Poppo
In the Cooler
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2012
- Messages
- 3,457
From the " corriere della sera" today:
Speer died in his bed, now international celebrity, in 1981. But it took more than a decade for his legend to be completely unmasked and his enormous responsibilities in the crimes of Nazism come to light, including full personal involvement in the organization of the " Holocaust.
An evidence for all, now largely documented, the meeting of 15 September 1942, in which the Minister for Armaments and War Production personally authorized the Auschwitz-Birkenau lager project at the cost of 13.7 million Reichsmark, including the Construction of places for 'special treatments', code words for gas chambers and crematorium furnaces.
Moreover, other documents that came to light in the 1990s show that two Speer assistants kept him constantly informed of the progress of the work in the most famous Nazi lager; That he personally visited the Mauthausen field and that, unlike what he claimed in Nuremberg where he overturned the guilty of Fritz Sauckel, it was his idea of using the work of Jewish slaves in the underground factories of Mittelbau-Dora where V-2 was built.
But how could Albert Speer's self-assertive "tale" remain unchallenged for so long? How do you explain that so many Germans have so long accepted their truth, even after a rigorous historical search had refuted it?
It is around these questions that rotates the exhibition open until the end of November at the Doku-Zentrum in Nuremberg. The installation site could not be more suitable: the Bavarian Documentation Center is in fact housed in the monumental complex that Speer himself designed for the congresses of the National Socialist Party and where the millennial Reich staged its megalomania.
Carried out by Martina Christmeier and Alexander Schmidt, the Nuremberg exhibition runs with film, photographs, documents and installations all the "speerian" self-representation after 1945. There is his technologically improvised show in Nuremberg, the cynicism with which he reverses Others have the responsibility for its own decisions. The informal network of friends and family that he could count on in Germany during and after twenty years of imprisonment came to light and was crucial to clear up the traces of his involvement: among others, the documents showing Rudolf Wolters, a His former assistant, removed from the teacher's diaries any compromising passage before handing over the "original" to the federal archives.
"Speer's - explains Alexander Schmidt - was a systematic operation of falsifying history. Even in Memories, which he does not write but is said to Joachim Fest and publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler, who probably "help" to remember, nothing is authentic, everything is rebuilt in his favor. "
A very accurate work was done, for example, to conceal Speer's participation at the famous Himmler meeting with the Gauleiter of October 1943 in Poznan, Poland, where the SS chief clearly and without euphemisms said that all Jews They had to be killed. In fact, the Armed Forces and War Production Minister did not only take part, but he also had a long conversation with Himmler.
Yet, Speer's justifications were fully accepted in Germany while still alive.
Why? "Because it was what the Germans wanted to hear," Schmidt said, "even if he was in Hitler's magical circle and one of Reich's top figures, he did not know what was happening, then anyone else could say in consciousness, I did not know anything about it. "
His story was about the whole of German society, after 1966 Speer's role was disadvantageous in confronting Germany with the national-socialist past. " His charisma, his culture, his beautiful presence, and the reassuring bourgeois image that fought with the bovine and criminal iconography of the Nazis contributed not least.
With the Nuremberg exhibition, the curtain on one of the most significant and controversial personalities of the Hitler regime is likely to fall. Ignore too many lies, architect Albert Speer emerges as one of the main guilty of the Nazi criminal universe. But it's too late. If the Nuremberg judges had known then what we know today would surely send him to death.
Speer died in his bed, now international celebrity, in 1981. But it took more than a decade for his legend to be completely unmasked and his enormous responsibilities in the crimes of Nazism come to light, including full personal involvement in the organization of the " Holocaust.
An evidence for all, now largely documented, the meeting of 15 September 1942, in which the Minister for Armaments and War Production personally authorized the Auschwitz-Birkenau lager project at the cost of 13.7 million Reichsmark, including the Construction of places for 'special treatments', code words for gas chambers and crematorium furnaces.
Moreover, other documents that came to light in the 1990s show that two Speer assistants kept him constantly informed of the progress of the work in the most famous Nazi lager; That he personally visited the Mauthausen field and that, unlike what he claimed in Nuremberg where he overturned the guilty of Fritz Sauckel, it was his idea of using the work of Jewish slaves in the underground factories of Mittelbau-Dora where V-2 was built.
But how could Albert Speer's self-assertive "tale" remain unchallenged for so long? How do you explain that so many Germans have so long accepted their truth, even after a rigorous historical search had refuted it?
It is around these questions that rotates the exhibition open until the end of November at the Doku-Zentrum in Nuremberg. The installation site could not be more suitable: the Bavarian Documentation Center is in fact housed in the monumental complex that Speer himself designed for the congresses of the National Socialist Party and where the millennial Reich staged its megalomania.
Carried out by Martina Christmeier and Alexander Schmidt, the Nuremberg exhibition runs with film, photographs, documents and installations all the "speerian" self-representation after 1945. There is his technologically improvised show in Nuremberg, the cynicism with which he reverses Others have the responsibility for its own decisions. The informal network of friends and family that he could count on in Germany during and after twenty years of imprisonment came to light and was crucial to clear up the traces of his involvement: among others, the documents showing Rudolf Wolters, a His former assistant, removed from the teacher's diaries any compromising passage before handing over the "original" to the federal archives.
"Speer's - explains Alexander Schmidt - was a systematic operation of falsifying history. Even in Memories, which he does not write but is said to Joachim Fest and publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler, who probably "help" to remember, nothing is authentic, everything is rebuilt in his favor. "
A very accurate work was done, for example, to conceal Speer's participation at the famous Himmler meeting with the Gauleiter of October 1943 in Poznan, Poland, where the SS chief clearly and without euphemisms said that all Jews They had to be killed. In fact, the Armed Forces and War Production Minister did not only take part, but he also had a long conversation with Himmler.
Yet, Speer's justifications were fully accepted in Germany while still alive.
Why? "Because it was what the Germans wanted to hear," Schmidt said, "even if he was in Hitler's magical circle and one of Reich's top figures, he did not know what was happening, then anyone else could say in consciousness, I did not know anything about it. "
His story was about the whole of German society, after 1966 Speer's role was disadvantageous in confronting Germany with the national-socialist past. " His charisma, his culture, his beautiful presence, and the reassuring bourgeois image that fought with the bovine and criminal iconography of the Nazis contributed not least.
With the Nuremberg exhibition, the curtain on one of the most significant and controversial personalities of the Hitler regime is likely to fall. Ignore too many lies, architect Albert Speer emerges as one of the main guilty of the Nazi criminal universe. But it's too late. If the Nuremberg judges had known then what we know today would surely send him to death.
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