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Arts, Books, History

Book Review – ‘Speer: Hitler’s Architect’

Speer

Crony: Speer with Hitler in 1938.

Intro: Albert Speer saved himself at the Nuremburg War Trials from hanging by claiming ignorance of the Holocaust – then made a fortune from his memoirs in prison.

ALBERT SPEER cut a lonely figure, pacing the grounds of West Berlin’s Spandau Prison. Obsessed by numbers, the former Nazi minister calculated that during his 20 years incarcerated there, he clocked up a staggering 31,816 km.

He also said he read 5,000 books in that time; a questionable claim given he spent six hours a day gardening and two hours walking. But then, Speer was always liberal with the truth.

He lied to save his life at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, he lied to the German people, he even lied to Hitler. And, as Martin Kitchen’s superb and surely definitive biography of the man who ran Germany’s war economy shows, most of all he lied and deceived himself.

Born in 1905, Speer followed his wealthy architect father into the business. His big break came in 1933 while site manager on the renovation of the Chancellery in Berlin.

Adolf Hitler visited the works daily and was immediately impressed by the young man’s polite manner and precise, direct answers to his questions.

Speer was soon a regular at the daily lunches Hitler gave for his closest cronies, and established the nearest thing to a friendship Hitler ever had.

Significantly perhaps, the self-conscious, aloof, narcissistic, ruthlessly ambitious Speer had no intimate friends himself. He even remained distant from his wife and six children.

In January 1938 Hitler appointed Speer as Berlin’s Inspector General of Building, tasked with rebuilding the city (which was to be renamed Germania) as a ‘world capital’.

Speer lacked creativity and originality as an architect, but he had one great asset: he twigged what Hitler liked in his architecture – a kitsch combination of ornate late 19th-century Viennese and the modern ‘cruise liner’ style seen in the Hollywood movies of the time. Above all, everything had to be big.

Take the new Chancellery that Speer built for Hitler. It was ridiculously grandiose. Visitors had to undergo a long walk through several rooms to reach the Fuhrer, the last a 146m-long hall.

Hitler insisted it had a highly polished stone floor, whose slipperiness would unsettle visitors as they approached the huge double doors of his office, a room 27m long, 14.5m wide and 9.75m high.

Hitler was never photographed in it because its inhuman scale would have dwarfed him into insignificance.

Stone for Speer’s projects was quarried by 10,000 concentration camp slaves in unimaginable conditions. When this was mentioned to Speer, he replied: ‘The Yids got used to making bricks while in captivity in Egypt.’

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WHEN dwellings had to be demolished for his projects, Speer seized 23,000 Jewish apartments to rehouse the displaced inhabitants, which meant 75,000 evicted Jews were ‘resettled’, a euphemism for being sent to death camps.

In 1942, three years into World War II, Hitler appointed Speer as Minister for Armaments, recognising both his talents as a brilliant organiser and his utter loyalty to the Fuhrer.

At first Speer produced what he called ‘a miracle’. Production rose as he reshaped the system, but the task became increasingly difficult.

Hitler constantly meddled in details of tank or aircraft design and frequently changed his mind. He had to be fed encouraging production statistics.

Eventually the only way to do this was to churn out vast numbers of obsolete models on existing production lines – like the Messerschmitt Me109 fighter – at the expense of building new factories to make jet aircraft that might have made a difference to the war.

As the Russians advanced and Allied bombing intensified, Speer lost vital factories, raw materials, and oil supplies.

By 1944, the war obviously lost, he was battling vainly to maintain output.

Now Hitler put his faith in ‘miracle weapons’, chiefly the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. Their factories were moved underground to protect them from bombs.

Slave labourers worked under appalling conditions, living in tunnels with no latrines, surrounded by their own filth, their clothes infested with lice.

Working 72 hours a week on a daily diet of 1,100 calories, 160 slaves dropped dead every day. But after visiting the factory, Speer wrote to congratulate the manager, seemingly unaffected by the workers’ plight.

Not so some members of his staff, who were so traumatised after witnessing this living hell that they had to take sick leave.

Speer could genuinely claim one thing to his credit. When Hitler issued his infamous Nero Decree, ordering the destruction of Germany’s industry and infrastructure, Speer countermanded it, travelling the country to successfully preserve things for the country’s post-war reconstruction, in which he naively believed he would play a part.

He was shocked to find himself put on trial at Nuremburg, but he mounted a brilliant defence – he accepted full responsibility for his actions but claimed ignorance of the mass murder of Jews. His calm, educated demeanour contrasted with the ranting and fanaticism of other leading Nazis and impressed the judges.

He escaped the hangman’s noose and got 20 years in Spandau.

Ever a loner, he wasn’t too unhappy in jail. His wealthy acquaintances smuggled in luxuries. Always sure of his entitlement, Speer complained if the champagne wasn’t up to scratch or the caviar not the best.

After his release in 1966 he published his memoirs. The book was a phenomenal success. Readers lapped up fascinating details of Hitler’s private life. It earned Speer a fortune.

Its portrait of him as the ‘Good Nazi’ absolved a whole generation of Germans of Nazi war guilt. For if, it was argued, this mover and shaker, a member of Hitler’s innermost circle, didn’t know about the Holocaust, how could an ordinary person be expected to?

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SPEER was deceiving the German people and, in his failure to admit his guilt himself.

Since his death in 1981, the evidence against Speer has mounted. His eviction of Jews from Berlin. His brutal use of slave workers. His presence at a speech given by Heinrich Himmler in which the SS leader said it was not only necessary to exterminate the Jews but their children, too, to prevent future revenge.

Kitchen’s exhaustively researched, detailed book nails, one by one, the lies of the man who ‘provided a thick coat of whitewash to millions of old Nazis’. It’s a fascinating account of how the moral degradation of the chaotic Nazi regime corrupted an entire nation as well as being a timely warning for today.

–     Speer: Hitler’s Architect by Martin Kitchen is published by Yale for £14.99

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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, United States

Book Review – Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism & Defeating ISIS

BOOK REVIEW

Intro: In his new book Liam Byrne MP argues that the British government is making critical mistakes in its methods of combating home-grown extremism. Defeating Islamic State will probably mean taking on the digital caliphate.

THE WORLD was caught by surprise in June 2014 when the infamous terrorist group Islamic State (IS) declared a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. Within the space of just a few short months, like a rapidly spreading avenging fire, it had scorched across Syria and much of Iraq. In so doing, the group carved out an empire stretching more than 400 miles from Aleppo to the Iraqi town of Sulaiman Bek, a town just 60 miles from the Iranian border.

IS, also known as Isis, or Da’esh, seemed unstoppable at first, but it has now been pushed back, possibly decisively. Since the group inaugurated, it has lost an estimated 45,000 jihadists, as well as a slew of key towns and resources it previously controlled. Its most direct enemies – Kurds, Iraqi troops and Shia militias – are largely contained in Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and are advancing on the group’s de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.

In this timely book, the Labour MP Liam Byrne, points out that the fight against Isis and its brutal ideology has many fronts. Isis is obsessed with controlling territory, as well as having higher aspirations by creating a global caliphate. For many years, though, the group existed without any territory. With its war on the world going badly, its digital caliphate is becoming ever more important.

Byrne offers up a wide-ranging and discursive study. In his book, he elicits and concentrates on what is arguably the most significant fight of all: the ‘battle of ideas’. Whilst his journey has taken him to northern Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, his most interesting discoveries are found and reported upon within in his own parliamentary constituency of Birmingham Hodge Hill. Here, Muslims boast the highest share of the population of any area in the UK.

Byrne is assertive that Isis and other jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and al-Qaeda are fundamentally heretical by nature. Essentially, he says, they are death cults, with as much relevance to most Muslims as David Koresh has had on mainstream Christianity. Ironically, however, Isis claims to espouse the purest form of Islam, the creed and doctrine pursued in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad. It believes that it has the power to repudiate and excommunicate apostates, an act known as takfir. But as the world has come to witness, this has metastasised into exterminations and genocide, as Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, and Muslims in the Middle East can attest.

In the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group, notoriously known to the world as al-Qaeda, morphed with Saddam Hussein’s avowedly secular Ba’ath Party. What emerged was something yet even more ferocious as the terrorist group had a firm apparatus in which to operate from.

The objective of Isis was to trigger conflict between Iraq’s Shia majority, which came to power after the invasion, and the Sunni minority, which hitherto had the reins of power. The group’s global aim was to foment division between Muslims and everyone else.

Mr Byrne is of the firm believe that the British government is making a critical mistake in its methods of combating home-grown radicalism and extremism. He says its doctrine is symptomatic of a ‘clash of civilisations’ which makes Islam the problem. Counter-extremism programmes which operate in the UK such as Prevent are based on a ‘conveyer belt’ theory that specifically highlights religious conservatism as the trigger for radicalisation. But the author, citing security and academic sources, argues that anger and resentment, often engendered by a sense of marginalisation, are more powerful factors.

We should – at the very least – recognise the true nature of the extremist threat we face. The U.S. president-elect’s declared solution to dealing with Isis including heavy bombing and barring all Muslims from entering his country are, though, the very antithesis of proper reason and rationality which seems to be in such short supply these days. For clear insight, we could do worse than reach for Liam Byrne’s excellent and revealing narrative.

–     Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating Isis and Winning the Battle of Ideas by Liam Byrne is published by Biteback at £12.99

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Arts, Books, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Book Review: The Great Convergence

the-great-convergence

BOOK REVIEW

Intro: Globalisation has developed in waves. First it was free movement of goods, then ideas. The free exchange of people will be the hard part and likely to be problematic.

FORMER US President Bill Clinton once referred to globalisation as “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”. The concept, which has had a major impact on world trade and markets, pushes countries to specialise and swap. Such a force of inertia makes countries richer, but one in which the world becomes smaller. In this book “The Great Convergence”, by Richard Baldwin, the author, a Geneva-based economist, adds an important caveat.  Like wind and water, he argues, globalisation is powerful, but can be inconstant or even destructive. True. How often have we heard and witnessed the erosion of local markets to the price-dominance of globalisation? Unless beloved nations catch up with reality, politicians will be pushed to make grave mistakes.

In an economist’s ideal world, things, ideas and people would flow freely across borders. Reality is less pragmatic, stickier, and often far less mobile in terms of movement. Historically, constraints on trade once bundled consumption and production together, limiting its growth.

Mr Baldwin’s grand theory of globalisation is of a series of unbundlings, driven by sequential collapses in the cost of moving things and ideas across cyberspace. From the domestication of the camel around 1,000 BC to the first commercial steam engine in 1712, the first great wave of globalisation unbundled production and consumption. From 1820, prices in Britain were set by international demand, and consumers were offered an increasing range in diversity of goods and services. Café goers, for example, could sip Chinese tea sweetened with Jamaican sugar.

Although moving goods became cheap, it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that expensive prices for moving ideas became more affordable for most. Mr Baldwin invites readers born in the mid-1960s to remember the price of making an international call at $5 a minute, or the $50 price of sending a single document by an overnight courier. Industries clustered by default. The centres of economic activity emerged in those countries we now know as the G7. In this form of globalisation, national groupings of ideas and workers battled for market share, and became richer in the process. Mr Baldwin uses the analogy of two sports teams swapping players to improve their performance.

Since the 1990s, however, globalisation has changed radically. The internet has lifted the cost of moving ideas, and fuelled a second unbundling. Because co-ordinating international production is now much cheaper, faster and safer, supply chains are afforded the enormous benefit of ignoring borders to go sprawling across the world. Thus, a Canadian aeroplane-maker can direct a team of Mexican engineers. Apple can combine American design with Chinese assembly lines. With many products made everywhere, trade has become, in effect, denationalised.

The pace and speed of change and the now modern ease with which rich-world companies can outsource work have eliminated the old boundaries around knowledge. But in doing so has created a new, more unsettling trade landscape. Once, textile-mill workers in South Carolina had exclusive access to American technology. Although some may suggest that they have lost out to competition from Mexican workers, more accurately they face an altogether more formidable competitor: Mexican workers have been made more productive by American know-how.

Continuing the sports analogy, Mr Baldwin implies that today’s trade is like the coach of a top team being allowed to offer his services to those less successful. The coach gets rich from the double market for his services, while the better team gets a sudden surprise from the newly skilled competition. Mr Baldwin makes the inference that discontent with globalisation stems in part from an “ill-defined sense that it is no longer a sport for national teams”. The sporting parallels offered by the author are well placed and provides the reader with an insightful grasp of the magnitude of issues that globalisation encompasses.

Raising tariffs to placate or appease voters in protecting its national goods and services is a mechanism and tool best suited to the 19th or 20th century, not one that should be utilised in tackling 21st century globalisation. Given the new world of global logistical supply chains, a tariff is like erecting a wall in the middle of a factory. Mr Baldwin’s 21st-century policies involve setting common rules and standards to make companies feel secure that their supply chains will work. These are the goals of trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or Britain’s membership of the European Union’s custom union – both of which are under threat. He says little on how to win over disgruntled voters, save a few lines on support for workers rather than jobs, and a vague plea that gains should be shared between winners and losers.

Critical also of the author is that he appears too sanguine about the politics of globalisation. A bright and rosy vision of the future imagines globalisation totally unshackled from its third constraint, as labour will invariably become replaced with robots and people being more routinely allowed to offer their services remotely.

–     The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalisation, by Richard Baldwin, is published by Belknap at $29.95 and £22.95.

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