Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, escaped hanging to serve a sentence in Spandau. Speer was convicted of crimes against humanity, specifically using slave labor to boost war production. He was released in 1966, and he died in 1981.
Saw an interview with him filmed after his release. When asked if Hitler was insane, he sidestepped the question because the answer was not “instructive.” It didn’t matter whether Hitler himself was insane. This was as close as most folks were willing to get, in those days of Germany’s repatriation and restoration, to the territory since trodden in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the reality that rank-and-file Germans knew exactly what was happening in the deathcamps and that the einsatzgruppe, the murder-gangs who did the bulk of the dirty work across Europe, were made up of ordinary citizens, not SS elite. The führer was just the mouthpiece exhorting them to do what they’d been itching to do since the 1890s.
Speer was an unreliable witness who has been alleged to know as much about the Holocaust as the rest of Hitler’s inner circle did. Smooth, urbane, and evil as the day is long, one of the most terrifying sons of bitches I’ve ever seen, and I’ll bet he slept like a baby.
And he was right. It’s not instructive to ask whether the führer is insane.
I wouldn’t attempt to put words in the mouth of a man like Speer, but I think he was hinting that Hitler was a symptom, not the disease.
Parallel to be drawn here: 45 is insane, but he is also the symptom, not the disease. Congress must contain 45 and quarantine if necessary (because he will sell everything he knows to the highest bidder/rapt-est listener), and the justice department must hunt down and punish the mooks and suckers who trashed the Capitol.
And we have to address the disease, not just the symptoms.
If we’re going to live up to our contract, this fragile contract of true democracy that’s really less than 60 years old, we should finally, finally pay for the construction of that Capitol building the mooks and suckers broke into.
Capitol construction started in 1793. Three guesses who provided the actual hard labor, down to casting of The Statue of Freedom, the crowning feature of the Dome.
We the people should start pushing for reparations to the descendants of those kidnapped and forced to build this country.
Again, Speer was convicted of crimes against humanity, specifically using slave labor to boost war production.
That’s one of the 17 conflicting thoughts I had Wednesday as the mooks and suckers were chanting “Whose house? OUR HOUSE!” in the rotunda.
It’s not their house. It’s not our house.
We haven’t earned it yet. We haven’t even fucking paid for it.