Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and Minister of Armaments, had the task, among other things, of repairing bombing damage during the war, which he accomplished with a considerable degree of success. Once he was released from Spandau Prison, I asked him what would have been Hitler's reaction to an air raid against a German city as a reprisal for “say, the transport of Jews which left the other day to one of the killing centers in the East.” Speer answered: “He would have exploded. He would have hit the roof. He always blamed the Jews for the bombing raids against German cities. Now he would have had his proof [in printed leaflets supplied by the Allies – S.A.]. He then would have reacted. He would have taken his revenge, and even accelerated the ‘Final Solution.’”

To my astonished question of how the Holocaust could have been “accelerated” when the Nazis already invested in it an enormous effort and diverted manpower, vital transportation facilities, and other irreplaceable resources at the expense of their war machine to accomplish the murder (an image that was created following Hannah Arendt's arguments against the Judenräte, who allegedly had done nothing to at least make the smooth working of the machinery of destruction more difficult since the initial mass killings in Russia), Speer answered with facts and calculations that he had prepared in advance of our interview: “It is not true that the ‘Final Solution’ required an extraordinary effort of any special significance – and hence it could have been accelerated.