Another holocaust-era, German defendant, another case of following orders and denying evil. Most recently we’ve seen former SS officer Oskar Groening, 94, charged with 300,000 concentration-camp counts of accessory to murder. “There was a self-denial in me that today I find impossible to explain,” he says. It was the code of obedience that prevented him from rebelling, he adds by way of explanation.
But there’s a more insidious, disingenuous response: that of Albert Speer. He was “Hitler’s architect” and Minister of Armaments and War Production. He served a 20-year prison sentence after the Nuremberg Trials.
He toured the U.S. in the early 1970s to help market his memoir, “Inside the Third Reich.” Among his appearances: the “Mike Douglas Show,” based in Philadelphia. I still remember the interview.
Douglas, an engaging crooner/talk show host, was no Mike Wallace as an interviewer. But he did ask Speer, then in his mid-60s, if he took “responsibility” for all that the Nazis did in those death camps. Speer said he did, indeed, take responsibility because he “ought to have known” what was going on there.
And Speer was, as we know, hardly the only one to claim such self-serving ignorance.