MovieChat Forums > Inside the Third Reich (1982) Discussion > War Guilt

War Guilt

posted 19 years ago by Seb-15
9 replies | jump to latest

Does anyone (of all the massive amounts of posts here. Lol. I shall leave it for a few years) think that there must be a certain freeing bias in his book and his portrayal in this film. When I read it I knew full well that I believed it to be a possibility, but it could also be that he was a former high ranking nazi trying to write to show that he was not that big a nazi. Do you get the feeling there are things he is omitting, probably because he must omit it. Or is that just me?

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[–] ib011f9545i 19 years ago

It has been a long time since I saw this but I remember it as being well acted and looking good.
Even when I was watching it I wondered about how it managed to make Speer somehow a good guy,in comparision to people around him at least.
Of course it was based on Speer's book ,so he is bound to come out of it well.
Since I saw it I have read a lot of history books about Nazi Germany and indeed got a history degree.
So I can say that you are right,the majority historical opinion now says that Speer was a lot more of a nazi than he portrayed himself after the war.
It is true he did good things at the end of the war such as not destroying all of Germany's reamining industry.
But he did use slave labour and he must have known about the holocaust.
Speer created a version of events which suited him best.
I rememeber reading somewhere that he has an old friend a nazi who was very good to Speer's family while he was in jail,but Speer dropped the guy after he got out because he was pretending to be an anti nazi rather than a former nazi.
There are a couple of books written about Speer,I think they are called "THE GOOD GERMAN by Dan Van Der Vat and there is another one by Gitta Serany the title I can't recall.
If you type ALBERT SPEER into Amazon books the titles will come up

[–] little_peyton 18 years ago

The Gitta Sereny book you speak of is called "Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth." It's an excellent read and well worth having. Dan Van Der Vat's book "The Good Nazi" I think rather less of, inasmuch as it's a rehash of Speer's work that does little to illuminate or contradict anything Speer had said before. Joachim Fest recently published a book called "Speer: The Final Verdict," but it's nothing new either, really.

The question of Speer's war guilt is centered mainly on his presence at a conference during which Himmler announced that the Jews were being exterminated. Speer claims no memory of attending the event, though it has been asserted that some of his friends and associates WERE there, so whether he was present or not he must certainly have heard what was said. Speer made a few excellent points in his defense, to wit:
a) everybody knew what kind of relationship he had with Hitler, and thus (like Himmler or Goering) no one would have dared ask him about this kind of thing, nor would they be inclined to repeat whatever they may have heard to him.

b) he admits he did not ask questions, because he did not want to know but also because it was DANGEROUS to ask those questions. Speer (and others) knew all to well what happened to those who ran afoul of the SS or the SD.

Did he know something was happening? Probably so. Did he know the scale of what was happening or exactly what they (the SS and the SS-Einsatzgrüppen) were doing? Probably not.

[–] rroach50 16 years ago

Did he know the scale of what was happening or exactly what they (the SS and the SS-Einsatzgrüppen) were doing? Probably not.

I disagree. Just one example. Speer had the most intimate knowledge of the A-4 rocket plant at Nordhausen while working side-by-side with SS General Kammler on the rocket's development & production. Kammler, among other things, designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Speer was very aware of the horrible conditions and consequently high death rate of these Nordhausen slave laborers. Speer knew that millions of "undesireables" were being held in various camps. It doesn't take much deduction to know that if important male rocket workers were being treated this harshly by the SS that they wouldn't hesitate to eliminate those they deemed to be worthless and a liability.

[–] Maungaiti 17 years ago

an old saying I've heard "No one is a villian in their own story." History itself is subjective especially peoples account of their own history.

[–] kurt7825 8 years ago

speer was a traitor to his country

[–] ib011f9545i 8 years ago

how and indeed when?
Do you mean he was a traitor by not carrying out Hitler's orders to destroy what was left of German industry?
You could say that he did his country a favour by saving what was left of Germany?

Speer was dishonest and self serving but was he wrong for not being a nazi to the end?

[–] kurt7825 8 years ago

he disobeyed direct orders given to him from his superior. that is the only problem i have with Speer

[–] chrissso 8 years ago

So disobeying an order makes him a traitor to Germany???

I think Speer was a traitor to humanity. He certainly knew what was happening with the camps ... a man that well connected. Was he responsible for it ... no. Could he have stopped it ... no. Was he complicate ... obviously! And in turn a perjure!!!

Too bad the slime ball got to live a pretty normal life after he got out of jail.

[–] The_Dougster 7 years ago

It's not just you. I think Albert Speer was a HUGE war criminal and almost certainly deserved to be hanged every bit as much as many of the Nazis who were. This is self-serving revisionist history at it's worst!