When Margarete Speer stepped forward to greet her husband at the gates of Spandau Prison in the early hours of October 1st, 1966, she was 61 years old. She had been 41 when Albert Speer was sentenced to 20 years for his role in the crimes of the Third Reich. After two decades of waiting, raising six children largely alone, and defending a man she barely knew anymore, they shook hands. The final weeks of the war had scattered the family.
In late April 1945, Margarete was at the Berghof complex on Obersalzberg with five of her children, while her husband moved between Berlin and northern Germany. There, he attached himself to Karl Dönitz’s short-lived Flensburg government as Minister of Industry and Production. American forces reached the Obersalzberg on May 4th. Just over two weeks later, on May 23rd, British troops arrested Albert Speer at Glücksburg Castle.
Margarete’s 18 years as the wife of one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany were over. With the family villa in Berlin destroyed and the Berghof under Allied control, she packed what she could carry and moved to Heidelberg, her own birthplace. The family home there was occupied, so she and the six children, ranging from age 10 down to an infant, settled into an outhouse on the grounds of her father-in-law’s estate. They would live in those cramped quarters for the next eight years.
The transition was abrupt. The children had grown up around Hitler and his inner circle, surrounded by cooks, servants, and chauffeured cars. Now they shared a few rooms in a post-war outbuilding. In the months after his father’s arrest, ten-year-old Albert Jr.
developed a severe stutter that would stay with him into his 30s. Albert Speer stood trial at Nuremberg from November 1945 through October 1946. On October 1st, 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his use of forced labor. He was sentenced to 20 years and transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin in July 1947, registered as prisoner number five.
Margarete was left to manage a household stripped of every privilege it had known. Though the regime had awarded her a Cross of Honor for bearing six children and Hitler had given the family a villa on the Obersalzberg in 1935, the marriage itself had always been marked by absence. As Margarete put it bluntly in interviews decades later, for all practical purposes, the children did not have a father. Speer rarely visited Berchtesgaden, and he took his holidays with Eva Braun and his ministry team instead of his wife.
In early 1954, with Speer eight years into his sentence, a journalist from Macleans found Margarete still living in the outhouse at Wolfsbrunnenweg. Smartly dressed and defending her husband with measured restraint, she did not deny that slave labor had occurred. She simply asked whether eight years was not already enough. One decision defined her relationship with her husband more than any other: she refused to let any of the children visit him at Spandau.
She told the reporter 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 once a year.
When Albert Speer finally walked out of Spandau at midnight on October 1st, 1966, he barely acknowledged his wife. They shook hands. Within a few years, he began an affair with a German woman 30 years his junior who was married to an Englishman living in London. Margarete and the children knew.
She remained at the Heidelberg house. Speer 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 six Speer children each carried the heaviest surname of the 20th century and each made a different choice with it.
Albert Speer Jr. , born in Berlin on July 29th, 1934, decided to 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, first working as a carpenter while his father was still in Spandau, then studying 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. 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, and 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. 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 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. Albert Speer Jr. died on September 15th, 2017 in Frankfurt am Main, aged 83, from complications following surgery after a fall at home.
Hilde Speer, born on April 17th, 1936, faced her father’s legacy differently. In the summer of 1953, at age 17, she was awarded an American Field Service Scholarship to study at Hastings High School on the Hudson, just outside New York City. The United States initially refused her visa. 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 her father’s identity kept officially secret in the locality. Hilde was nine when the war ended, old enough to remember Hitler’s hand on her shoulder in photographs at the Berghof. 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 one of the formative influences on Hilde’s life, shaping a question she never stopped asking: what should the children of perpetrators do with what they had inherited? Politics came next. Hilde joined the Greens during the 1980s and was elected to the Berlin House of Representatives, serving from 1985 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 1991.
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. 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 used the proceeds to found the Zurückgeben Foundation, a name 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, she told the Associated Press that 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, she said, 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 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 lived in Baghdad and Chicago before settling in Berlin, where she taught herself photography and built a career in architectural work.
In the 1990s, she worked as a photographer 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 “Zinzi die Tochter Speer, Are You Speer’s Daughter? ” 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 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. After Albert Speer’s death, his children 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 her death in 1987, even that connecting figure was gone.