Echoes of the Holocaust

Albert Speer has an absorbed and patient look as he answers questions about his complicity in Hitler’s war crimes, through hour after hour of Marcel Ophuls’s documentary, The Memory of Justice. “What makes you do this?” Ophuls finally asks. “It can’t be pleasant for you to give these interviews; you have a life of your own. Why do you go on?” And Speer replies: “It’s in this sense, I suppose, that I’m still Hitler’s prisoner. After all, I was there. I can’t stop being a witness.” We are angry with Speer because he does not satisfy our need to see a bad man, and because we have to believe him: someone so conscientious cannot be without a conscience. Yet...