The Court in Defeat

Abstract

The prospect of universal destruction may be exhilarating to some aesthetic souls, especially to those who do not intend to survive it and are therefore free to admire, as a spectacle, the apocalyptic setting of their own funeral. But those who must live on in the charred remainder of the world have less time for such purely spiritual experience. It is therefore not surprising that there were many in Germany who looked with dismay upon this orgy of deliberate destruction, and resolved, as far as they had any power to do so, to frustrate it. One such was Karl Kaufmann, Gauleiter of Hamburg. Having seen his city, the greatest port, and one of the most ancient and prosperous towns in Germany, shattered from the air, he was resolved not to see it still further ruined either by British shells or by Nazi dynamite. Another was Kaufmann’s closest friend, perhaps the ablest and most interesting of all the Nazi Government, Albert Speer.