Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Speer

Normal, Speer insists, right up until someone else starts narrating the numbers. The line is a miniature of his whole postwar project: present himself as the cool technocrat watching a factory’s vital signs, then blame any irregular pulse on an external infection called “propaganda.” It’s managerial prose with a moral alibi baked in.

The specific intent is defensive. Speer wants sickness to read as a minor, expected fluctuation in an industrial system he supposedly ran efficiently and humanely. “In my opinion” does quiet work here: it turns coercion and collapse into a matter of interpretation, a supervisor’s judgement call. He isn’t describing bodies; he’s describing an accounting problem.

The subtext is harsher. The only way “feign illness” becomes a central worry is if illness itself is already politically charged: a last available form of resistance for people with no leverage except their capacity to stop producing. Speer’s framing flips that. He recasts forced laborers, prisoners, and battered civilians not as exhausted or traumatized but as opportunists coached by enemy leaflets. The victim becomes a malingerer; the malingerer becomes evidence of foreign manipulation.

Context matters because Speer’s “criminal” profession isn’t ornamental. As Hitler’s armaments minister, he oversaw a war economy increasingly dependent on enslaved labor and brutal conditions. After the war, he cultivated the image of the “repentant Nazi” who didn’t know, didn’t see, only optimized. This quote is optimization as evasion: a tidy explanation that launders suffering into sabotage, and turns the machinery of exploitation into the story of how others made it run poorly.