Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Speer’s meteoric rise in the 1930s had rested on shrewd exploitation of the would-be architect Hitler’s building mania, coupled with his own driving ambition and undoubted organizational talent. Hitler liked Speer. ‘He is an artist and has a spirit akin to mine,’ he said. ‘He is a building-person like me, intelligent, modest, and not an obstinate military-head.’²⁸ Speer later remarked that he was the nearest Hitler came to having a friend.²⁹ Now, Speer was in exactly the right place — close to Hitler — when a successor to Todt was needed. Six hours after the Reich Minister’s sudden death, Speer was appointed to replace him in all his offices.³⁰ The appointment came as a surprise to many — including, if we are to take his own version of accounts at face value, Speer himself.³¹ But Speer was certainly anticipating succeeding Todt in construction work — and possibly more.³² At any rate, he lost no time in using Hitler’s authority to establish for himself more extensive powers than Todt had ever enjoyed.³³ Speer would soon enough have to battle his way through the jungle of rivalries and intrigues which constituted the governance of the Third Reich. But once Hitler, the day after returning to Berlin for Todt’s state funeral on 12 February (at which he himself delivered the oration as his eyes welled with, perhaps crocodile, tears),³⁴ had publicly backed Speer’s supremacy in armaments production in a speech to leaders of the armaments industries, the new minister, still not quite thirty-eight years of age, found that ‘I could do within the widest limits practically what I wanted’.³⁵ Building on the changes his predecessor had initiated, adding his own organizational flair and ruthless drive, and drawing on his favoured standing with Hitler, Speer proved an inspired choice. Over the next two years, despite intensified Allied bombing and the fortunes of war ebbing strongly away from Germany, he presided over a doubling of armaments output.³⁶

Hitler was full of confidence when Goebbels had the chance to speak at length with him during his stay in Berlin following Todt’s funeral. After the travails of the winter, the Dictator had reason to feel as if the corner was turned. During the very days that he was in Berlin the British were suffering two mighty blows to their prestige. Two German battleships, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, had steamed out of Brest and, under the very noses of the British, passed through the English Channel with minimal damage, heading for safer moorings at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. Hitler could scarcely contain his delight.³⁷ At the same time, the news was coming in from the Far East of the imminent fall of Singapore. Hitler expressed his admiration for the Japanese.³⁸ But it was tinged with a feeling that the British were losing their Empire when they could have accepted his ‘Offer’ and fought alongside instead of against Germany. ‘This is wonderful, though perhaps also sad, news,’ he had said to the Romanian leader Anton-escu a few days earlier.³⁹ He told Ribbentrop not to overdo the pronouncements on the fall of Singapore. ‘We’ve got to think in centuries,’ he apparently said. ‘One day the showdown with the yellow race will come.’⁴⁰ Goebbels noted a degree of resignation that the Japanese advances meant ‘the driving-back of the white man’ in the Far East.⁴¹ But, despite his racial prejudices, Hitler took a pragmatic view. ‘I’m accused of sympathizing with the Japanese,’ his secretary recalled him saying. ‘What does sympathizing mean? The Japanese are yellow-skinned and slit-eyed. But they are fighting against the Americans and English, and so are useful to Germany.’⁴² His enemy’s enemy was his friend, in other words.