What You Should Know About Albert Speer, Nazi Architect in World War II

Albert Speer was a brilliant architect who joined the Nazi Party in Germany and designed the Reich Chancellery and the Zeppelinfeld Stadium in Nuremberg.  He was part of Hitler's inner team and became the Minister of Armaments and War Production during World War II.  He was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to twenty years in prison, which he served in Spandau prison in West Berlin.  He wrote a fascinating book called Inside the Third Reich after being released from prison, in which, among other things, he comes to terms with his own guilt.  I remember an interview he once gave, I believe to 60 Minutes while still in prison, in which he readily acknowledges his guilt.  Let me paraphrase what he said.

I knew nothing about the holocaust, he insisted.  Yes, he said, I had heard rumors about bad things, but you always hear rumors in government and in wartime and you never know where they are coming from or whether they were planted.  I didn't want to know.  I was in charge of keeping the economy of Germany producing goods and services and I was very busy doing this.

But one day, he said, returning to his office from lunch, "I found a manila folder, addressed to me from an anonymous source.  I opened it up and saw some photographs which suggested the rumors I had heard might be true.  I took the folder across the hall to Geobbels' (Minister of Propaganda) office and asked him directly what these pictures were all about."  Goebbels got angry "and told me I didn't want to know.  You are in charge of economic production.  Leave these pictures here, go back to your office, and ask no more."

"I took his advice and returned to my office," he said.  That made me guilty.  As a human being it was my responsibility to learn more about what was happening.  My refusal to act in the face of evidence of crimes against humanity makes me guilty of complicity.  

Speer acknowledged his guilt by complicity, if you believe his version of things, because he saw some photographs that demanded his attention as a human being, and he did nothing to learn more, much less do something about it.  Like Speer, Susana Martinez has seen the photographs and the tapes.  Unlike Speer, who claimed he simply went back to his office and did nothing to find out more about these crimes, Martinez has publicly supported the specific policies--of separating parents from their children when migrants come to the border seeking asylum from severe danger in their own countries.  By the logic of a confessed war criminal, she is not complicit indirectly, as he claims to have been, through silence in the face of crime, but directly, through the bully pulpit of her office, supporting the crimes.

Years from now people will judge our own humanity and actions or in-actions in the face of crimes against humanity. Now that you know, what are YOU going to do about it?  What will be said about YOU years from now?  What would you like for people to say about YOUR reaction to these crimes?