Quotes by Albert Speer

“One seldom recognizes the devil when he has his hand on your shoulder.”

“I would rather not tell you here things which every German has at heart.”

“In all my activities as Armament Minister I never once visited a labor camp, and cannot, therefore, give any information about them.”

“It is certain that concentration camps had a bad reputation with us.”

“It is clear that a worker who has not enough food cannot achieve a good work output. I already said yesterday that every head of a plant, and I too at the top, was naturally interested in having well-fed and satisfied workers, because badly fed, dissatisfied workers make more mistakes and produce poor results.”

“No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.”

“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.”

“I knew that the National Socialist Party was anti-Semitic, and I knew that the Jews were being evacuated from Germany.”

“Temporarily in 1934 I became a department head in the German Labor Front and dealt with the improvement of labor conditions in German factories. Then I was in charge of public works on the staff of Hess. I gave up both these activities in 1941.”

“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.”

“Cases of sickness made up a very small percentage which in my opinion was normal. However, propaganda pamphlets dropped from aircraft were telling the workers to feign illness, and detailed instructions were given to them on how to do it.”

“I assert that a great number of the foreign workers in our country did their work quite voluntarily once they had come to Germany.”

“Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.”

“The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”

I do not think that in those early days of September, Hitler was fully aware that he had irrevocably unleashed a world war. He had merely meant to move one step further. To be sure, he was ready to accept the risk associated with that step, just as he had been a year before during the Czech crisis; but he had prepared himself only for the risk, not really for the great war.

For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethes.