Wartime reports debunk Speer as the Good Nazi

Have been expecting this for years now. Note an extraordinary reaction from Speer biographer Sereny to the news.

Wartime reports debunk Speer as the Good Nazi
Telegraph
11/05/2005

Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and munitions minister, was fully aware of and involved in the mass murder of Jews despite his lifelong claims to the contrary, new documents have shown. ... His insistence that he knew nothing about Auschwitz or the crimes against Jews, meant that he was the only leading Nazi to escape execution following the Nuremberg trials. Instead he was sentenced to 20 years in prison and after his release in 1966, went on to become the best-selling author of books such as Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: Secret Diaries. He died in 1981, spending his last years in London. ... His insistence that, despite being the closest Nazi to Hitler, he knew nothing of the Holocaust, led to many Germans adopting a similar stance of denial.

The documents uncovered by the Berlin historian Susanne Willems include a Third Reich report from May 1943 that refers to a "Prof Speer special programme" to expand the Auschwitz camp so that it could serve as a death camp. The report, on which Speer made copious handwritten notes in the margins and over the text, refers to the fact that Auschwitz's role as a work camp had "recently been expanded to include the solution to the Jewish question". The gassing of Jews began at the latest in the spring of 1942. The report was compiled after Speer, who as the head of armaments for the Third Reich was responsible for overseeing the distribution of building materials, dispatched two of his advisers, Desch and Sander, to investigate a number of concentration camps around Germany and Poland, including Auschwitz. They reported being shown "everything" at the camp by its leader, Rudölf Hoss, who gave them a "short report on the erection and purpose of the whole concentration camp site".

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Gita Sereny, the London-based author of the 1995 book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, yesterday accused Breloer of stripping Speer of "the honesty he always showed".