Dec 8, 2015 2 min read

I didn’t have the good fortune to sit in a class led by Leonard Siegel, a retired California University of Pennsylvania professor, but I was glad to read the article in Monday’s Observer-Reporter in which he talked about his interviews with Nazi official Albert Speer and said Speer “was a con artist and a slick character.” What Speer did as Germany’s minister of armaments during World War II was unforgivable.

My view of Speer evolved over the years. I once wished this decent “gentleman” had been on our side. But the more I read, the more I felt he was no less guilty of crimes against humanity than Fritz Sauckel, the Nazi official who, per Speer’s demand, rounded up 5 million foreign workers, working under the cruelest conditions, to keep the Nazi war machine going. Sauckel was deservedly hanged after Nuremberg trial and Speer got a mere 20 years in prison.

Speer said he had no knowledge of Holocaust during the war, a laughable assertion. Being an intimate friend of Adolf Hitler, he was one of the two people who accompanied Hitler on his trip to Paris as a tourist in June 1940. He even made a speech at the notorious Posen Conference in 1943, where the Final Solution was outlined.

German scientist Fritz Haber once said, “During peacetime, a scientist belongs to the world, but during wartime, he belongs to his country.” This is true in a sense, and it can even be applied to professions other than science. But when one’s government is led by an evil figure or party, it’s another story.

Speer served that evil for personal glory and power. He was the accomplice of the crime. Writer and activist Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, has often been criticized that he is unwilling to forgive. I don’t blame him. How can one forgive the crime against humanity committed by Hitler and helped by Speer?

Jer-Yuan Tsai

Waynesburg