"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"
About this Quote
The sentence performs a familiar sleight of hand: confession without culpability. Speer, speaking as a technocrat of genocide, offers a portrait of himself as the clear-eyed observer of “extraordinary effect” while studiously misplacing agency. The grammar is the tell. “These two gases… had” the effect; “there was no respirator”; “no protection… that we knew of.” The verbs make the horror sound like weather, not policy. Humans disappear into passive construction, leaving chemistry to shoulder the blame.
His “all I know” is not humility but boundary-drawing. It shrinks responsibility to a narrow technical register: efficacy, countermeasures, soldier vulnerability. That last pivot is the most revealing subtext. He frames the moral problem as German troops being “unable to protect themselves,” not civilians being selected, gassed, and erased. It’s a defensive empathy, calibrated to the in-group, and it doubles as an alibi: if even soldiers couldn’t defend against it, then the use of gas reads as an impersonal, unstoppable weapon rather than an administratively engineered murder process.
Context matters because Speer’s postwar persona depended on sounding like the repentant “good Nazi” who merely optimized production and saw too little. This quote fits that strategy: precise enough to seem candid, vague enough to keep intent offstage. The chilling effectiveness is in the way it translates atrocity into a logistical problem, the ethical equivalent of wiping fingerprints while narrating the scene in high-resolution detail.
His “all I know” is not humility but boundary-drawing. It shrinks responsibility to a narrow technical register: efficacy, countermeasures, soldier vulnerability. That last pivot is the most revealing subtext. He frames the moral problem as German troops being “unable to protect themselves,” not civilians being selected, gassed, and erased. It’s a defensive empathy, calibrated to the in-group, and it doubles as an alibi: if even soldiers couldn’t defend against it, then the use of gas reads as an impersonal, unstoppable weapon rather than an administratively engineered murder process.
Context matters because Speer’s postwar persona depended on sounding like the repentant “good Nazi” who merely optimized production and saw too little. This quote fits that strategy: precise enough to seem candid, vague enough to keep intent offstage. The chilling effectiveness is in the way it translates atrocity into a logistical problem, the ethical equivalent of wiping fingerprints while narrating the scene in high-resolution detail.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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