The Nuremberg Trial and the Strategy That Saved Albert Speer's Life

You have to be clear about the starting position, otherwise you will not understand the outcome. Speer was a Reich minister, he sat on the decisive bodies, he commanded labor that had been taken from half of Europe by force. By the prosecution's criteria this looked like a certain death sentence. Fritz Sauckel, who procured the people, was hanged. Speer, who ordered them and planned their deployment, got away with twenty years. This difference is no accident of the evidence but the result of demeanor, language and choice of role. That is exactly why it is worth looking closely at this stage of the trial.

Remorse as a Defense

The core of the strategy was simple and effective. Speer declared that the leadership of the Reich bore joint responsibility for what had happened, and he expressly counted himself among them. That set him apart from all the others at once. In the same breath, however, he stressed that he had known nothing of the extermination camps, had given no orders for the persecution of the Jews and had never approved of the terror. The construction allowed him to look morally large while staying legally small. A court dealing with nothing but deniers found this appearance a relief. Contemporary observers described him as the only defendant one could talk to reasonably. That this very reasonableness was the truly disturbing thing was noticed by hardly anyone at the time.

Added to this were stories that showed his role in a friendly light. He had tried to kill Hitler in the Reich Chancellery with poison gas through the ventilation system. He had systematically undermined the orders to destroy German infrastructure and thereby saved the basis for reconstruction. For the second point there is indeed evidence, if less clear than he claimed. For the first there is essentially his word. In court such stories acted as a counterweight to the files, and they were hard to refute because the prosecution worked under enormous time pressure and drew its evidence primarily from German documents that his own ministry had produced.

What the Prosecution Did Not Have on the Table

Here lies a point that is often underestimated. The investigators of 1945 and 1946 did not have the body of files that research knows today. The role of the General Building Inspector in the expulsion of Jewish tenants in Berlin played practically no part in the proceedings. The links between his agency and building projects in camp complexes were not examined. Nor could the question of who had heard what at which internal conference be reconstructed back then even approximately as precisely as decades later. Speer thus profited not only from his presentation but also from a gap. Anyone who goes through the file holdings today finds material that casts his appearance in a different light. Details are in the chapter Aftermath: The Deception.

A Typical Error in Looking at Nuremberg

Many people assume that a court establishes the whole truth. It does not, and that is not its job. A criminal trial examines counts on the basis of the evidence presented, within a certain time frame and with limited means. What is not presented stays outside, even if it exists. Anyone who therefore reads the verdict against Speer as history's final judgment makes a double mistake. He overestimates what could be known in 1946 at all, and he underestimates how strongly a defendant's personal impression works. Speer steered that impression deliberately, down to clothing, posture and speaking pace. It is worth watching for this in the film.

It also remains remarkable how quickly trial behavior became a model for life. The formulas he found before the tribunal he never left again. For forty years he repeated the same sentences about responsibility without knowledge, about the unpolitical specialist and about late insight. What began as a defense in Nuremberg became a manuscript in Spandau and a book afterward. This continuity is the real common thread. How the prison years turned it into a proper body of work you can read in the section on Spandau, and how the whole thing began historically in the chapter on the years until 1945.