Berlin
Nazi architect Albert Speer did, in fact, know about Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a newly discovered letter proves. Speer always insisted that he had left a top Nazi meeting at Posen before Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and SS, announced the Final Solution. Because Speer was able to claim ignorance of the Holocaust, he was known after the war as “the good Nazi” and was spared execution in the Nuremberg trials. But in a 1971 letter to the widow of a Belgian resistance leader, part of a collection recently found in Britain, Speer admits he lied. “There is no doubt,” he said, “I was present as Himmler announced on Oct. 6, 1943, that all Jews would be killed.”
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