Albert Speer Quotes

“the great Dutch Protestant theologian W. A. Visser ’t Hooft suggested, which I suspect applies to many people including–to a large degree–Speer: that “people cannot find a place in their consciousness . . . their imagination . . . or finally have the courage to face (or allow themselves to remember) unimaginable horror. It is possible,” he said, “to live in a twilight between knowing and not knowing.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“What Hitler taught us–to an extent greater than anyone else in history, though we would become aware of it again in Vietnam–is that a licence to kill creates a momentum which defies moral sensibility and discernment and destroys the capacity of the individual to distinguish between good and evil or, and this is perhaps even worse, to act against a recognized wrong.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“citing a prayer Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in April 1945 for his co-prisoners in the concentration camp of Flossenburg before all of them were hanged. In the dawn of the day I call to Thee Help me pray Direct my thoughts to Thee I cannot manage on my own It is dark within me, but there is light in Thee I am lonely, but Thou will not leave me I am faint of heart, but know Thou will help me I am troubled, but know that in Thee is peace I am bitter, but in Thee is endurance I do not understand Thy ways But Thou understandeth them for me.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“Speer’s moral corruption had its seed in his emotional attachment to Hitler–he likened it to Faust’s fatal bargain with Mephistopheles. Achievement and success rooting it ever deeper over the years, he lived–almost addictively–in an increasingly vicious cycle of need and dependence.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“THE OBSESSION of Speer’s life after Nuremberg, as I have pointed out, was Hitler’s murder of the Jews. The ambivalence, however, was that while he sincerely grasped every opportunity to reiterate his sorrow and his pain at having been–the automatic formula he used–“a part of a government that committed such crimes”, he was totally incapable of saying that he had known about them at the time.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“I’m not happy to face it,” he added, “but in the context of my life then, these workers’ only significance was what they could produce towards our war effort; I didn’t see or think of them as human beings, as individuals.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“Most Hitler biographers are dismissive of his emotional capacities. The general trend has been to see him as cold and incapable of compassion. But while this certainly applies to his political self, more recent research suggests that he was neither cold nor indifferent towards those closest to him, and this certainly included Speer.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“As possibly no other politician in our time, Hitler understood the art of public speaking, of pauses, of silence, of inducing, inciting and inflaming passion. “I am ashamed of it now,” said Speer, “but at the time, I found him deeply exciting.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth

“If one wanted to gain real understanding of Speer, one had to realize first that almost everything he did–though, as shown by some of our talks, not quite everything–had a purpose, generally directed towards his own benefit.”
― Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth