Speer's Confessions At His Last Supper

Mayfair, August 1981, and Hitler’s industry and architecture chief is revealing why the Allies won the war. Next day, he is dead.His host, historian Norman Stone, looks back.

It was in the end too much for a well-intentioned German friend of mine, passing through Oxford last summer.

Amazed by the sheer inefficiency of so much in England – the dustbins, the railways, etc – he said, ‘How did you manage to win the war?’

One answer is contained in Martin Kitchen’s new book about Albert Speer, Hitler’s favoured architect, who ran a large part of the German war economy.

When large matters came up, the Nazis were amazingly inefficient. They really lost the war in the air. Hitler had threatened, in the Thirties, that he would smash his enemies into the ground by bombing, and took great pride in his air force. But there were seventeen different and competing Luftwaffe research establishments, and allocation of scarce materials was so slipshod that, in the Messerschmitt works in Bavaria, valuable aluminium was used to make ladders. Germany never did manage to create a long-range bomber.

True, Hitler in 1939–40 brought offa huge victory in France, but as A J P Taylor – one so often comes back to him – noted, this only showed that armies would lose battles if they were led badly enough.

The British performance was much better. Winning the Battle of the Atlantic, against the U-Boats, was probably the most important priority, and great bravery and ingenuity went into that. But a third of the war economy, for better or worse, went into the air war, especially the bombing of Germany’s cities.

This is a still fought-over aspect of the British war effort. On the whole, common mortals would say that the Germans, having started it with Warsaw,Rotterdam and the Blitz, had it coming to them. This was a view supported by the Queen Mother and Margaret Thatcher in 1992, when they backed the erection of a statue – outside St Clement Danes, the RAF church on the Strand – to ‘Bomber’ Harris, destroyer of German cities.