Albert Speer
Architect who overcame his Nazi father’s legacy by encouraging sustainable town planning
ALBERT SPEER, who has died aged 83, was the eponymous eldest son of Hitler’s favourite architect and minister of munitions, and himself became a prominent architect and town planner in postwar Germany, building up a thriving international practice.
The senior Speer famously transformed the Führer’s megalomaniacal fantasies into huge monumental structures. His work on the 1936 Berlin Olympic stadium projected Germany’s revival as a super power and although his plans for a new imperial capital city, Germania, were never realised, they left a legacy in the form of the East-west Axis running from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin through the Tiergarten Park.
As the head of Albert Speer & Partner, his Frankfurt based firm, Speer Jr tried to play down the significance of his father’s name although he admitted that it had shaped his career. “With such a name, you really try hard,” he told an interviewer. “Perhaps that’s why this office developed with a big focus on ecology, sustainability and compatible architecture, rather than preconceived architectural structures … My ambition to do something for other people is something to do with the name.”
Indeed Speer was credited with having introduced the idea of “sustainability” into urban planning at a time when Germans still associated the term with forestry. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung called him the “green conscience of the industry.”
Speer did a lot of work in the developing world, his commissions including a satellite city near Cairo for 3 million people, the Chinese industrial city of Anting, and a new capital for Nigeria.
He created the layout for the Olympic zone north of Beijing for the 2008 Games and his designs for a stadium complex in Doha were said to be one significant reason why Qatar was awarded the 2022 football World Cup.
In Germany Speer put together a master plan for the design, construction, transport and logistics of the Expo 2000, Germany’s first world fair held in Hanover, featuring, at its heart, the Europe Plaza, a vast space stretching across 12,000 square metres.
He also developed the Olympic bids for Leipzig for 2012 and Munich for 2018. Yet his name was hardly mentioned in the saturation coverage of Expo 2000, the biggest fair in German history, in the German press. Moreover Speer was never able to do much work in Berlin, missing out on the capital’s makeover following German unification in 1990.
“It’s no use working where you feel you have many enemies,” he told an interviewer. “I am accepted as a professional – but for government buildings it’s not worth trying.”
Albert Speer was born on July 29 1934, the oldest of six children, and liked to remind people that he came from a family of architects who were not all as notorious as his father. Some of the buildings designed by his grandfather, the first Albert Speer, are now classed as historic monuments in Germany. A great-grandfather, Bertold Speer, was also an architect.
Albert was raised by his mother Margret at Hitler’s Obersalzberg mountain retreat, where he recalled watching the Fuhrer’s collection of Mickey Mouse films with other sons and daughters of the Nazi leadership: “Hitler had his own cinema and we would go there and watch his Mickey Mouse films. As kids, we were fascinated by them,” he recalled.
After the war the young Speer grew up in a cramped Heidelberg flat after his father was jailed for 20 years at Nuremberg.
Speer senior’s claim at the trials that he knew nothing of the Holocaust – which spared him the hangman’s noose – was subsequently challenged by historians who showed, for example, that he was personally involved in extensions to the Auschwitz death camp.
Speer Jr, however, tried to stay out of the past “I never had a proper relationship with [my father]”, he said. “As a child I hardly knew him. Then he sat for 20 years in prison. There I was allowed to visit him regularly but that was more a strain than a pleasure. When he came out we still kept our distance.’’
But the war left its mark on Young Albert who stuttered so badly as a boy that a friend once suggested that the trauma of the conflict had rendered him speechless. In later life he admitted that he had not had the strength to read biographies of his father until he had put his own life on a sound footing.
After failing his final exams at school he took a three-year apprenticeship as a carpenter, but later passed his exams and decided to study architecture at Munich’s technical university.
Although he saw no reason to change his name, he sought to establish his credentials as an architect by entering competitions anonymously and in 1964 he won a competition that gave him enough money to travel in the United States. “When they opened the results, one judge said: ‘Albert Speer? That’s not possible – he is in prison.’ But somebody else knew he had a son, so this was my start,” he recalled.
A few years earlier Speer had sought to escape the demons of his upbringing by travelling to Ankara on his Lambretta motor scooter. The trip marked the beginning of a long association with the Middle East which saw him win major commissions in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, where he designed the diplomatic district of Riyadh. In 1984 he founded his own architectural practice in Frankfurt.
Speer was critical of the decision by German planners in the aftermath of the Second World War to rip down many old buildings in the belief that they could create a “new society”. “Those in power after World War Two said history doesn’t interest us,” said Speer. “It was not only the history of the Third Reich. They ripped down buildings that were much older.”
But he was equally opposed to post-reunification plans to reconstruct buildings destroyed in the war such as Dresden’s Frauenkirche and Kaiser Wilhelm II’S former residence in central Berlin.
“When there is something left that’s part of the history of the city, then you should keep it,” said Speer. “But if there is nothing there, to make out as if we would like our old Kaiser Wilhelm back again is absurd. It’s crazy.”
He married the actress Ingmar Zeisberg in 1972. She survives him.