88 REFLECTIONS ON CHARACTER AND LEADERSHIP
itself, in the fi nal year of the war, rather than relinquish power and admit
defeat.
Albert Speer, Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production,
recalled Hitler ’ s reaction when presented with Speer ’ s conviction that
the war was lost:In an icy tone [he] continued: ‘ If the war is lost, the people will be lost
also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need
for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even
these things. For the nation has proved itself to be the weaker, and the
future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. In any case only those
who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already
been killed. ’ (Speer, 1970 , p. 557)Two days later, Hitler confi rmed this attitude in his order to implement
a scorched - earth policy in the face of the advancing allied forces:‘ All military, transportation, communications, industrial, and supply facil-
ities, as well as resources within the Reich ’ were to be destroyed. The
message was the death sentence for the German people ... The conse-
quences would have been inconceivable: For an indefi nite period there
would have been no electricity, no gas, no pure water, no coal, no trans-
portation. All railroad facilities, canals, locks, docks, ships, and locomo-
tives destroyed. Even where industry had not been demolished, it could
not have produced anything for lack of electricity, gas, and water. No
storage facilities, no telephone communications — in short, a country
thrown back into the Middle Ages. (Speer, 1970 , p. 560)At the end of his life, Hitler was prepared to lay waste the country he
had spent so much time and energy molding to his image of the most
technologically and architecturally brilliant, militarily powerful, and
culturally imposing on earth. The cynicism, deceit, and brutal exploita-
tion that lay behind his imposture were fi nally exposed, fatally late in
the day.
Yet the spell that this most seductive of Pied Pipers cast over his
followers survived, battered but more or less intact, until the end. It
compelled Speer, disgraced and demoted, to risk his life and return to
Berlin to say a last goodbye to the F ü hrer :The overpowering desire to see him once more betrays the ambivalence
of my feelings. For rationally I was convinced that it was urgently neces-
sary, although already much too late, for Hitler ’ s life to come to an end.
Underlying everything I had done to oppose him in the past months had
been the desire to prevent the annihilation that Hitler seemed bent on ...