The quotation last day from the speech given by Himmler in Posen (Poznan) on October 6th 1943 is taken from a longer version included in Gitta Sereny’s excellent Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, first published in 1995. The full text is available on the net—except that one must be careful as to which version is accessed. Himmler also spoke to senior SS commanders in Posen two days earlier (October 4th) and at the beginning of 1944 to senior army officers.

The speeches resulted from, in Sereny’s words, ‘Hitler’s determination to make sure that his supporters were all implicated in the catastrophe he was bringing on Germany. Hitler had told his closest army advisers months before that the “bridges behind us are burnt,” but now he charged Himmler with making the most faithful in the party privy to the guilty knowledge. The Allies had already announced in October 1942 their intention to proceed against war-crimes suspects, and in December linked this to the German government’s “bestial policy of the extermination of the Jews of Europe.” Himmler’s orders from Hitler would have been to draw everyone in the upper ranks of Nazis into the net, so that no one could henceforth dare to break ranks, claiming ignorance or innocence.’

The question mark that arises here is from the seeming implication that at least some in the higher ranks of the Nazi Party and the army and the SS were in ignorance of the ongoing extermination of the Jews. By any standards, a ridiculous contention. But, of course, the ‘ignorance’ being referred to wasn’t a reference to some natural state of unawareness, but rather the more studied ignorance of denial and not officially wanting to know. To some extent, there was a rather inefficient hermetic seal surrounding the whole matter of the destruction of the Jews, created on the one side by those who didn’t want the matter spoken of, and, on the other, by those who didn’t want to be told. But, of course, the very fact of not wanting to know is in itself an indication of already knowing, or at least guessing.

In a somewhat different context, when the collapsing eastern fronts forced Adolf Eichmann to be recalled to state security headquarters in Berlin in early 1945, ‘Every day, his boss and former mentor, Kaltenbrunner, would lunch with all his department heads except Eichmann, who was never invited. Covering their tracks to avoid postwar retribution, most of them avoided this pariah who had executed their wishes; ironically, Kaltenbrunner and several of the others were hanged long before Eichmann’ (The Wiesenthal File: Alan Levy, Constable, 1993).

The fact that Kaltenbrunner at this stage was head of the Reich Main Security Office and in overall charge of the Final Solution makes his attempt to distance himself from Eichmann seem rather absurd. But what seems to have been at work here was some instinctive individual defensive reaction that seems always to operate in such circumstances, rationality not withstanding.

Also of interest is that implication that while several of the bigwigs were hanged, others, it seems, may have survived. No doubt the clever ones, who anticipating early on the possibility of the war being lost, were careful not to leave a trail of evidence connecting them to things that in the end might turn out to be incriminating. The fact also that Eichmann never progressed above the rank of colonel—a comparatively lowly rank in the SS bureaucracy considering his ability and the scope of operations he was in control of—suggests a rather prescient acknowledgement on the part of the upper echelons of the SS of the advantages of leaving an insulating gap of rank between themselves and him.

The reason that the Posen meeting comes to play such a prominent part in Sereny’s book on Albert Speer is that Speer was present in Posen on the particular day, and indeed gave a speech of his own to the assembled Gauleiters the same morning. It was the organizational genius of Speer—Hitler’s architect, and also Minister for Armaments and War Production—that was one of the main reasons why Germany was able to continue in the war as long as it did. Brought to trial for his life at Nuremberg, he admitted a ‘general responsibility’, as a member of the government, for what had occurred under Hitler; at the same time he denied any personal involvement in or knowledge of the atrocities that had occurred. He escaped with his life, and instead was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Gitta Sereny based her book on a very close personal engagement with Speer—‘whom I knew well and grew to like’—in the four years before he died in 1981. Previously she had written one of the classic works on the subject of the extermination of the Jews, Into That Darkness, a biography of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. That book, too, was based upon a long series of interviews with Stangl in the weeks before his death in prison, in the course of which, as she says herself, ‘in a curious way—and I say this with reflection—I had become his friend.’

Now the friendship involved here, with both Stangl and Speer, wasn’t some cynical journalistic ploy to get inside their guard. Rather it was a consequence of her natural inclination to relate to them as human beings, to try and understand them, and at the same time to unravel the web of rationalizations and denials with which they cocooned themselves for protection, fundamentally from themselves.

As she says of Stangl, ‘My professional interest notwithstanding, it had been important to me not to persuade or fatigue this man into disclosing more about himself than he wished to. If the sum total of what he could tell, and possibly teach us, was to be valid and of real value, I felt he had to offer it freely, and in full possession of all his faculties.’

She thus approached her subjects as much in the way of a ‘father’-confessor as a journalist, the sensitivity of her approach gaining their confidence and cooperation in a way a more confrontational attitude would never have. In the same process, it seems clear, she also eased them gradually towards the possibility of some final truthful coming to terms with themselves.

In the case of Speer, when the information came out, in the years after his release from prison, that he had been in Posen on the day of Himmler’s speech, the implications threatened to undermine not just his defence at Nuremberg (which by that stage was academic anyway), but also his sense of self, the image of himself that he had built up during his years in prison and subsequently presented to the world. He had been in Posen on the same day, he admitted, but he had left before Himmler’s speech. The evidence is somewhat mixed, but the greater part would seem to support his contention of not being present. But even more important, of course, is the fact that he wouldn’t want to have been present, being arguably one of those who sought to insulate themselves from any direct knowledge that might serve to link them to what was happening.

In 1977, in an affidavit requested of him by a Jewish group, Speer wrote: ‘However, to this day I still consider my main guilt to be my tacit acceptance of the persecution and the murder of millions of Jews.’ He later explained the phrase ‘tacit acceptance’—or as Sereny translates it from the German, ‘tacit consent’—in terms of ‘looking away’; in other words, of not wanting to know. As Sereny goes on to write: ‘If Speer had said as much in Nuremberg, he would have been hanged.’