Children of Nazis

by Tania Crasnianski; Molly Grogan

  During the renovation of the chancellery, Speer was named assistant to Paul Ludwig Troost, who was Hitler’s chief architect at the time. In his new position, he was responsible for providing regular updates on the work’s progress to the Führer. One day, Hitler invited him to lunch and explained that he was looking for a young architect who could realize the architectural vision of the new Germany. Albert Speer was his man. Troost’s death in 1934 accelerated Speer’s rendezvous with destiny; he was subsequently named head of the Chief Office for Construction: effectively the chief architect of the Reich.

  At Obersalzberg, near the Austrian border, life followed its course. Every year for Hitler’s birthday, the children put on their Sunday best, and everyone helped the Führer blow out the candles on his chocolate birthday cake at his mountain chalet, the Berghof. Each child presented him with a bouquet of flowers, then a photo was taken of Hitler surrounded by his little admirers. Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, made a number of short films where a smiling Hitler can be seen playing with the children. The Speer children appear in these films, playing with Martin Bormann’s children and Göring’s daughter. When Albert Jr. watched one such film showing him and his sister with the Führer, he recalled a particularly pleasant man who was like a gentle uncle with the children. His own father remembered, however, that children did not usually gravitate toward Hitler who “never found the proper easy manner of treating them; after a few benign words he would soon turn to others.”17

  Such was the life of the Speer children during the war; a tranquil existence in a magnificent alpine setting, far removed from the war’s privations and protected from strangers and intruders. Until April 25, 1945, not a single bomb fell there. From their villa, they had a panoramic view of the Watzmann mountain, one of the highest peaks in Germany, which towers over Obersalzberg. The Speer children who were old enough attended the local school in Berchtesgaden with the other children living on the vast private estate reserved for Nazi officials. Every morning, they walked the almost four miles to the village, about an hour’s walk, and returned the same way. Albert Jr. remembered that he hated school because he was always told what to do.18 There was no evidence of National Socialism in the Speer home, not a single uniform, symbol, or ritual. His sister Margret would recall a childhood completely different from what the Bormann children knew, who were raised by fanatical parents according to the tenants of the party’s ideology.

  Speer was a man who had everything, including a happy family life. He was an elegant man who abhorred the coarseness and boorishness of someone like Martin Bormann, who brought his mistress to live with his wife and children. Margret remembers a happy childhood; her father had a certain sense of humor and was not particularly authoritarian. On that last point, however, Albert Jr. does not entirely agree with her.

  Living at Obersalzberg had its inconveniences. Hitler entertained incessantly, and Speer was obligated to attend these dull evenings on a regular basis when he might have been making progress on his designs. Speer was a workhorse, and nothing made him happier than to spend day and night on his plans. Hitler expected to see him at every event, however, and Speer admitted that if Hitler had had any close friends, he would have been counted among them.19 Aware of the rivalries and conflicts that absorbed his subordinates, Hitler appreciated Speer as someone who knew how to steer clear of these plots and stay focused on his work. After he was named Minister of Armaments in 1942, Speer decided to skip the Christmas holidays with his family, preferring to spend them alone in Lapland. His wife had to make do in his absence.

  In April 1945, Speer could feel the tide turning and knew that this idyllic chapter of their life was coming to a close. The children were heartbroken to leave Berchtesgaden and sensed that something was afoot, without knowing what or how big. Speer knew he was risking Hitler’s ire by leaving: anyone who abandoned the Führer was a traitor in his eyes. Speer saw no other solution, however, and the family headed north to flee the advance of the Allies and to join the Reich’s provisional government, which would be led after Hitler’s death by Karl Dönitz. Speer made it that far, but was arrested with the other members of the Flensburg government on May 23, 1945.

  After their comfortable mountain villa, the family of seven was forced into a cramped, two-room apartment. The children had been baptized, like those of many other party leaders. Their job at present was to blend in despite their father’s absence and status as a war criminal,20 which had consequences for all of them. So began a long journey for the Speer children, one that would radically change their relationships with their father and make communication with him difficult. It was no different for Albert Jr. even though he had an obvious subject in common with his father. He may have considered that—as an architect—he was following in his grandfather’s footsteps as much as his father’s.

  Speer was transferred from the prison at Mondorf-les-Bains to Luxembourg, and from there to Versailles, and finally to Nuremberg to await his trial in late 1945. The family went to live in the house of Speer’s parents in Heidelberg in the Black Forest, which provided them a comfortable home. The children had had to interrupt their schooling for a year but were able to enroll in the Heidelberg public schools, after initial resistance due to their parentage. Margarete and Albert were both Heidelberg natives, a fact that eased the family’s transition into life in this small town.

  Some of the children’s teachers also chose to look the other way. One of Albert’s instructors lectured the class: “You all know what has become of the father of one of your classmates. This is precisely why I would like you to behave yourselves correctly with him.”21 Nevertheless, he struggled in school and, when he was fifteen, was offered a carpenter’s apprenticeship. His road to becoming an architect would be hard, but there would be many successes. After three years of study and night classes, he eventually earned his secondary school diploma and enrolled at the Technical University of Munich to begin architecture studies under Hans Döllgast, a major postwar architect who had received the Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal in 1972, named, of course, for Albert’s father’s mentor.

  Albert’s two sisters, Hilde and Margret, attended a Protestant boarding school for girls near Heidelberg, named after the wartime resistance fighter, Elisabeth von Thadden. The girls’ identity was not a secret to their classmates or their teachers, yet the sisters integrated easily and would be forever grateful for the generosity of spirit they were shown there. Hilde would later pay homage to her history teacher, Dora Lux, a survivor of a Jewish family living in Berlin during the war, for her intellectual guidance.22 Margret became friendly with a certain Adda, the daughter of Hans Bernd von Haeften, who was a member of the German resistance involved with the July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Hitler. Adda’s father was hanged as a traitor by the Nazis; Margret’s father was a war criminal and still alive. For the first time, she felt guilty as the “bad” child of a Nazi criminal, compared to her friend, the “good” daughter of a hero of the resistance. As for Arnold, the fifth of the six Speer children, his relationship with his father would never be the same: “Until 1945, he was my father and I could look him in the eye; after 1945, he was a war criminal.”23

  At Nuremberg, Albert Speer created an elaborate defense that rested on his condemnation of the ideology of the Nazis and their Führer, but also, as pertaining to his functions as an influential figure within the regime, on the notion of “collective responsibility for all the measures of Hitler.”24

  He was indicted on four counts and acquitted on two: conspiracy and crimes against peace. On October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity. During the trial, Speer’s attitude and his recognition of both guilt and collaboration, by which he tried to distance himself from his codefendants, worked in his favor. In a further effort to argue for a lenient sentence, he also testified that he had hatched a plot to kill Hitler and that he was one of the few members of Hitler’s inner circle who voiced opposition to his sco
rched earth policy. According to his biographer Gitta Sereny,25 Speer would not have helped his case by expressing any doubt about the regime’s treatment of the Jews, as doing so would have implied knowledge of the persecution and genocide, which would have made him a de facto cog in the death machine. Speer stuck therefore to a clever line of defense, helped by the fact that certain writings of his that would have been damning had not yet come to light.

  Speer was forty-one at the time of his sentence. He did the math in his prison diary: “I’ll be sixty-one when I am released…. It is as if I am entering an immeasurably long tunnel.”26 Speer need not have feared the boredom of incarceration: this cold, unfeeling man proved adept at suppressing inconvenient memories and emotions, a technique that would prove useful during the long years of his sentence. He immediately created a charity fund to support his family—with the help of his trusted childhood friend, Rudolf Wolters, and former contacts of Speer’s—to which donations were made with the promise of return favors. Through the fund, the family received a monthly stipend of two hundred deutschmarks.27 All told, Speer was able to raise over five hundred thousand deutschmarks between 1948 and 1966 when he was released. At the time he began his sentence, his children ranged in age from one and a half to eleven and a half years. Speer also put into place a system of financial incentives to encourage his children to earn high marks in school, another way Speer continued to rule over his family, even from his prison cell. Margarete, with six children to raise by herself, did not hesitate to call upon Wolters as needed. Wolters also created a communication system, a sort of secret line, by which Speer could communicate freely with the outside world, sharing the abundant notes he took on his activities and thoughts.

  In fact, writing quickly became the principal activity of prisoner “Five,” as he was known within Spandau; he wanted to “tell all,” whether about himself or about Hitler. However, he quickly abandoned the biography of Hitler he had begun in order to concentrate his efforts on himself. As Rudolf Hess did with his family, Speer also refused visits from his wife and children in prison, for eight years. Was it, as he wrote in his prison journals, to avoid seeing his children cry at the end of each visit?28 The oldest were adolescents when they were first allowed at Spandau, in 1953.

  These half-hour, monthly visits were tiresome and rote. Speer had little to say to the children as he stood stiffly before them, a smile screwed to his face. He found impersonal questions to ask them to fill the lulls in the conversation, and they answered politely. He felt as though they “exchanged monologues” and he wondered if he had “lost them not just for the duration of [his] detention, but forever.”29 He felt as if he did not even know who they were. Before his capture, his relentless schedule kept him away from home. “He very rarely saw his family,” Margarete remembered.30

  With time on his hands at Spandau, however, he did think about the children, and shared his thoughts in his letters. For his children, these opened the door to some understanding of their father, although for some of them he would remain a perfect stranger. Their relations were formal; they exchanged no physical gestures nor displays of warmth, only the usual courtesies. The children even refrained from calling him “father.” Speer wondered at times if “it might be better if I never came home again.”31 Margret would remember that when it was time to write to him, the whole family would gather to scrupulously choose every word.32 They sent photographs with every letter so he could see how much they had grown, but he could barely tell them apart.33 He put great effort into maintaining a semblance of a relationship with them, composing gay, comical stories about his childhood and about life in prison. Hilde, who was the second child in the family and the eldest daughter, remembers these letters often made her laugh heartily.

  Hilde was Speer’s biggest and best ally. Ever loyal to him, she took it upon herself to act as a liaison between her father and his circle of supporters, and every year she wrote to the office of the German president requesting, in the name of her entire family, that her father be released. Her letters were well received, and Charles de Gaulle and Willy Brandt counted themselves among her father’s supporters.34 Nevertheless, Speer’s sentence was never commuted. Brandt was the mayor of Berlin when Speer was finally released and he sent Hilde a bouquet of red roses to congratulate her. Speer was also spared a denazification trial—during which his property would have been confiscated—for which he had Brandt to thank.

  Hilde was probably Speer’s favorite child, the one who made him the happiest, but as a female, she could never be his confidante; for Speer, that role could only be held by a son, a man like himself. He began an intimate correspondence with Ulf Schramm, Hilde’s husband, because he felt it stimulated him intellectually to do so, but it eventually overshadowed his need to communicate with the rest of his family, so that he only shared practical news with them.35

  When she was sixteen, Hilde was refused a visa to study in the United States under a student grant program. Her case was the object of sufficient publicity—including from an Israeli family who hoped to host her—for the American government to reverse its decision. Speer was never reassured however by the idea of his daughter studying in America, fearing she would be treated badly as the daughter of a German war criminal.

  Hilde wrote her father a letter, dated May 13, 1953, in which, for the first time, she asked him about his participation in Nazi atrocities. He responded with a long letter in which he told her: “And just to calm you, of the dreadful things, I knew nothing.”36 He suggested that she might understand better if she read G. M. Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary in which the psychologist recorded Speer’s interpretation of events: “He knew no more about concentration camps than any other minister knew about V-2.”37

  Speer’s relations with the youngest of his children, Ernst, were the most difficult. Ernst was not yet two when Speer was imprisoned, and the little boy never said a word during his visits to Spandau. Withdrawn and taciturn, he refused to speak of his father for the rest of his life, saying only, “I had nothing to say to him. It’s sad, but that was always the case.”38 However, in 1968, Ernst, his wife, and their two children moved into a garage adjacent to the Speer property in Heidelberg. “I knew my father only as a stranger,” he admitted, and summarized his relationship as having a father and not having one at the same time.39 Things were no easier between Speer and his third child, Fritz, even though Speer found Fritz to be very intelligent and the one who resembled him the most. In his prison journal, he confided his irritation at his son’s seriousness and embarrassment, which rendered the boy speechless and unable to answer his father’s questions. As for Arnold, his third son, he found nothing more interesting to discuss than the furnishings in the visiting room: there was no emotional contact between them.40

  Speer spent his prison sentence usefully, defending his reputation, writing his life story, and explaining Hitler’s influence on him. His antidote to depression was writing, a process he thought of as “liberation by writing things down.”41 He tried his hand at gardening and walked in the prison yard. He developed a method for distracting himself by imagining walking around the entire world; between 1953 and 1966, he walked between 1,500 and 1,800 miles in his head. By the time he was released, his imaginary voyage had taken him 31,936 kilometers—almost twenty-thousand miles.42

  On the scheduled day of his release, a crowd of journalists assembled before the prison, at midnight on October 1, 1966. Prisoner Number Five was by then sixty-one years old, and it was a graying man who walked through the prison gates into the blinding barrage of projectors and flashes. Despite his age and his years of incarceration, he retained something of his former elegance.

  The only member of his family who came to meet him was his wife. He greeted her with a cool embrace and these words: “My sentence was just,” before getting into her car. He shared his first impressions as a free man with the German newspaper, Der Spiegel.

  A family reunion was planned the next day in a hunting lodge on Lake Kellers
ee in northern Germany, where fifteen or so of his closest relations gathered to greet him after so many years. But the party turned sour. As welcoming and natural as everyone tried to be, their attempts at conversation failed. His adult children no longer knew who he was, while their spouses, who had never met him, tried vainly to develop a rapport with him and ease the tension. No one succeeded in finding the right words. As soon as Speer turned the conversation to his life in Spandau—a refrain well-known to everyone already—it only made matters worse. His children wanted to talk about their lives, their projects, their ideas, their friends; he only wanted to talk about himself. His wife thought “it was probably too much to ask of him.”43 Two worlds faced off in silence that first day: the future and the past, freedom and prison. His daughter Margret remembered that it was also out of the question to talk about life before Spandau, which left the family spinning its wheels with hardly anything to talk about.44 Speer’s wife was equally reticent to speak of the past : “Enough about those old stories!” was invariably her answer to questions about the war and National Socialism.45

  It was clear to everyone: no communication would ever be possible with their father and husband. In 1978, when Gitta Sereny interviewed him in Heidelberg, he blamed himself for his failure to communicate with his family, saying he never knew how to go about it. His presence weighed on the family. Like most parents, he took pleasure in following his children’s success in school and later at university. He was particularly interested in Albert’s architecture studies since they shared the same career choice. At Spandau, he had wondered if their tense relations would continue after he came home; the disastrous family reunion seemed to indicate they would, and the conclusion was a bitter pill to swallow. Even at Spandau, he had never felt so alone. He began to miss his spartan life in prison, his books, and his imaginary walks, but he realized nothing would ever be the same. His children were of the same mind. Hilde recalled that—one by one—they stopped trying, in the absence of any point of connection between them. Albert Jr. would remember: “My father admired my work as an architect, but he didn’t understand it. We were coming from two different worlds.”46 His children began to plan their visits to their mother in Heidelberg around their father’s absences, but Speer did not seem bothered by this: his sole concern was restoring his reputation. He received requests for interviews from around the world, and the house in Heidelberg saw a steady flow of visitors.