Of all the Nazis in Hitler’s inner circle, only Albert Speer escaped the hangman’s noose. How was he able to achieve this when the armaments’ industry used slave labour on an epic scale?
Unlike most of Hitler’s circle, Albert Speer and Hermann Goering were not regarded as archetypal Nazi thugs. Most such as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy until his arcane mission to Britain in 1941, were wastrels and professional thugs in keeping with their narrow-minded views on society and the solutions to social problems. If there had to be a psychological attribute for being a member of the Nazi inner circle, that trait would be sociopathy.