Aging & Wisdom Quote by Albert Speer

A queasy confession, but also a carefully engineered one: Speer frames his moral collapse as vertigo, a physical symptom that substitutes for accountability. “I grow dizzy” is not remorse so much as self-diagnosis, a way to stage inner turmoil while keeping the facts at arm’s length. He doesn’t say he chose tanks over human beings; he says the numbers “seems to have been” more important to him. The passive construction smuggles in uncertainty, as if his priorities arrived like weather.

The sentence pivots on bookkeeping. “Number of manufactured tanks” is the grammar of technocracy: measurable outputs, managerial pride, the soothing clarity of production figures. Against that, “vanished victims of racism” is deliberately hazy. Vanished by whom, where, and how? The euphemism drains agency from the perpetrators and specificity from the murdered. It’s a moral asymmetry: precision for the machinery, fog for the people.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, built a postwar persona as the “repentant Nazi,” a cultivated exception who supposedly cared more about efficiency than ideology. This line advances that narrative: I was an apolitical manager who got lost in metrics. The subtext is exculpatory even as it gestures toward guilt; the crime becomes not participation but distraction.

What makes it work - and what makes it chilling - is its modernity. It anticipates the alibi of systems: that atrocity can be reduced to a dashboard problem, and that a talented administrator can treat mass suffering as an externality, only later “recalling” the human cost. Speer’s dizziness is the last refuge of a man trying to feel something without naming what he did.