Children of Nazis

by Tania Crasnianski; Molly Grogan

  She agreed to the interview because of her advanced age. Although she had always kept her secret to herself, it no longer seemed impossible to her that one of her descendants could do something horrible. After the war, she at first denied her father’s involvement, then minimized his role, stressing that Auschwitz was not her father’s idea and that he acted under orders of Himmler and Hitler. Moreover, he was an exemplary father and “the nicest man in the world.” Harding asked her how that could be when he was responsible for millions of deaths at Auschwitz. She claimed not to know, but, she also argued, “There must have been two sides to him. The one that I knew and then another….” She also questioned the official number of Jews sent to their deaths: “How can there be so many survivors if so many had been killed?” She explained her father’s confession as a statement made under torture and showed the journalist her parents’ wedding photo, which she kept over her bed. As for her nephew, Rainer Höss, she has called him “an unbelievable liar.”44

  Rainer Höss is the son of Hans-Jürgen, the second son of Rudolf Höss. When Rainer was twelve, he learned that his grandfather was one of the “worst mass murderers in history,” and it changed him forever.

  Rainer’s father shared the ideas of his own father. Rainer remembers Hans-Jürgen as a violent, anti-Semitic dictator at home. Like his sister Brigitte, Hans-Jürgen resisted sharing his secret with his son. Every attempt Rainer made to question him was met with silence, and he would only learn of his family history after a gardener at the boarding school he attended—an Auschwitz survivor—regularly mistreated him on the basis of his family name. “He beat me because he projected onto me all of the suffering he endured,” Rainer explained. “A Höss is always a Höss, whether you are the grandfather or the grandson: guilty.”45

  This heavy silence draped itself over many families. Rainer Höss decided to uncover the secrets on his own, searching in archives and on the Internet for any information he could find about his grandfather. He gathered photos of a smiling, happy family on the grounds of the villa at Auschwitz. His mother, Irene, divorced his father after twenty-seven years of marriage. Hans-Jürgen had never told her that he was the son of Rudolf Höss; she read about it in the newspaper. She said he never talked about Auschwitz except when he was feeling melancholic.

  Rainer Höss has struggled to live with his family history. He twice attempted suicide as a teenager. He has had three heart attacks and suffers from asthma, which has worsened over time as he has dedicated himself to researching his past. Unlike the other members of his family, however, he has not turned a blind eye to his family’s history and considers that if his grandfather was a mass murderer, then shame and sadness are just his lot in life.

  The rest of the Höss family has declared him a traitor and refuses to have any contact with him. For his part, he severed all ties in 1985.46 His goal in pursuing his research is to prevent this buried past from coming back to haunt his children. Over the years, he has ceased to feel personally responsible but still feels burdened by the past.

  Nevertheless, to understand Rainer Höss is to know he is a controversial figure. He attempted to sell some of his grandfather’s personal effects to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, an act that earned him opprobrium as a macabre mercantilist. He addressed a brief letter to the museum authorities: “Rare objects, Auschwitz Kommandant Höss. Certain personal effects of Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz: a large fire-resistant chest bearing official insignia—a gift from Heinrich Himmler, SS Chief—weighing 50 kg, a paper-cutter, never-before seen files and photos of Auschwitz, letters dating from his detention in Kraków. Request the pleasure of a response. Cordially, Rainer Höss.”47 He has denied the affair, using two different defenses: first, that the letter was written by the son of another Nazi official, and, later, that it was Yad Vashem that contacted him, and not vice versa.

  When he introduces himself, he has said, he can see people’s distrust in their eyes, as if he had the same diabolical nature as his grandfather. He never sought to change his name, however, feeling it would have no effect. He arranged to meet Jozef Paczynski, a concentration camp survivor who was his grandfather’s barber, hoping to have a constructive, well-intentioned conversation with him. Paczynski asked him to stand up so he could get a good look at him, then declared him the spitting image of his grandfather. When people ask him about his grandfather, Rainer likes to repeat what he said during a visit to Auschwitz: “If I knew where my grandfather was buried, I would piss on his grave.”48

  In 2014, Rainer Höss appeared in a video for the European Parliament campaign of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which was fighting the rise of extremism in Europe with the slogan: “Never forget to vote.” By Rainer’s analysis, the far-right parties are better organized today than they were in Nazi Germany, and he fears that Europe has not learned its lesson.

  THE SPEER CHILDREN

  The Offspring of “The Devil’s Architect”

  It is an August evening in Frankfurt in 2013. Albert is studying a model built to his specifications for EXPO 2000 in Hanover. Measuring five feet by five feet, the model is a clue to the sheer size of the project. Albert likes to describe it in every last detail, in all of its elegance. He would say, however, that he doesn’t have a style, as if he didn’t have any influences. He has been designing buildings since 1964, when he won his first architecture prize for his proposal for a new train station in Ludwigshafen, Germany. He was thirty when he entered that anonymous competition. He carries his father’s first and last names—Albert Speer—and he believes that if the jury had known who he was, things might have turned out differently, but he tries not to think about it. He does know, however, that his father would have been proud of him that day.

  The dying sunset is reflected on the glass skyscraper where he has his office. His father always worked in stone; Albert prefers materials such as glass that give an impression of weightlessness. He and his team are always searching for creative solutions; creativity is not only their motto but his driving motivation. When his colleagues question the size of the buildings he wants to design, he always answers that they should never be afraid to dream big. Size alone is not synonymous with greatness.

  On the threshold of his eighties, he can look back on his life and see that he was always a dreamer; he would choose the unpredictable over the ordinary any day. His ambitions have taken him all over the world: his architecture firm, AS&P, has had offices in Asia for many years with countless operations.

  Today, he is dreaming about the desert and remembering the presentation he made in Doha, Qatar. Standing before a huge multimedia screen, he made buildings appear and disappear as he presented his proposal for Qatar’s bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2022. People said his project was crazy; it would be the most freakish construction in the history of architecture. His answer: “Major events like the Olympics or the World Cup make the unthinkable thinkable.”1 In the book he published in 1992, Die intelligente Stadt (The Intelligent City),2 he outlined his vision for a forward-thinking, people-centered metropolis whose sole function is to make its inhabitants happy. For Speer, a city should feel natural and spontaneous: its human dimension should never be underestimated. The hallmarks of its creator should also be invisible; his plans are only a framework for others to work from: their realization is up to the architects, the designers, and the builders.3 He is more interested in cities and their complexities than by the aesthetics of individual buildings. He thinks of himself above all as a designer of urban spaces.

  His wife enters, and Albert Speer Jr. gets up from his desk, turns off his desk lamp, then takes a look to see that all the lights are off in the office. It is a natural gesture for this man credited with pioneering the concept of “sustainability” in urban planning. He has even been called “the green conscience of the industry.”4

  With Ingmar Zeisberg, his wife since 1972, he leaves the building. Ingmar is an actress and Albert’s only love for over forty years. As the couple walks thro
ugh Frankfurt’s streets at night, he reflects on the role he has played in the city’s development. For Speer, no other German city rivals Frankfurt for internationalism: a global model. Here, too, he is better known as an architect than as the son of his father, another famous architect in Germany. Whereas his father left his mark on Berlin, Albert feels most at home in Frankfurt, the “Jewish city” that Hitler despised. In Frankfurt, he is the star architect, not his father. Working in separate cities also helps Albert avoid drawing comparisons between their respective accomplishments. In any case, Berliners don’t seem ready to have another Speer designing the city’s architecture: his proposals have always been refused on the same grounds: “Speer in Berlin? We’ve tried that already.”5

  In preparation for the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, China wanted to show off on a grand scale. In 2002, the city solicited architectural firms, including AS&P, for designs for a project linking the Forbidden City to the new stadium. The grandiose project submitted by Speer’s firm was not without similarities to his father’s design for the Berlin Olympic stadium in 1936, or “Germania,” the capital of Nazi Germany imagined by Hitler and designed by Albert Speer Sr.

  That project proposed a North-South / East-West layout and a major reorganization of the city’s railway. There was to be a wide central axis known as the Avenue of Splendors that would lead north to the Volkshalle, a huge, domed monument inspired by the Roman Pantheon; to the south would lie the headquarters of the Wehrmacht. The east and west axes were to terminate, respectively, in the German Parliament, known as the Reichstag, and a new chancellery and palace for the Führer.

  A British newspaper wrote that AS&P’s project was inspired by Germania,6 an allegation that still troubles Albert Speer Jr. as he walks the streets of Frankfurt. Others think he is driven by an unconscious desire to distance himself from his father. Comparisons are inevitable when father and son practice the same profession. At his age, however, he is tired of being “the son of ….” Nevertheless, and despite being named after his father, he never thought to take an alias. What matters to him is that people consider him an architect in his own right, and his creations in the same way. As far as he is concerned, he is a self-made man.7

  On his personal web page, www.albertspeer.de, Speer outlines three generations of architects going back to his grandfather, Albert Freidrich. He describes his father, Albert, as an “architect/politician” and himself, Professor Albert Speer, as an “architect/urban planner.” His research for the site led him to search through boxes of old photos in the family home in the Allgäu that his father loved so much. In an early version of the site, he imagined what each Speer’s favorite project would have been. For his grandfather, he chose a renovated building in the historic quarter of Mannheim. For his father, it was the Reich Chancellery, which was the Führer’s official residence in central Berlin from 1938 to 1945. As for his own best work, he chose his design for Europaviertel, a district in Frankfurt. He began the project in 2005 and considers it the crowning glory of his illustrious career. The website included a personal and professional timeline entitled “La Dolce Vita,” with a photo of his father, Hitler’s architect, surrounded by his children. The photo was taken at Obersalzberg on the magnificent slopes of the Bavarian Alps. During a subsequent update of the site, all images of his father were removed.

  The photo was a memory of his happy childhood in the mountains, surrounded by forests and wildlife. That was before the truth caught up with his family and he became the son of “the Devil’s architect,” before his father was jailed at Spandau Prison in Berlin, and after he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He remembers that he was twelve at the time and that he suffered from a stuttering problem, which poisoned his adolescence and troubles him still today. He cannot remember when it began exactly but he admits his condition is probably “linked to all that.”8 To overcome his handicap, the best medicine was to do what he hated most: talk and talk and talk.9

  The Speer family moved onto Hitler’s mountain in 1938, where the close relationship between Hitler and his architect was reinforced by their physical proximity. Albert Speer joined the ranks of Nazi officials like Göring, the Reichsmarschall, and Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary who lived comfortably on large properties near the Führer’s Berghof. Hitler had a spacious architecture studio built for Speer so he could work whenever he wanted. The family took over a house that had belonged previously to a painter, Bormann having evicted the local population to make room for Hitler’s inner circle.

  Albert Jr. was born in Berlin in 1934. Five children followed: Hilde (1936), Fritz (1937), Margret (1938), Arnold (1940), and Ernst (1942). As their father rose rapidly to prominence, his absences from home increased. Hitler had a passionate interest in architecture, and the two men were destined to meet. For Speer, architecture opened the door to the center of the Third Reich’s power structure, a fact he would nevertheless attempt to nuance later: “I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political events did not concern me. My job was simply to provide impressive backdrops.”10 He also showed little consideration for the millions of forced laborers he sent to work on his monumental projects.

  Speer distinguished himself among the rest of the minds behind the Nazi machine in that he was one of the few, if not the only, Nazi official with a brilliant intellect. How could such an individual support the Nazi agenda and its murderous persecution of the Jews? Why did he serve the regime to the last? Without Speer, Germany likely would have lost the war earlier. At least, that is the conclusion of historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper, who have called Speer “the real criminal of Nazi Germany.”11

  Albert Speer Sr. was a child of the Black Forest. He was born in 1905 in Mannheim into an architect’s family, whose comfortable existence protected him from the changes sweeping the world. He was a small, scrawny child, with little tolerance for physical exertion, due to a nervous system disorder that was diagnosed when he was very young. He compensated for his physical weakness by developing his mental agility, and at the age of twelve he drew his first artwork with India ink.

  At the age of seventeen, he fell in love with Margarete Weber, a girl he met on his way to school one day. She was the daughter of a cabinetmaker, and Albert’s parents judged her an insufficient match for their son. Albert payed no attention and married her six years later; his parents were not invited to the wedding. Much to his father’s pleasure, however, Albert gave up his earlier plan to study mathematics and took up architecture studies instead, first in Munich and then at the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg, where—in 1927—he became the assistant to Heinrich Tessenow. This architect and urban planner was one of the most active architects during the Weimar Republic and a prominent member of the German Arts and Crafts movement. Speer followed in his father’s footsteps, as his son would follow in his.

  The Speers were a liberal family with little interest in politics. Albert discovered National Socialism by way of an analogy drawn between the party’s ideology and the theories of his mentor, Tessenow, who believed that “style emanates from the people.”12 Speer wrote later that Tessenow, who rejected Nazism, would have been horrified by this comparison.13 Hitler was gaining a following among students, and it was at a speech he delivered at the Technical University that Speer fell under the “almost hypnotic impression” Hitler left on him, writing later: “His persuasiveness, the peculiar magic of his by no means pleasant voice, the oddity of his rather banal manner, the seductive simplicity with which he attacked the complexity of our problems—all that bewildered and fascinated me. I knew virtually nothing about his program. He had taken hold of me before I had grasped what was happening.”14

  Albert was not the only member of his family who rallied to National Socialism early on; his mother was favorably impressed by the party’s promise of “discipline in a time of chaos.”15 She joined the party but never told her husband, whose aversion to politics she knew well, but she would share her secret years later w
ith her son.

  After several years as Tessenow’s assistant, during which his salary was cut due to the economic crisis in Germany, Speer began to look around for an opportunity to open his own architecture office in his hometown of Mannheim. This was in 1931, and Speer was twenty-six. The economic situation convinced him to bide his time: the chances of a young, inexperienced architect finding work would be extremely slim, at a time when the country was experiencing unprecedented hyperinflation and construction was at a standstill.

  Since he owned an automobile, he proposed his services to the National Socialist Motor Corp, the NSKK, and was named president of the organization’s office in Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where he lived. Karl Hanke, who was then a regional party official, hired Speer to renovate the regional party offices in Berlin, which were subsequently named after Adolf Hitler. Hanke was sufficiently satisfied with the result to recommend Speer to his superiors.

  After Hitler was named Reich Chancellor, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, turned to Speer to work on the party’s headquarters in Berlin. However, it was his set design for the Nazi rally on May 1, 1933, on the Tempelhof esplanade that made a lasting impression on the party’s high command. Speer proposed an enormous platform to be erected in front of three flags, each the height of a six-story building, with the middle flag flying the Nazi swastika. The entire scene would be illuminated by one hundred and thirty powerful military searchlights to create an “ice cathedral.”16 The success of his vision for that event led him to design the set for the Nuremberg Rally that same year. In Speer, the party found the man who could translate the future power of the new Germany under Hitler into visible form. Hitler was sold. Speer learned at their first meeting that the word “architecture” held an almost magical power over the Führer.