The Art of Shaping Memory

Knowing Whom to Remember and How to Forget
By Andrew J. BacevichJune 20, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  How best to describe the recently completed allied commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of France? Two words come immediately to mind: heartfelt and poignant. The aged D-Day veterans gathering for what was probably the last time richly deserved every bit of praise bestowed on them. Yet one particular refrain that has become commonplace in this age of Donald Trump was absent from the proceedings. I’m referring to “fake news.” In a curious collaboration, Trump and the media, their normal relationship one of mutual loathing, combined forces to falsify the history of World War II. Allow me to explain.
In a stirring presentation, Donald Trump -- amazingly -- rose to the occasion and captured the spirit of the moment, one of gratitude, respect, even awe. Ever so briefly, the president sounded presidential. In place of his usual taunts and insults, he managed a fair imitation of Ronald Reagan’s legendary “Boys of Pointe Du Hoc” speech of 1984. “We are gathered here on Freedom’s Altar,” Trump began -- not exactly his standard introductory gambit.
Then, in a rare display of generosity toward people who were neither Republicans nor members of his immediate family, Trump acknowledged the contributions of those who had fought alongside the G.I.s at Normandy, singling out Brits, Canadians, Poles, Norwegians, Australians, and members of the French resistance for favorable mention. He related moving stories of great heroism and paid tribute to the dwindling number of D-Day veterans present. And as previous presidents had done on similar occasions marking D-Day anniversaries, he placed the events of that day in a reassuringly familiar historical context:

“The blood that they spilled, the tears that they shed, the lives that they gave, the sacrifice that they made, did not just win a battle. It did not just win a war. Those who fought here won a future for our nation. They won the survival of our civilization. And they showed us the way to love, cherish, and defend our way of life for many centuries to come.”

Nor was that all. “Today, as we stand together upon this sacred Earth,” Trump concluded,

“We pledge that our nations will forever be strong and united. We will forever be together. Our people will forever be bold. Our hearts will forever be loyal. And our children, and their children, will forever and always be free.”

Strong and united, together, bold, loyal, and free... forever.

Selective Remembering and Convenient ForgettingIt was, in its way, an astonishing performance, all the more so because it was entirely out of character. It was as if Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had published a book of sonnets or National Security Advisor John Bolton had performed a serviceable rendition of “Nessun dorma” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial -- wonderful in its way, but given the source startling as well.
If the purpose of Trump’s speech was to make his listeners feel good, he delivered. Yet in doing so, he also relieved them of any responsibility for thinking too deeply about the event being commemorated.
Now, let me just say that I hold no brief for Josef Stalin or the Soviet Union, or Marxism-Leninism. Yet you don’t need to be an apologist for Communism to acknowledge that the Normandy invasion would never have succeeded had it not been for the efforts of Marshal Stalin’s Red Army. For three full years before the first wave of G.I.s splashed ashore at Omaha Beach, Russian troops had been waging a titanic struggle along a vast front in their own devastated land against the cream of the German military machine.
One data point alone summarizes the critical nature of the Soviet contribution: in May 1944, there were some 160 German divisions tied up on the Eastern Front. That represented more than two-thirds of the armed might of the Third Reich, 160 combat divisions that were therefore unavailable for commitment against the Anglo-American forces desperately trying to establish a foothold in Normandy.
As has been the custom for quite some time now the German chancellor, representing the defeated enemy, attended the D-Day anniversary festivities as an honored guest. Angela Merkel’s inclusion testifies to an admirable capacity to forgive without forgetting.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not, however, make the guest list. In liberal circles, Putin has, of course, made himself persona non grata. Yet excluding him obviated any need for Trump and other dignitaries in attendance to acknowledge, even indirectly, the Soviet role in winning World War II. Although the Red Army was never known for finesse or artfulness, it did kill an estimated four million of Merkel’s countrymen, who were thereby not on hand to have a go at killing Donald Trump’s countrymen.
If war is ultimately about mayhem and murder, then the Soviet Union did more than any other belligerent to bring about the final victory against Nazi Germany. Without for a second slighting the courage and contributions of our Canadian, Polish, Norwegian, and Australian comrades -- bless them all -- it was the Red Army that kept General Dwight Eisenhower’s expeditionary command from being pushed back into the Channel. In other words, thank God for the godless communists.
So, however heartfelt and poignant, the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings was an exercise in selective remembering and convenient forgetting. It was, in other words, propaganda or, in contemporary parlance, fake news. The deception -- for that’s what it was -- did not escape the notice of Russian commentators. Yet members of the American media, otherwise ever alert to Trump’s sundry half-truths and outright deceptions, chose to ignore or more accurately endorse this whopper.
Time to Get Over the Hangover?
How much does such selective remembering and convenient forgetting matter? A lot, in my estimation. Distorting the past distorts the present and sows confusion about the problems we actually face.
For a small illustration of the implications of this particular elision of history we need look no further than the D-Day anniversary-inspiredruminations of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. The purpose of his column, which appeared on June 7th, was to spin the spin. Stephens was intent on reinforcing Trump’s carefully edited interpretation of World War II in order to further his own version of a crusading and militarized American foreign policy agenda.
Now, the war against Adolf Hitler occurred a considerable time ago. The war against Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein is a far more recent memory. Which should have greater relevance for U.S. policy today? On that score, Stephens is quite clear: it’s the “lessons” of World War II, not of the reckless invasion of Iraq, that must pertain, not only today but in perpetuity. Sure, the Iraq War turned out to be a bit of a headache. “But how long,” Stephens asks, “should the hangover last?” Time to take an Alka-Seltzer and get back to smiting evildoers, thereby keeping alive the ostensible tradition of the Greatest Generation.
“If we really wanted to honor the sacrifices of D-Day,” Stephens writes, “we would do well to learn again what it is the Allies really fought for.” According to him, they fought “not to save the United States or even Britain,” but to liberate all of Europe; not to defeat Nazi Germany, “but to eradicate a despicable ideology”; and “not to subsume our values under our interests but to define our interests according to our values.”
Now, only someone oblivious to the actual experience of war could subscribe to such a noble list of “what the Allies really fought for.” Perhaps more to the point, in expounding on what inspired the Allied war effort, Stephens chose to overlook the fact that the ranks of those Allies included the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and their generals would not have considered this a casual omission. They thanked their lucky stars for the Soviet Union’s participation. 
Furthermore, Soviet leaders from Josef Stalin on down entertained their own distinct ideas about the war’s purposes. They adhered to and were intent on exporting an ideology hardly less despicable than that of the Nazis. Their purpose was not to liberate Europe, but to absorb large chunks of it into an expanded Soviet sphere of influence. And while correlating interests with values might have appealed to the Soviet dictator, the values to which he subscribed excluded just about every item in the American Bill of Rights. So if we are serious about identifying common war aims, “what the Allies really fought for” focused on one thing only: destroying the Third Reich.
Just like Trump, however, Stephens airbrushes the Soviet Union out of the picture. In doing so, he sanitizes the past. His motive is anything but innocent. Having concocted his own spurious version of “what the Allies really fought for,” Stephens pivots to the present moment and discovers -- wouldn’t you know it -- that we are right back in those terrible days of the 1930s when the Western democracies hesitated to confront the rising threat posed by Adolf Hitler. 
Seventy years after D-Day, the world is in disarray. And the West, Stephens charges, is sitting on its hands. Syria is a mess. So is Venezuela. Kim Jong-Un, “the world’s most sinister dictator,” still rules North Korea. In Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, dissidents languish behind bars. Nobody “other than a few journalists and activists” seems to care. Everywhere indifference prevails.
And we’ve seen this movie before, he insists:

“This is the West almost as it looked in the 1930s: internally divided and inward looking, hesitant in the face of aggression, incanting political pieties in which it no longer believed -- and so determined not to repeat the mistakes of the last war that it sleepwalked its way into the next.”

Now, in those circles where neoconservatives congregate and call for the United States to embark upon some new crusade, this analysis undoubtedly finds favor. But as a description of actually existing reality, it’s about as accurate as Trump’s own periodic blathering about the state of the world.
Is the West today “inward looking”? Then how do we explain the presence of Western forces in Afghanistan, of all places, for nigh onto 20 years? Is the West “hesitant in the face of aggression”? How does that charge square with actions taken by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere? When it comes to war, some might suggest that our problem of late has not been hesitancy, but unending hubris and the absence of even minimal due diligence. More often than not, when it comes to aggressive behavior, we’re the ones spoiling for a fight. Take General Kenneth McKenzie, the latest bellicose head of U.S. Central Command, for example, who is now plugging for “a return to a larger U.S. military presence in the Middle East” with Iran in mind. Don’t accuse him of hesitance.
The prescription that Stephens offers reduces to this: just as in June 1944, brave men with guns, preferably speaking English, will put things right and enable freedom and democracy to prevail. We need only gird our loins and make the effort.
It’s all very inspiring really. Yet Stephens leaves out something important: this time we won’t be able to count on some other nation with a large and willing army to do most of the fighting and dying on our behalf.
Andrew Bacevich is a TomDispatch regular. His new book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (Metropolitan Books) is due out in January. 
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2019 Andrew J. Bacevich

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What “Everyone Knows” About D-Day

By Prof Susan Babbitt

Global Research, June 10, 2019

Four days of coverage of D-Day on CBC radio and no one explains “free world”. After seventy-five years, everyone knows what it is.

Evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould said nothing is as dangerous as what “everyone knows” but no one remembers the arguments for. Che Guevara called out the US president, at an economics conference, for what “everyone knows” democracy is.[i] Guevara said the conference was political, not about economics.  JFK made no arguments.

But there were arguments and Che Guevara knew them. He refuted them, as Gould refuted scientific arguments for white supremacy. Today the arguments for “free world” are forgotten, even by some who study such things. Nothing is as dangerous as ideology not recognized as ideology.

Gould knocks out one peg of that ideology: an idea of reason.  Evolution has no final purpose, Gould argued. It aims for no ideal. Yet if you wind back the tape of evolution to any point, the next steps are constrained by myriad causal factors.[ii] Gould used the word “contingency”. It means dependence.

Marx had this view of reason, radically contingent upon circumstances and conditions. He got part of his view from Hegel, who saw reality structured organically and developmentally.[iii] Marx accepted Hegel’s vision but found Hegel’s explanation “mystical.” For Marx, it was just a fact that the world is structured dialectically, and so the best way to know it is in terms of organic tendencies and systems.

Einstein agreed. He criticized US schools for emphasizing end results: success. Students should feel their relationship to their work, knowing through their own bodies how engagement with the world creates them.  When we focus on end results, we focus on what is expected, not what is. We miss out. [iv]

In theory, the view is appealing. Connectedness is trendy. Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci upholds such a view and then denies it, in practise. Isaacson doesn’t know that he does this.[v]

He doesn’t bother with philosophy. It is not a luxury, although it seems so, the way it is done, in rarified language, accessible to few. Gramsci said everyone is a philosopher. It is because we all, at some moments of reflection, rely on ideas like “freedom” or “human”. If you don’t think critically about such ideas, you’re a slave of convention, for instance, of the “free world”.

Isaacson tells us the Mona Lisa is “a distillation of accumulated wisdom about the outward manifestations of our inner lives and about the connections between ourselves and the outer world.”  It is, we learn, “Leonardo’s profound meditation on what it means to be human.” For him, it means contingency. It is what Leonardo lived: the intersection of mind and body. It is how he saw himself.

It is how Leonardo thought. It is not how Isaacson thinks. He insists, irritatingly, that we should be like Leonardo by asking questions, as if questioning is an act of will, something decided.  In fact, we ask questions when surprised by what is unexpected, and expectations are part of who we are. Asking questions, when it matters most, is a way of letting go of expectations.

It is a kind of renunciation. We must care. Leonardo asked questions not because it is good to ask questions but because he cared about what those questions explained: what it means to be human. Caring is an orientation. It is not something you do because your life coach tells you to.

And this is how the book ends: talking points for a life-coach. We get a list, for an entire chapter: We are to “retain a childlike sense of wonder”, “go down a rabbit hole”, “start with details”, “get distracted”, “procrastinate”, “make lists”, and on and on. A formula.

If we learn anything from Leonardo’s life, it is that the intersections his art expressed are not formulaic.  No formula. But why look for one? It is for control. We can’t trust relations.

Sensitivity to relations is insecure.  No straight lines in nature, Leonardo noted. He knew we are part of the unfolding of the universe, complex and mysterious, but beautiful for being so.  We are not discreet beings, the lie of the “free world”. We live well, and better, without complete control: because of contingency. Marx knew this too. So did Lenin and others not part of the “free world”.

Feminism, since the 80s, is the area of scholarship in North American universities most attentive to relations, most expressive of Marx’s dialectical vision (although he doesn’t get much credit). The ends-dependent view of reason is refuted by insistence on interdependence.

But the vision is elusive. The Apology, by radical feminist Eve Ensler, is an imagined letter from her father, dead 31 years, apologizing for abuse.  Why it is liberating for the abused to tell this story, so long after the fact, as if it is the father’s story, when in fact it is not? Why invent a story about oneself, conforming to one’s own expectations, as a “way to be free”?

We don’t get an answer. Perhaps “everyone knows”, and the arguments are forgotten. Interestingly, in 7,200 pages of notes, covering a remarkable range of scientific passions, Leonardo says little about himself.  Or so says Isaacson. In fact, it is all about himself. Leonardo knew human beings by intensely studying nature.  He knew himself that way.

We know ourselves, as human, through dependence, through solidarity. This is part of the argument against the forgotten arguments for the “free world”.  It is a more interesting vision, acknowledging the myriad causal relations constituting human community and through which we know that community, and ourselves.

As Patrick Mondiano describes in Sleep of Memory, such encounters might “drag you in their wake when they disappear”. But they’re real.

*

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] Punta del Este, Uruguay, 1961

[ii] Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Norton 1989)

[iii] A. Wood Karl Marx (Routledge 2004) 197ff

[iv] Ideas and opinions (Wings 1958)

[v] This book is reviewed at https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/along with the two referenced below.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Prof Susan Babbitt, Global Research, 2019

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History of World War II: America Was Providing Military Aid to the USSR, While Also Supporting Nazi Germany

Franklin D. Roosevelt's Lend Lease. Part II

By Evgeniy Spitsyn

Global Research, June 07, 2019

Oriental Review

First published by the Oriental Review and Global Research on May 17, 2015

See Part I: 

Roosevelt’s World War II Lend-Lease Act: America’s War Economy, US “Military Aid” to the Soviet Union By Evgeniy Spitsyn, May 13, 2015

Nonlethal lend-lease aid

Besides weapons, other supplies were also provided under lend-lease. And those figures are absolutely indisputable indeed.

Specifically, the USSR received 2,586,000 tons of aviation fuel, an amount equal to 37% of what was produced in the Soviet Union during the war, plus almost 410,000 automobiles, making up 45% of the Red Army’s vehicle fleet (not counting cars captured from the enemy). Food shipments also played a significant role, although very little was provided during the first year of the war, and the US supplied only about 15% of the USSR’s canned meat and other nonperishables.

This support also included machine tools, railway tracks, locomotives, rail cars, radar equipment, and other useful items without which a war machine can make little headway.

Of course this list of lend-lease aid looks very impressive, and one might feel sincere admiration for the American partners in the anti-Hitler coalition, except for one tiny detail: US manufacturers were also supplying Nazi Germany at the same time …

For example, John D. Rockefeller Jr. owned a controlling interest in the Standard Oil corporation, but the next largest stockholder was the German chemical company I. G. Farben, through which the firm sold $20 million worth of gasoline and lubricants to the Nazis.And the Venezuelan branch of that company sent 13,000 tons of crude oil to Germany each month, which the Third Reich’s robust chemical industry immediately converted into gasoline. But business between the two nations was not limited to fuel sales – in addition, tungsten, synthetic rubber, and many different components for the auto industry were also being shipped across the Atlantic to the German Führer by Henry Ford. In particular, it is no secret that 30% of all the tires produced in his factories were used by the German Wehrmacht.

The full details of how the Fords and Rockefellers colluded to supply Nazi Germany are still not fully known because those were strictly guarded trade secrets, but even the little that has been made public and acknowledged by historians makes it clear that the war did not in any way slow the pace of the US trade with Berlin.

Lend-lease was not charity

There is a perception that lend-lease aid was offered by the US out of the goodness of its heart. However, this version does not hold up upon closer inspection. First of all, this was because of something called “reverse lend-lease.” Even before the Second World War had ended, other nations began sending Washington essential raw materials valued at nearly 20% of the materials and weapons the US had shipped overseas. Specifically, the USSR provided 32,000 tons of manganese and 300,000 tons of chrome ore, which were highly prized by the military industry. Suffice it to say that when German industry was deprived of the manganese from the rich deposits in Nikopol as a result of the Soviet Nikopol–Krivoi Rog Offensive in February 1944, the 150-mm frontal armor on the German “Royal Tiger” tanks turned to be much more vulnerable to Soviet artillery shells than the 100-mm armor plate previously found on the ordinary Tiger tanks.

The United States of America – The Real Reason Why They Are Never Winning Their Wars

In addition, the USSR paid for the Allied shipments with gold. In fact, one British cruiser, the HMS Edinburgh, was carrying 5.5 tons of that precious metal when it was sunk by German submarines in May 1942.

The Soviet Union also returned much of the weaponry and military equipment after the war, as stipulated under the lend-lease agreement. In exchange they were issued an invoice for $1,300 million. Given the fact that lend-lease debts to other nations had been written off, this seemed like highway robbery, and Stalin demanded that the “Allied debt” be recalculated.

Subsequently the Americans were forced to admit their error, but they inflated the interest owed in the grand total, and the final amount, including that interest, came to $722 million, a figure that was accepted by the USSR and the US under a settlement agreement signed in Washington in 1972. Of this amount, $48 million was paid to the US in three equal installments in 1973, but subsequent payments were cut off when the US introduced discriminatory practices in their trade with the USSR (in particular, the notorious Jackson-Vanik Amendment).

The parties did not return to the discussion of lend-lease debt until June 1990, during a new round of negotiations between Presidents George Bush Sr. and Mikhail Gorbachev, during which a new deadline was set for the final repayment – which would be in 2030 – and the total outstanding debt was acknowledged to be $674 million.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, its debts were categorized as either sovereign debt (the Paris Club) or debts to private banks (London Club). The lend-lease debt was a liability owed to the US government and is part of the Paris Club debt, which Russia repaid in full in August 2006.

Direct speech

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt explicitly stated that aid to Russia was money well spent, and his successor in the White House, Harry Truman, was quoted in the pages of New York Times in June 1941 as saying,

“If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible …”

Nikolay Voznesensky (1903-1950)

The first official assessment of the role played by lend-lease aid in the larger victory over Nazism was provided by the chairman of Gosplan, Nikolai Voznesensky, in his work Voennaya Ekonomika SSSR v Period Otechestvennoi Voiny [Soviet military complex during the Great Patriotic War] (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1948), where he wrote,

“If one compares the quantity of industrial goods sent by the Allies to the USSR with the quantity of industrial goods manufactured by socialist factories in the Soviet Union, it is apparent that the former are equal to only about 4% of what was produced domestically during the years of the war economy.”

American scholars and military and government officials themselves (Raymond Goldsmith, George Herring, and Robert H. Jones) acknowledge that allthe Allied aid to the USSR was equal to no more than 1/10 of the Soviets’ own arms production, and the total quantity of lend-lease supplies, including the familiar cans of Spam sarcastically referred to by the Russians as the “Second Front,” made up about 10-11%.

Moreover, the famous American historian Robert Sherwood, in his landmark book, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1948), quoted Harry Hopkins as claiming the Americans “had never believed that our Lend Lease help had been the chief factor in the Soviet defeat of Hitler on the eastern front. That this had been done by the heroism and blood of the Russian Army.”

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once called lend-lease “the most unselfish and unsordid financial act of any country in all history.” However, the Americans themselves admitted that lend-lease brought in considerable income for the US. In particular, former US Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones stated that the US had not only gotten its money back via supplies shipped from the USSR, but the US had even made a profit, which he claimed was not uncommon in trade relations regulated by American state agencies.

His fellow American, the historian George Herring just as candidly wrote that lend-lease was not actually the most unselfish act in the history of mankind, but rather an act of prudent egotism, with the Americans fully aware of how they could benefit from it.

And that was indeed the case, as lend-lease proved to be an inexhaustible source of wealth for many American corporations. In fact, the United States was the only country in the anti-Hitler coalition to reap significant economic dividends from the war.There’s a reason that Americans often refer to WWII as “the good war,” as evidenced, for example, in the title of the book by the famous American historian Studs Terkel: The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984). With unabashed cynicism he quoted, “While the rest of the world came out bruised and scarred and nearly destroyed, we came out with the most unbelievable machinery, tools, manpower, money … The war was fun for America. I’m not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us the war was a hell of a good time.”

Evgeniy Spitsyn is a Russian historian and author.

Source in Russian: Ukraina.ru

Adapted and translated by ORIENTAL REVIEW.

The original source of this article is Oriental Review

Copyright © Evgeniy Spitsyn, Oriental Review, 2019

https://www.globalresearch.ca/history-of-world-war-ii-americas-was-providing-military-aid-to-the-ussr-while-also-supporting-nazi-germany/5449378


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History of the Third Reich: Hitler’s Armaments Minister Albert Speer’s Complicity in the Nazi Genocide

Hitler's war minister consistently denied knowledge of the Holocaust.

By Shane Quinn

Global Research, October 12, 2018

One summer day in 1944, the Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer had a visit from his old friend Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia. Twelve years before, Hanke had “discovered” Speer when recommending the precocious architect to Joseph Goebbels, in order to refurbish the Nazis’ ill-decorated Berlin headquarters.

Hanke now cut a desolate figure before Speer. The Gauleiter had just returned from an “invitation” to see a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. The death camp Hanke saw was Auschwitz, where prisoners were being systematically killed from September 1941, as Hitler’s war machine marched towards a seemingly certain victory in the USSR.

When Hanke visited Auschwitz in mid-1944, hundreds of thousands had already been murdered there by the SS. Sitting opposite him, Speer wrote that Hanke “seemed confused” and “spoke falteringly”, advising the war minister “never to accept an invitation to inspect a concentration camp in Upper Silesia… He [Hanke] had seen something there which he was not permitted to describe and moreover could not describe”.

What the Nazi official may have observed were rows of corpses, or perhaps he had witnessed the gassing of innocent victims. When the Soviet army finally liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, over one million people had been killed there. About 90% of those murdered were Jewish peoples, while also among the dead were Poles, Soviet POWs, along with ethnic groups like Roma and Sinti.

Following Hanke’s warning, Speer wrote a quarter of a century later that,

“I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler… I did not investigate – for I did not want to know what was happening there. Hanke must have been speaking about Auschwitz”.

All is not as it appears, however. It is unimaginable that, during Speer’s many years at the core of the Third Reich, he was somehow unaware of the Nazis’ crimes until summer 1944.

In reality, Speer had knowledge at least months before the Hanke meeting that killings on a vast scale were being committed in Upper Silesia, and in other Nazi-occupied regions. Historians such as veteran author Martin Kitchen have asserted that Speer, and his team, were involved in concentration camp construction alongside the SS, and therefore had a role in implementing the “Final Solution”.

During the postwar Nuremberg trials, Speer denied being present at the Posen Conference of October 1943, where SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler said of Jewish populations that,

“The grave decision had to be taken to cause this people to vanish from the earth”.

Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in 1943. (Source: Wikipedia)

It is in fact certain Speer was in attendance at the Posen Conference. Himmler addresses him personally during the speech and, crucially, it was discovered that Speer wrote in December 1971,

“There is no doubt; I was present as Himmler announced on October 6, 1943 that all Jews would be killed”.

Previously, on 20 January 1942, a separate notorious meeting was organized in Wannsee, south-west Berlin. It was chaired by the SS commander Reinhard Heydrich who said that

World War II and the Atomic Bomb: Western Leaders Ignored The Dangers of Nuclear Weapons

“Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west”.

Speer was not in attendance at the Wannsee Conference – yet it is likely he was informed of this order for genocide, as Speer was well acquainted with some of those present at Wannsee like Heydrich himself, the Gestapo’s Gerhard Klopfer, Reich Minister Georg Leibbrandt and Gauleiter Alfred Meyer.

Hitler had in 1937 assigned Speer as General Building Inspector of the Reich. In the late 1930s and early 40s, the architect was at least partially culpable in the eviction of Jewish tenants in Berlin, to be replaced by “Aryan” dwellers. Speer even inquired as to how the expulsions were progressing, with 75,000 Jewish tenants eventually evicted.

In early February 1942, Speer was appointed as armaments minister by Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters, following the mysterious death of Fritz Todt in a plane crash. From 1942 onward, Speer was directly complicit in sustaining Hitler’s increasingly criminal dictatorship. He poured all his energy into the challenges ahead, quickly becoming one of Nazi Germany’s most powerful men.

Speer had no experience in the field of armaments, he had not even fired a gun before. Regardless, Speer was remarkably adept in his new role, using his organizational skills and intelligence to produce weapons on a massive scale – despite the indiscriminate Allied bombing from above. The results Speer achieved saw his stock rise even further with Hitler, who was soon addressing him as “My dear Speer”.

In the time ahead, Speer cast away further scruples by extensively exploiting slave labor, with the final aim of turning the war around and preserving the Third Reich. Speer’s policies prolonged the global conflict by many months, thereby allowing the extermination camps to remain in existence for longer, while Hitler’s military could continue fighting across various fronts.

As Soviet and Allied forces closed in from east and west, the discovery of the death camps sent waves of horror across the world. Yet on 30 January 1939, Hitler had explicitly remarked during a Reichstag speech of “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” should Germany enter “once more into a world war”.

Britain and France may have declared war on Germany two days after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but it was almost a token gesture. British and French elites cared little for the fate of Poland, as the country was dissected by Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Almost three decades after the war, Britain’s Conservative MP Robert Boothby candidly commented that,

“We’d gone to war for the defense of Poland. In the event, we did nothing to help Poland at all. We never lifted a finger… we confined our war efforts [in 1939] to dropping leaflets on the German people”.

This dismal inaction had major consequences for millions of people. At the start of hostilities in September 1939, Poland’s Jewish population was 3.3 million, the second largest such community in the world (behind the Soviet Union’s Jewish populace). Hitler’s address the previous winter outlined precisely what fate lay in store for them.

By 1945, over 1.8 million Polish Jews would be killed, about half of whom were murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp in eastern Poland. Altogether, about six million Poles lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis.

During Speer’s collaboration with Hitler, which included their enacting of vast architectural aims and ambitions, he claims that

“scarcely any anti-Semitic remarks of Hitler’s have remained in my memory… Hitler’s hatred for the Jews seemed to me so much a matter of course that I gave it no serious thought. I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political events did not concern me”.

Political events may not have concerned Speer in the Reich’s early years when he was a naive, reserved young architect “completely under the sway of Hitler”. As time moved by, however, Speer’s character was inevitably corrupted by the all-consuming nature of Hitler’s dictatorship, along with the personalities that surrounded him.

From late 1933 onward, Speer was in close contact with Hitler on an almost daily basis. The relationship included morning walks and conversations, dinner outings and tea parties. This incredibly intimate association with the Nazi leader – who was 16 years older than Speer – must have profoundly impacted the latter’s still developing disposition.

Hitler was known for his remote nature with people, yet he spoke of “the warmest human feelings” for Speer who represented a “kindred spirit” for him. Speer later admitted that, “All I wanted was for this great man [Hitler] to dominate the globe”.

Speer was, in the meantime, increasingly in the presence of figures like Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler. Sustained relations with nefarious men such as these was bound to have further detrimental effects upon him.

Speer had been a latecomer to the Nazi Party having applied for membership on 1 March 1931, when he was aged almost 26. Speer had only seen Hitler for the first time four months previously, when the aspiring dictator was delivering a speech in Berlin at a dilapidated beer hall. About five thousand people were in attendance that evening, mostly students, and Speer wrote that Hitler “spoke urgently and with hypnotic persuasiveness” which “swept away any skepticism, any reservations”.

Despite hailing from an upper class background in Mannheim, south-west Germany, Speer had lived through challenging times. In his late teens, he struggled through the hyperinflation years of the Weimar Republic, which reached crippling levels in the early 1920s. By 1929 and the early 1930s Speer’s architectural dreams lay in apparent ruins, with the Great Depression resulting in unprecedented hardship in Germany.

Overlooking his travails, Speer’s driving force remained finding a master who would bestow upon him the architectural tasks he desired. He confessed that, “For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust”.

Capitalizing on his contact with Hanke, Speer finally met Hitler in person during July 1933, when he was invited to the Nazi leader’s modest apartment in Munich.

Having impressed Hitler with his architectural style, speed and efficiency, Speer was admitted to his inner circle by the autumn of 1933, and soon sat beside the dictator at dinner. Some years later Hitler informed Speer that,

“You attracted my notice during our rounds. I was looking for an architect to whom I could entrust my building plans. I wanted someone young, for as you know these plans extend far into the future”.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Shane Quinn, Global Research, 2018

https://www.globalresearch.ca/history-of-the-third-reich-hitlers-armaments-minister-albert-speers-complicity-in-the-nazi-genocide/5656762


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