When the gates of Spandau Prison opened at midnight on October 1st, 1966, Margarete Speer was standing in the cold with her husband’s defense attorney, Hans Flachsner. She was 61 years old and had not lived with her husband since 1945. When Albert Speer walked out after serving his full 20-year sentence, he barely acknowledged her. They shook hands.
That was the full extent of their reunion. Margarete had been 41 when the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg convicted her husband of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his use of forced labor and sentenced him to two decades in prison. During the years that followed, she raised six children alone, managed a household stripped of every privilege it had known, and defended a man she could not visit. Of all the people Albert Speer left behind in 1945, no one’s life was reshaped more by his choices than hers.
She had married Speer in Berlin on August 28th, 1928. She was the daughter of a Heidelberg master joiner who employed about 50 workers and served on the town council. His mother considered the Webers socially inferior. Seven years passed between the wedding and the first time Margarete was invited to stay at her in-laws’ home.
That delay 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, and 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. He visited Berchtesgaden rarely, mostly when Hitler was in residence. He took his holidays with Eva Braun and his ministry team, not with his wife. Margarete herself put it bluntly in interviews decades later.
For all practical purposes, she said, the children did not have a father. 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. American forces reached the Obersalzberg area on May 4th.
The family avoided internment as non-combatants, but the household they had known was finished. On May 23rd, 1945, British troops arrested Albert Speer at Glücksburg Castle near Flensburg, where he had been cooperating for a week with the US Strategic Bombing Survey. The arrest ended Margarete’s eighteen 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 birthplace, where the Speer family had owned a home since 1918.
But 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 lived 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 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. The father’s case dominated the next eighteen months.
From November 1945 through October 1946, Albert Speer stood trial at Nuremberg as one of twenty-four major defendants. On October 1st, 1946, he was convicted and sentenced to twenty 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. Through the long years of the sentence, she refused to let any of the children visit their father at Spandau. They would form a wrong impression, she told a reporter in early 1954, of a father they had hardly known anyway. The Macleans journalist who interviewed her that year, with Speer eight years into his sentence, found her in the outhouse at Wolfsbrunnenweg, smartly dressed in a white blouse and gray skirt, defending her husband with measured restraint.
She did not deny slave labor. She asked instead, quietly, whether eight years was not already enough. She would raise the children alone for twelve more years. The children only began visiting Spandau in their teenage years, on their own initiative.
Albert Jr. later said he saw his father once a year. The stutter that arrived in 1945 stayed with Albert Jr. into his thirties 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 siblings, finished school, and made the decision that would define the rest of his life. 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, working first as a carpenter 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, and master planner for the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup. Critics noted the irony: the son of Hitler’s architect repeatedly worked for governments that drew comparisons to the regime he had spent his career trying to escape. 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. The name had not helped him. He died on September 15th, 2017, in Frankfurt am Main, aged 83, from complications following surgery after a fall at home. Hilde, the second child, was born on April 17th, 1936.
She 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 a 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 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. 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, Dora Lux, was a Jewish historian who had survived the war in Berlin.
Lux became a formative influence on Hilde’s life 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 served in the Berlin House of Representatives from 1985 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 1991, including a term as the chamber’s vice president. Her platform was consistent: the peace movement, women’s rights, anti-racism, and a refusal to look away from what Germany had done.
She became an education professor. Then in 1994 she 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, whose name means 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. Berlin awarded her the Moses Mendelssohn Prize, and in 2019 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. 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 Berlin home well into her eighties. Margret, born on June 19th, 1938, and named after her mother, spent the first six years of her life at Obersalzberg, a few hundred meters from the Berghof.
She studied archaeology, married the archaeologist Hans Nissen in 1962, and later taught herself photography and built a career in architectural work. In the 1990s, she was 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. In 2004 she published her memoir, titled with the question she had been asked her entire adult life: Are You Speer’s Daughter? 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. 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.
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, 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 Albert Speer died in London on September 1st, 1981, in the company of a German woman thirty years his junior with whom he had begun an affair within a few years of his release, Margarete outlived him by six years. She died at home on Christmas day, 1987. She had held the household together for thirty-six years.
After her death, even that connecting figure was gone. The children lived in different cities, worked in different professions, and never came together as a family.