On October 1, 1966, Margarete Speer waited at the gates of Spandau Prison in Berlin. She had been 41 when her husband was sentenced there. She was now 61. Beside her stood the defense attorney Hans Flachsner.
At midnight, Albert Speer walked out after serving his full twenty years. He barely acknowledged her. They shook hands. The man who emerged was the same one who had been arrested at Glücksburg Castle near Flensburg on May 23, 1945, when the war in Europe was barely two weeks over.
Until that moment, Margarete Speer had spent eighteen years as the wife of a senior official of the Third Reich. She had married Albert Speer in Berlin on August 28, 1928, when she was twenty-two. The marriage itself had been a slow acceptance into his family. Seven years passed before she was first invited to stay at her in-laws’ home, a delay rooted in her mother-in-law’s view that the daughter of a Heidelberg master joiner was socially inferior.
The Reich years turned her into the wife of one of the most powerful men in Germany and one of the most absent. Between 1934 and 1942, she gave birth to six children. The regime awarded her a Cross of Honor for her fertility, and 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 put it bluntly in interviews decades later: for all practical purposes, their children did not have a father. He visited Berchtesgaden rarely, mostly when Hitler was in residence, and took his holidays in the company of Eva Braun and his ministry team, not his wife. 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 and then in northern Germany, where he had attached himself to Karl Dönitz’s short-lived Flensburg government as Minister of Industry and Production. American forces reached the area on May 4. The family avoided internment as non-combatants, but the household they had known was finished. The arrest at Glücksburg ended everything they had once had.
With the Berghof under Allied control and the family villa in Berlin destroyed, Margarete packed what could be carried and moved the children to Heidelberg, where the Speer family had owned a home at Schlosswolfsbrunnenweg since 1918. But the house itself was occupied. She and the six children settled into an outhouse on the grounds of her father-in-law’s estate and lived there in cramped conditions for the next eight years. The transition was abrupt.
The children had grown up around Hitler and his entourage, with cooks, servants, and chauffeured cars. Now they shared a few rooms in an outbuilding in post-war Germany. The eldest, ten-year-old Albert Jr. , developed a severe stutter in the months after his father’s arrest.
From November 1945 through October 1946, Albert Speer stood trial at Nuremberg as one of twenty-four major defendants. On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his use of forced labor and sentenced him to twenty years. On July 18, 1947, he was transferred to Spandau Prison, registered as prisoner number five. Margarete was 41.
The youngest of her children was five. Ahead of her stretched two decades in which she would raise six children almost entirely alone, manage a household stripped of every privilege, and defend her husband’s reputation when she chose to and stay silent when she chose not to. When a reporter from Maclean’s interviewed her in early 1954, eight years into the sentence, he found her in the outhouse at Wolfsbrunnenweg, smartly dressed in a white blouse and gray skirt. 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. One decision in those years defined her relationship with her husband more than anything else. She refused to let any of the children visit him at Spandau, saying they would form a wrong impression 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. After his release, Albert Speer began an affair with a German woman thirty 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 1, 1981. Margarete outlived him by six years and died at home on Christmas Day, 1987.
She had held the household together for 36 years. After her death, even that connecting figure was gone, and the children never came together as a family. Each of the six children made a different choice with the surname they had inherited. Albert Speer Jr.
, born in Berlin on July 29, 1934, decided as a young man that he would become an architect, the same profession his father had used to design monuments for the Third Reich. 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. He won his first international prize in 1964 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, the son built around what he called human dimension, pedestrian-friendly streets, mid-rise density, ecological planning. He won few major commissions in Berlin, where the surname carried the heaviest weight, and built his reputation abroad.
His firm served as lead designer for the central axis of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, master planner for Expo 2000 in Hanover, contributed to Shanghai International Automobile City, helped Munich bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics, and served as master planner for the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup. He told Süddeutsche Zeitung 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 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.
Albert Speer Jr. died on September 15, 2017 in Frankfurt am Main, aged 83, from complications after surgery following a fall at home. His firm continues to operate. Hilde Speer, the second child, born April 17, 1936, 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 the summer of 1953, the United States refused her visa. She was seventeen 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 lived that year with the family of Dr.
Richard Day, a children’s doctor and psychologist, with her father’s identity kept officially secret in the locality. 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, a Jewish historian who had survived the war in Berlin, became a formative influence on Hilde’s life. She later wrote Lux’s biography and shaped a question she never stopped asking: what should the children of perpetrators do with what they had inherited?
She joined the Greens in the 1980s and served in the Berlin House of Representatives from 1985 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 1991, including as vice president of the chamber from 1989 to 1990. Her platform was consistent: the peace movement, women’s rights, anti-racism, and a refusal to look away from what Germany had done. In 1994, 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 founded the Zurückgeben Foundation, which 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, Berlin awarded her the Moses Mendelssohn Prize, and she received the Obermayer German Jewish History Award. She told the Associated Press she had always felt fortunate because she had known what her father was and what he had done very early, unlike many people of her generation who had no such answers about their own families.
She was still hosting refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in her Berlin home well into her 80s. Margret Speer, born June 19, 1938 and named after her mother, spent her first six years at Obersalzberg, a few hundred meters from the Berghof. She studied archaeology, married the archaeologist Hans Nissen, and eventually lived in Baghdad, Chicago, and Berlin. She taught herself photography and built a career in architectural work.
In the 1990s, she worked as a photographer on Topographie des Terrors, the permanent Berlin exhibition on the site of former Gestapo headquarters documenting the regime that had run it. In 2004, she published a memoir titled Zinzi, the Daughter Speer, Are You Speer’s Daughter? The title was the question she had been asked her entire adult life. She 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 and did not seek to exonerate him. Arnold Speer was born in 1940 with the name 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 twentieth century. 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.