Читать книгу Golden Boy - Paula Astridge - Страница 6

PROLOGUE

When his sentence was handed down, Albert Speer was shocked. He had expected the death penalty.

So had his Nuremberg Defence Counsel, Dr Hans Flachsner, who thought he had no hope of winning his case. But guilty as Speer was, it appeared that Flachsner had done just that and pulled off the coup of the century. For what else could it be, considering the enormity of Speer’s crimes? Flachsner would have congratulated himself had he not seen the odd look on his client’s face. That astutely intelligent face, whose ashen-white expression was not one of unmitigated relief, but of inexplicable confusion and disappointment. A look that said: ‘I’ve been underestimated!’

Receiving a sentence of 20 years behind bars felt to Speer like he was being sold short. A sad second prize for him which killed his will to live through them; cruelly stripping him of martyrdom and shackling him to a horror far worse than death: a lifetime of earthbound tedium and obscurity. That was a hard pill to swallow. As a condemned war criminal, he had resigned himself to death by hanging. Having given up on life he wasn’t at all sure he wanted it back.

Because how was such a man as he to survive in a state of mundane anonymity after having learnt to live only in and for the limelight? For the last fifteen power-packed years he’d had direct access to both unlimited power and fear. He’d even been privileged enough to share centre stage with the star of the show.

But now that star, Adolf Hitler, was dead. Like a blinding surge of electricity, Hitler had burst onto the scene to show them the light. Then he had suddenly flicked the switch and turned himself off, condemning them all to the dark and leaving Speer — the closest to Hitler’s heart — to stand alone on an empty stage. Footlights dimmed, curtain down, with an audience that had stopped applauding. Their colossal production that once played to full houses and standing ovation had disintegrated into a pathetic piece of human tragedy.

Exit the hero and they had all lost the plot. No one more so than Speer, who was now fit for nothing but to shrivel up and die; an end which would have suited everyone’s purpose. Especially the executioner’s, whose adept hands would tie noose knots for the other 10 men found guilty of war crimes; those of the Third Reich’s rat pack who were bad and powerful enough to have warranted the death sentence, but not as clever as Speer who had side-stepped it.

Speer thought it was a pity that he hadn’t been quite as clever back in the beginning when that fatal thought had first crossed his mind to dabble in politics. What on earth had possessed him, an architect, to stumble onto such an unlikely career path? He had no excuse for the mistake he had made when that signpost at the fork in his road had clearly pointed the direction he should go. It’s faded inscription indicating the narrow one to the right and telling him to ‘walk this way’ and not look back.

It had been entirely his own choice to veer to the left and follow the more twisted path with its glitzy Nazi sign, even though he knew that he was tempting fate and playing a dangerous game. A game that, at some point, he suspected he’d have to play hard and fast to save his life. It just never occurred to him that it might cost him his soul.

In the heated present situation, however, with the Nuremberg courtroom pregnant with silence around him, it wasn’t his soul, but his integrity that was in question: ‘You sold us out, you bastard. You betrayed us!’

The accusation was screamed out loud by one of those ten condemned men, who, threatening to back it up with a physical attack on Speer, had to be dragged forcibly from the courtroom by two heavily armed guards.

‘I didn’t, I promise you. I did not betray you.’

From that point on, however, it was widely assumed not only by the unfortunate 10, but also by the world as a whole that Speer did betray them. The general consensus was that he swung a deal to save his own skin. But if they only knew, that what he had done, or more importantly, what he had deliberately failed to do, went further to save their skins than his.

The truth was that in the latter half of the war he had put his life on the line time and time again to save the world from annihilation. At the risk of stirring Hitler’s fury and savage retribution, he had disobeyed and actively countermanded the Fuhrer’s orders to that end.

For a time there, it had been well within Speer’s reach to bring the world to its knees. Yet instead, he extended those capable hands of his to keep it on its feet. Nonetheless, the shame and guilt were still there, haunting and bewildering him as they took him back to his cell. His tired thoughts were tumbling over themselves, mentally jousting for some kind of self-justification.

After all, it wasn’t his fault that his military subordinate, Fritz Sauckel, was going to the gallows in his place. He had no idea why he, as Sauckel’s commanding officer, had been spared. Not when he had told the court that he, Albert Speer, was guilty. He had owned up and confessed as much to anyone and everyone who would listen.

Most strategically, he confessed it to the twelve jurors. Standing in the witness box, he admitted it quite calmly. With his hands holding fast to the thigh-high wooden railing, he leant his body a little forward for emphasis when he said it: ‘I am guilty. I am guilty. I take full responsibility for the crimes.’

That was an admission that those other ten refused to make. Theirs was an evasion of responsibility that had nothing to do with cowardice, but with their sincere belief that they were innocent. All of them insisted that they had fought for a truth and were unfairly condemned to die for it. Yet to Speer it was more unfair still to be kept alive to live for it.

First though, he had to live through the appalling night of terror that preceded their executions. In vain, he tried to deafen his ears to the nightmarish sound of those ‘ten dead men walking’. All of them, in rank and file and with their accusing eyes turned in his direction, shuffled past his cell and down the corridor to their doom — the execution chamber which was their last point of call on Earth.

That night, Speer’s courage failed him. With his frantic, white-knuckled grasp on his cell bars to steady himself, he realised his words had been cheap. Who was he fooling? He wasn’t prepared to die either for The Cause or for his part in it. The truth was that he was paralysed with fear, petrified at the prospect of having to die like that. His trembling legs buckled at the knees as he fell to the floor to pray. He rattled off a feverish prayer of thanks; not for those 10 men who, at that very moment, were coming face to face with their own mortality, but because he wasn’t the one with the rope around his neck.

Coming to terms with his own limitations, however, did not help block out the horror. He heard it all — his compatriots’ every last word as they went down fighting. Their final pleas for mercy, their gurgled moans of agony, and worst of all — that ‘lump-in-the-throat, flag-flying’ moment, when the last man stood defiant; saluted and voiced his undying loyalty to Leader and Cause.

Then followed the sounds of silence — an eerie, sickening quiet that said they were all dead. Gone. Just like that. Their spirits quickly dispatched. All ten of those vicious men whose voices and vices had dictated the ways of the world had been bundled onto an express elevator to Hell.

In their wake was a void, a loud, accusing silence that roared in Speer’s ears and spurred the thud of his heart into gallop. Its pounding beat pacing the chaos of his conscience and causing its guilty inner voice to shriek out: ‘Shame, shame, shame!’

If he’d had the means to do it he could have slit his wrists right then and there. But the guards had closed off that escape hatch by stripping his cell clean. They had removed from it any implement that might serve as a means of suicide, which was an act of morbid diligence on their part. However in Speer’s case it was wasted effort. Whether through cowardice or courage, he was a man determined to survive.

That’s why, after sitting for three full days on the edge of his prison bunk in a mind-numbing despondency, he managed to drag himself up and out of his deep depression. He had no choice. He was stuck in this dark pit of despair for the rest of his life. The stark, grey nothingness of his new world’s stone walls were to be his home for the next 20 years.

The reality was that he had no present and no future. But he did have the past; and that they could never take from him. He would frame it, focus on it and cling to its irresistible memories until the day he died.