance…for fear of seeming to boast about it.”
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His defense lawyer, meanwhile, would insist that his client was no longer in the business of self-preservation. With his insistence on admitting guilt, it was claimed, Speer knew he was courting the death penalty, but “he was adamant. He would shrug and say, ‘So be it.’”
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This image of the penitent former Nazi minister offering up his secrets to his former enemies with no regard for his own fate is attractive but deeply unrealistic. Speer at Nuremberg was still very much in the business of self-preservation. He charmed his interrogators, stressed his good behavior, and highlighted the assistance that his specialist knowledge might still render the Allies.
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In a three-page letter submitted to the American prosecutor, he claimed: “I myself have during this period not
only given every possible information but further still calmly dispelled the objections of my former colleagues toward open information.”
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His subtext was clear. By reminding his jailers of his value both as a source of information and as a positive influence on his fellow inmates, he was hoping to avoid the death penalty.

Speer’s revelation of the bunker plot, therefore, probably
was
intended as a ruse to soften the prosecution’s view of him. In this purpose, he failed. The tribunal’s judges were too astute to be impressed by what they recognized as a calculated attempt to win their sympathy.
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In the event, however, it was not Speer’s revelation of his plot to kill Hitler that saved him, it was his whole demeanor. Speer was informative and intelligent. He impressed the court with his apparent honesty and his calm and reasonable temperament. In addition, it was noted that he had been one of the “few men” with “the courage to tell Hitler that the war was lost.”
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These were the factors that won him the sympathy of the tribunal and, arguably, saved his life.

But one should not imagine that this renders the plot as a whole fraudulent. Speer certainly sought to exploit the story for his purposes at Nuremberg, but he did not invent it solely for that purpose. He was intelligent, even manipulative, but he was almost certainly not the Machiavellian schemer that many still perceive him to be. In short, those who ascribe to him the cunning and forethought to concoct a spurious plot in the last weeks of the Third Reich solely to ingratiate himself with his later prosecutors are reading far too much into the story.

So, what conclusions might one draw? Speer’s plot is certainly a fascinating tale, all the more so because one cannot realistically expect to provide a definitive explanation for it. As Joachim Fest has noted, “many of the questions raised by Speer’s life are unresolved to this day; some will never be cleared up.”
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Some might conclude that the plot to kill Hitler falls into that category. However, a sober reading of the available evidence suggests a quite simple conclusion.

For all his faults, Speer was not entirely deaf to the voice of his conscience. Indeed, the fact that the idea of assassination occurred to him at all is surely evidence not of his potential as a
killer but rather of a belated and admittedly halfhearted moral renaissance. His plotting, therefore—tentative though it was—should perhaps be interpreted as a desperate eleventh-hour desire finally to do the right thing. His intention to kill Hitler was, as he confessed, “an impulse of despair.”
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But it was genuine enough, if only for that fleeting moment when he saw Germany peering into the abyss. It was genuine enough for him to risk his life by bringing in other conspirators, such as Stahl, and genuine enough for him to make less than discreet inquiries about the use of tabun.

Yet as Speer himself conceded, “from the intention to the deed, is a very long way.”
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And it is abundantly clear that he had barely begun to travel along that route. Beyond entertaining schoolboy fantasies about ambushes, flare guns, and poison gas, he never fleshed out his plans. He never set dates, assigned tasks, or addressed the grubby minutiae of planning a murder. He clearly never even thought through the consequences of his imagined actions, for if he had successfully introduced poison gas into the bunker, he would have had to reckon not only with the death of Hitler but also with those of all of the Führer’s entourage: prominent Nazis and generals, but also secretaries, adjutants, and valets. He would have earned himself “not the fame of the classical tyrannicide, but the infamy of a mass murderer.”
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For this reason, perhaps, Speer sits most uncomfortably in the presence of Hitler’s genuine would-be assassins. He lacked the dynamism and inspiration of Stauffenberg, the quiet determination of Elser, and the principled resolve of Tresckow. For all his other talents, as an assassin he was an absolute beginner—a point he would later willingly concede, saying: “I would never really have done it. I couldn’t have.”
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Albert Speer was indeed a deeply ambiguous and contradictory character. He was cultured, highly educated, and urbane. He was praised by Stauffenberg as “a man that one could talk to,” and even found himself allocated a seat in the post-Hitler cabinet, drawn up by the German resistance.
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At Nuremberg, he was lauded by the American judge as “the most humane and decent of the defendants.”
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The British were no less effusive,
describing him as “an impressive figure” and “a gifted and compelling man.”
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But Speer was also a war criminal. Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for his role in the procurement and exploitation of slave laborers for German industry. The prison psychiatrist at Nuremberg tried to make sense of Speer by describing him as “a blinkered racehorse.”
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In retrospect, one can extend the metaphor a little more. Speer’s blinkers had fallen away by the summer of 1944. From then on, he clearly saw the madness around him, but his residual loyalty to and even love for Hitler had effectively rendered him lame.

It was this cruel dilemma that tortured Speer in the last year of the war. Arguably, it would never leave him. He would later write: “I am obsessed by the thought of Hitler’s two faces, and that for so long a time I did not see the second behind the first.” In truth, he never really came to terms with Hitler. He described him as “an enigma, full of contradictions,”
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cursed him as a megalomaniac, and bemoaned the failure of the various assassination attempts against him as a “tragedy.”
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But, despite all his criticisms, he protested that he would “not like to be numbered amongst those who malign him in order to exonerate themselves.”
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Speer plotted Hitler’s death, then swore eternal fealty to his Führer and even risked his life to visit him one last time.
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