The 30 Minute Rule begins November 19 at 7:00 PM EST. An Initial Bid Must Be Placed By November 19 at 6:00 PM EST To Participate After 6:00 PM EST
ALS in German, signed “Speer,” seven pages on four sheets, 8 x 13, no date but circa November 1945. Handwritten letter to his Nuremberg defense counsel, Dr. Hans Flächsner, written in the earliest weeks of the Nuremberg trial, shortly after Speer had read the opening address delivered by chief American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson on November 21, 1945. Speer lays out, in his own words and before the bulk of the evidence had even been heard, why he did not intend to mount the kind of defense his co-defendants were building around him.
He opens by telling Flächsner he can no longer keep his own reasoning to himself (translated): "The more we approach the time at which the basic line of our defense in this case must be made clear before the public, the clearer I feel what position I have to take…I want to use the Sunday to give you my point in writing."
What follows is not a legal strategy memo, but a confession of moral exhaustion: "In this court case I am not as a private person accused but as a former minister of the state. Even though the former system has very little to admire in it, and since therefore there is little cause to be proud of this activity, there is still the following fact: Millions of soldiers have been killed for this false ideal, and hundred thousands of men, women, and children in our cities have perished terribly. Today untold Germans wander without a home on the roads and have nothing else to expect than a pitiable life."
He goes on: "That is what depresses me and what makes it impossible for me to defend myself for my person with the necessary energy. Everything we talk about appears to me, seen on the background of the whole, as unimportant and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I am often too weak to stick to this line with consequence. I shall only then be able to do so if you support me also in this respect and cut off any attempt on my side to offer any petty defense."
Speer then frames the only purpose he is willing to claim for his own testimony, not acquittal, but a reckoning aimed at his own countrymen: "There is only one aim in this case: to lead to reason those in the German nation who still believe in the past time. That must be the main purpose of my actions here. But I can do even that only with inner decency if I do not take cowardly care of my own person, for otherwise every word looks like dastardly flight from responsibility."
The letter closes with Speer's read of Jackson's opening statement, noting with something close to relief that the American prosecution had named him only in passing, "mentioned 'only' three times," and running through, point by point, how the case for conspiracy was shaping up against him and his co-defendants, naming Neurath, Schacht, von Papen, Raeder, Dönitz, and Jodl. He is candid that the overall picture is "not too unfavorable," even as he catalogs the specific accusations still to come.
In a postscript, he adds: "I am proud to have acted successfully against the will of Hitler in respect of enormous destructions in Germany ever since June 1944, also in other European countries. If I had thereby as a kind of traitor to Hitler, then this happened with those unprincipled means which were alone possible in an unprincipled conduct of the affairs of state. The only reproach I can make myself is that I have not done my duty as a German earlier and more thoroughly. None of the surviving leaders of this period has however a moral right to condemn my actions. I leave it to history to evaluate the actions of the individual persons." In fine condition, with light toning and creasing to the top edge.
Among the defendants at Nuremberg, Speer stands apart for having said, in open court, that he accepted a share of collective responsibility for the regime rather than hiding behind superior orders, a position that later scholarship has treated with real skepticism given how selectively he applied it. This letter shows that posture forming in private, addressed only to his own lawyer, weeks before he ever spoke those words for the tribunal's record. He does not deny the war's catastrophe or minimize what happened to the millions of soldiers and civilians he references in the letter's opening lines.
What he withholds, even here, is any specific accounting of his own actions inside the machinery that produced those deaths, the slave labor, the concentration camp workers, the war economy he ran. The self-awareness in this letter, that fighting the charges point by point would look "unimportant and ridiculous" against the scale of what Germany had done, sits alongside a defense strategy built, from this very moment, around exactly that kind of careful, document-by-document rebuttal of the individual charges against him.
This item is Pre-Certified by PSA/DNA
Buy a third-party letter of authenticity for
(inquire for price)
*This item has been pre-certified by a trusted third-party authentication service, and by placing a bid on this item, you agree to accept the opinion of this authentication service. If you wish to have an opinion rendered by a different authenticator of your choosing, you must do so prior to your placing of any bid. RR Auction is not responsible for differing opinions submitted 30 days after the date of the sale.
Third-party authentication service applies only to signatures and handwriting, and does not cover the addition of sketches, artwork, musical quotations, etc.
