The postwar cliché for Nazi buck-passing has always been “I was just following orders.” Adolf Hitler’s court favorite, Albert Speer, got away with the opposite position: “I was just giving orders.”
Speer controlled the production end of Hitler’s war machine and the government engineering-construction company that built the concentration camps. But he insisted he never saw any atrocities. How was a Reichsminister to know that his inferiors turned Russian P.O.W.’s into slaves and put Jews into gas chambers?
