Twenty Years in Spandau: Prison Routine, Smuggled Slips and the Workshop of a Legend

Spandau was no ordinary prison, and that had consequences for everything that happened there. Four powers shared the responsibility, each with its own ideas of penal practice, and none wanted to give way. For seven prisoners an apparatus was maintained consisting of guards, kitchen, doctors, chaplains and administration. The absurdity of this effort occupied many observers, but it arose from the political situation. As long as the facility existed, there was one place where the wartime alliance still worked, if only formally. For the inmates it meant a life among changing rules, in which every month ran differently from the last.

Writing as a Survival Technique and as a Blueprint

Speer began writing early, and he did not stop until the end. At first that was self-protection. Whoever may neither work nor decide for decades easily loses his footing, and the notes gave the day a structure. But from the start it was about more. He sorted memories, tested wording, discarded and wrote anew. Notes became chapters, chapters became a manuscript. The way out led through staff who were fond of him and through visitors who hid paper in their clothing. Some of these helpers did it out of sympathy, others for pay. A Dutch orderly played a special part, because for years he reliably carried out what would otherwise never have left the grounds.

A network was waiting outside. The architect Rudolf Wolters set up an account into which former colleagues and business partners paid. The money went to the family, to lawyers and into the supply chain for the manuscripts. Without this network not a single book would have come into being. It is one of the uncomfortable truths of this story that many people of good standing were willing to help a convicted war criminal build his second career. They saw in it no complicity but loyalty. Exactly this attitude explains a good part of how West Germany dealt with the past in the fifties and sixties.

The Garden, the Kilometers and a Very Precise Mind

The world walk in the prison yard sounds like a quirk at first. But it is revealing. Speer measured the length of a lap, kept a ledger of every stage covered and set a route that led him across the Balkans, the Middle East, Asia and the Bering Strait to North America. Books from the prison library supplied descriptions of landscapes, so that he could picture something for each stage. In the end he had put together several tens of thousands of kilometers. Anyone who wonders how someone endures twenty years of isolation finds an answer here. Anyone who wonders how the same man had earlier set production quotas for a whole country finds an answer here as well. It is the same ability, only squeezed into a yard a few hundred meters long.

What the Prison Years Did to the Family

The price was paid at home. Six children grew up with a father they knew almost only from letters, and with a mother who managed daily life alone. Visits were rare and short, often supervised and with forbidden subjects. Some of the children hardly saw him in this period. When he came back in 1966, he was a stranger who immediately took up a public role again. The conversations in the film with his sons and his daughter are among the quietest and at the same time hardest passages of the whole project, because there nothing is accused or defended but told plainly.

For all the harshness of the regime, a sober finding remains. These twenty years did not break Speer, they bought him time. No other participant could work through his picture of his own role for so long and so undisturbed. When he left through the gate, a finished concept lay ready, polished in language and tuned in emotion. How it worked out and what it failed on you can read in the chapter Aftermath: The Deception. The groundwork for it, however, was laid much earlier, in the years covered by the chapter Germania.