The gates of Spandau Prison opened at midnight on October 1st, 1966. Margarete Speer stood there with her husband’s defense attorney, Hans Flachsner, waiting for the man she had not lived with for over two decades. Albert Speer walked out after serving his full 20-year sentence. He barely acknowledged her.
They shook hands. After everything—six children raised alone, years of defending a man she could not even visit—that was the greeting she received. Margarete was 41 years old when her husband was sentenced. She was 61 when he came back.
In between, her entire life had been reshaped by choices he made and consequences she carried alone. In the final week of April 1945, Margarete was at the Berghof complex on Obersalzberg with five of her six children. Her husband was elsewhere—first in Berlin, then in northern Germany, where he had attached himself to Karl Dönitz’s short-lived Flensburg government as Minister of Industry and Production. Albert Jr.
was 10, Hilde was nine, Fritz was seven, Margaret was six, Arnold was four, and Ernst was two. American forces reached the area on May 4th, 1945. The family avoided internment as non-combatants, but the household they had known was finished. On May 23rd, British troops arrested Albert Speer at Glücksburg Castle near Flensburg, where he had been cooperating with the US Strategic Bombing Survey.
The arrest ended Margarete’s 18 years as the wife of a senior official of the Reich. With the Berghof under Allied control and the family villa in Berlin destroyed, she packed what could be carried and moved the children to Heidelberg, her own birthplace, where the Speer family had owned a home at Schlosswolfsbrunnenweg since 1918. But what waited for them was not the villa they had imagined. The house itself was occupied.
Margarete and the six children settled into an outhouse on the grounds of her father-in-law’s estate, where they would live in cramped conditions for the next eight years. The transition was abrupt. They had grown up around Hitler and his entourage, with cooks and servants and chauffeured cars. Now they were sharing a few rooms in an outbuilding in post-war Germany.
Ten-year-old Albert Jr. began developing a severe stutter in the months after his father’s arrest. Her husband’s case dominated the next 18 months. From November 1945 through October 1946, Albert Speer stood trial at Nuremberg as one of 24 major defendants.
On October 1st, 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his use of forced labor and sentenced him to 20 years. On July 18th, 1947, he was transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin and registered as prisoner number five. Margarete was 41. The youngest of her children was five.
Ahead of her stretched 20 years in which she would raise six children almost entirely alone, manage a household stripped of every privilege it had known, defend her husband’s reputation when she chose to, stay silent when she chose not to, and decide on her own terms what her family’s relationship with a man in a Berlin prison cell would look like. Of all the people Albert Speer left behind in 1945, no one’s life was reshaped more by his choices than hers. Seven years passed between her wedding and the first time Margarete was invited to stay at her in-laws’ home. She had married Albert Speer in Berlin on August 28th, 1928.
The daughter of a Heidelberg master joiner who employed about 50 workers and served on the town council, she had married into a family whose mother considered the Webers socially inferior. The seven-year wait for a welcome was the first lesson of her marriage in what she would and would not be allowed to expect. The Reich years made her the wife of one of the most powerful men in Germany and one of the most absent. Between 1934 and 1942, she had six children.
The regime awarded her a Cross of Honor for her fertility. Hitler gave the family a villa on the Obersalzberg in 1935. None of it changed the central fact of the marriage. Speer was almost never there.
Margarete herself put it bluntly in interviews decades later. For all practical purposes, the children did not have a father. He visited Berchtesgaden rarely, mostly when Hitler was in residence. He took his holidays with Eva Braun and his ministry team, not his wife.
After 1945, she became the only parent the children had. A reporter who interviewed her in early 1954, with Speer eight years into his sentence, found her in the outhouse at Wolfsbrunnenweg. Smartly dressed in a white blouse and gray skirt, she defended her husband to a foreign journalist with measured restraint. She refused to argue the case at Nuremberg.
She did not deny slave labor. She asked instead, quietly, whether eight years was not already enough. She had been raising six children alone since the surrender and would do so for 12 more years. She made one decision in those years that defined her relationship with her husband as much as anything else.
She refused to let any of the children visit him at Spandau. They would form a wrong impression, she told the reporter, of a father they had hardly known anyway. The children only began visiting in their teenage years on their own initiative. Albert Jr.
later said he saw his father in Spandau once a year. Within a few years of his release, Speer began an affair with a German woman 30 years his junior, married to an Englishman living in London. Margarete and the children knew. She remained at the Heidelberg house.
He died in the woman’s company in London on September 1st, 1981. Margarete outlived him by six years and died at home on Christmas day, 1987. The stutter arrived in 1945 when Albert Speer Jr. was 10 years old and his father was being arrested as a war criminal.
It stayed with him into his 30s and would only loosen its grip after a long bus trip across the United States in 1964, when he forced himself to speak to strangers in a language that was not his own. He had been born in Berlin on July 29th, 1934, and by the time he turned three, his father was Hitler’s chief architect. He grew up in the outhouse at Wolfsbrunnenweg with his mother and his siblings, finished school, and made the decision that would define the rest of his life. He would become an architect.
It was the same profession that his father had used to design monuments for the Third Reich. His grandfather had practiced in Mannheim and his great-grandfather before that. He took the longest possible route into the family trade. He worked first as a carpenter, beginning his apprenticeship while his father was still in Spandau, then enrolled at evening classes before entering architecture full-time at the Technical University of Munich in 1955.
In 1964, he won his first international prize and opened his own office. In 1977, he was appointed professor of urban planning at the University of Kaiserslautern, and in 1984, he founded Büro Albert Speer & Partner in Frankfurt am Main, which grew into one of Germany’s most respected urban planning firms. The contrast with his father’s work was deliberate at every level. Where Speer senior had designed at inhuman scale to make individuals feel small, Speer junior built around what he called human dimension—pedestrian-friendly streets, mid-rise density, ecological planning.
He won few major commissions in Berlin, where his surname carried the heaviest weight, and built his reputation abroad. His firm was lead designer for the central axis of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, master planner for Expo 2000 in Hanover, contributed to Shanghai International Automobile City, part of Munich’s bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics, and master planner for the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup. The irony was not lost on critics. The son of Hitler’s architect repeatedly worked for governments that drew comparisons to the regime he had spent his career trying to escape.
In interviews, he was direct about the arithmetic of his life. He told Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had tried his entire life to separate himself from his father and acknowledged that the man he had visited once a year in Spandau and who came out in 1966 was as foreign to him as one of his university professors. He told Reuters he had never considered changing his name. He was the eldest son of that father and saw no reason to take another.
The name had not helped him. Albert Speer Jr. died on September 15th, 2017 in Frankfurt am Main, aged 83, from complications following surgery after a fall at home. His firm continues to operate.
In the summer of 1953, the United States refused her visa. Hilde Speer was 17, the second of the six children, and had been awarded an American Field Service Scholarship to study at Hastings High School on the Hudson, just outside New York City. The decision was reversed only after public protest, including offers of hospitality from American Jewish families. She spent the year living with the family of Dr.
Richard Day, a children’s doctor and psychologist, with the identity of her father kept officially secret in the locality. Her father’s name had become a question that opened with no and required others to argue for yes. Born on April 17th, 1936, Hilde was nine when the war ended, old enough to remember Hitler’s hand on her shoulder in photographs at the Berghof and young enough to be reshaped by what came after. In Heidelberg, she attended a school originally founded by Elisabeth von Thadden, a resistance figure executed by the regime in 1944.
One of her teachers there, Dora Lux, was a Jewish historian who had survived the war in Berlin. Lux became one of the formative influences on Hilde’s life. She would later write a biography of her and shaped a question Hilde never stopped asking: What should the children of perpetrators do with what they had inherited? Politics came next.
She joined the Greens during their breakthrough years in the 1980s and was elected to the Berlin House of Representatives, serving from 1985 to ’87 and again from 1989 to ’91. From 1989 to 1990, she served as the chamber’s vice president. Her platform was consistent: peace movement, women’s rights, anti-racism, and a refusal to look away from what Germany had done. She married, raised children, became an education professor, and then in 1994 did something that defined her more than any office ever had.
That year she inherited several paintings from her father’s collection. Investigation suggested they had probably not been looted from Jewish owners, but she could not bring herself to keep them. She sold the paintings and with the proceeds founded the Zurückgeben Foundation, a German word meaning give back or return. The foundation funded grants to Jewish women working in the arts and sciences in Germany.
By 2019, it had supported more than 130 projects with around 500,000 euros. That same year, the city of Berlin awarded her the Moses Mendelssohn Prize for her work promoting tolerance, and she received the Obermayer German Jewish History Award. She gave a phrase to the Associated Press that captured a position none of her siblings ever quite reached. She had always felt fortunate, she said, because she had known what her father was and what he had done very early.
Many men and women of her generation had no such answers about their own families. She was still hosting refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in her home in Berlin well into her 80s. In the 1990s, the photographer working on the Berlin exhibition Topographie des Terrors—a permanent installation on the site of former Gestapo headquarters, documenting the regime that had run it—was Albert Speer’s daughter. Margret had been born on June 19th, 1938, named after her mother, and had spent the first six years of her life at Obersalzberg, a few hundred meters from the Berghof.
She studied archaeology at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, married the archaeologist Hans Nissen on April 14th, 1962, and lived in Baghdad from 1965 to ’67, then in Chicago, and finally in Berlin, where she taught herself photography and built a career in architectural work. In 2004, she published her memoir, “Zinzi – Tochter Speer, Are You Speer’s Daughter? ” through Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Munich. The title was the question she had been asked her entire adult life.
The book described a father who was egocentric, distant, and far more invested in constructing the image he left behind than in being present for the children who carried his name. She named his crimes plainly. She did not seek to exonerate him. Arnold Speer was born in 1940.
His original name was Adolf, given in the year his father’s career reached its peak. After the war, the family quietly renamed him Arnold. Public information about his life is limited. By various accounts, he became a community doctor and stayed out of public view.
Two of the six made a choice that left even less behind. Fritz, born in 1937, and Ernst, born in 1942, gave no interviews, wrote no memoirs, and made no public statements about their father. In a family where the surname guaranteed a question every time it was spoken, silence was its own kind of answer. Six children inherited one of the heaviest surnames of the 20th century, and each made a different choice with it.
One designed cities for the modern world. One funded restitution for those their father’s regime had harmed. One photographed the regime’s archives and named what her father had done. Three said almost nothing at all.
After his death, they lived in different cities, worked in different professions, and never came together as a family. Their mother had held the household together for 36 years. After 1987, even that connecting figure was gone.
