Albert Speer
Albert Speer
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer; March 19, 1905 – September 1, 1981) was a German architect who was, for most of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany. Speer was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming ministerial office. As "the Nazi who said sorry", he accepted moral responsibility at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs for complicity in crimes of the Nazi regime, while insisting he was ignorant of the Holocaust...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth19 March 1905
CityMannheim, Germany
CountryGermany
The Americans had not played a very prominent part in the war of 1914-1918, he (Adolf Hitler) thought, and moreover, had not made any great sacrifices of blood. They would certainly not withstand a trial by fire, for their fighting qualities were low. In general no such thing as an American people existed as a unit; they were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and many races.
He was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games.
One seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.
Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.
I knew that the National Socialist Party was anti-Semitic, and I knew that the Jews were being evacuated from Germany.
I assert that a great number of the foreign workers in our country did their work quite voluntarily once they had come to Germany.
All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of your superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected.
All I know is that these two gases both had a quite extraordinary effect, and that there was no respirator, and no protection against them that we knew of. So the soldiers would have been unable to protect themselves against this gas in any way.