Margarete Speer was 41 years old when the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced her husband to 20 years in Spandau Prison, and she was 61 when the gates finally opened on the night of October 1, 1966. In the two decades between those two moments, she raised six children almost entirely alone, defended a man she was permitted to visit only rarely, and watched the family she had built scatter across a divided Germany. When Albert Speer walked out of Spandau after serving his full sentence, his wife stepped forward to greet him.
They shook hands. It was, by the accounts of those who observed the scene, a gesture that said more about the marriage than any words could have.
The story of what happened to the Speer family after the collapse of the Third Reich is a case study in the long afterlife of complicity, one that historians and biographers have returned to repeatedly in the decades since. It is a story that begins in the final week of April 1945, when Margarete Speer was at the Berghof complex on the 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.
Albert Speer Jr. was 10 years old. Hilde was nine.
Fritz was seven. Margarete was six. Arnold was four.
The youngest, Ernst, was two.
American forces reached the Obersalzberg area on May 4, 1945. The family avoided internment as non-combatants, but the household they had known was finished. On May 23, 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 18 years as the wife of a senior official of the Reich and began a period of uncertainty that would last for more than a year before the verdict at Nuremberg settled the family’s future.
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, her own birthplace and the city where the Speer family had owned a home at Schlosswolfsbrunnenweg since 1918. What waited for them was not the family villa they had imagined. The Speer 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 and total. They had grown up around Hitler and his entourage, with cooks and servants and chauffeured cars.
They were now sharing a few rooms in an outbuilding in post-war Germany, dependent on relatives and whatever remained of the family’s pre-war resources.
The psychological toll on the children became apparent quickly. Ten-year-old Albert Jr. began developing a severe stutter in the months after his father’s arrest, a condition that would stay with him into his 30s.
Their father’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 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 20 years.
On July 18, 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 and 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 his wife’s. Seven years passed between the wedding and the first time Margarete was invited to stay at her in-laws’ home. She had married Albert Speer in Berlin on August 28, 1928.
The daughter of a Heidelberg master joiner who employed about 50 workers and served on the town council, she was marrying into a family whose mother considered the Webers socially inferior. Margarete had been born in Heidelberg on September 8, 1905, and met Speer in the summer of 1922 when both were teenagers. 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.
The Maclean’s 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.
At midnight on October 1, 1966, Margarete waited at the gates of Spandau with Speer’s defense attorney, Hans Flachsner. Her husband walked out after 20 years. He barely acknowledged her.
They shook hands. Within a few years, 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 1, 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 29, 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, Albert Friedrich Speer, had practiced in Mannheim, and his great-grandfather had practiced 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 15, 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.
She had grown up around it.
Born on April 17, 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 1987 and again from 1989 to 1991. From 1989 to 1990, she served as the chamber’s vice president.
Her platform was consistent throughout. 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.
The same year, the city of Berlin awarded her the Moses Mendelssohn Prize for her work promoting tolerance. In 2019, 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 the former Gestapo headquarters documenting the regime that had run it, was Albert Speer’s daughter. Margret had been born on June 19, 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 14, 1962, and lived in Baghdad from 1965 to 1967, 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 die 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.
The Speer family’s postwar trajectory has drawn renewed attention in recent years as historians continue to grapple with the question of inherited guilt and the responsibilities of the children of perpetrators. Margarete Speer’s decision to shield her children from their father during his imprisonment, her quiet campaign to present him as a man who had served his time, and her refusal to publicly reckon with the full scope of his crimes stand in sharp contrast to the path chosen by her daughter Hilde, who spent her adult life working to return what her family had taken and to confront what her father had done. The divergence within a single family, observed one biographer, is itself a historical document, a record of the different ways Germans of the postwar generation chose to live with what their parents had left them.
Albert Speer died in London in 1981, in the company of a woman 30 years his junior, having never returned to live with his wife. Margarete remained at the Heidelberg house until her death on Christmas Day, 1987. The six children scattered, each carrying the name into a different future.
The eldest built a career trying to design a more humane world than the one his father had helped to construct. The second spent her life giving back what she could. The third documented the regime her father had served.
The others chose silence. Between them, they answered, in six different ways, the question their mother had faced alone for 20 years behind the gates of Spandau.