FRANKFURT: As the son of one of Hitler’s closest aides who spent much of his childhood at the dictator’s mountain retreat, Albert Speer knows more than most Germans what it is like to live in the shadow of the country’s Nazi past.

Named after his father who was Hitler’s chief planner and favourite architect, Albert Speer Jr. was so traumatized by the war years that he developed a stutter so strong that he could barely communicate.

“I couldn’t string a sentence together,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “The reason was probably my childhood. The stutter is why I left school. I did a carpentry apprenticeship — if you build you don’t have to talk much.”

Speer later chose to follow in his father’s professional footsteps and become an architect, making his professional break by submitting anonymous proposals for building projects.

Now 71, he has learned to live with the name that plagued him as a young man growing up in a post-war Germany that has spent decades trying to come to terms with its Nazi past and World War Two.

Speer can look back on a career which has seen him become one of Germany’s better-known architects and an acclaimed town planner.

Speer’s practice, based in an imposing former factory in Frankfurt’s fashionable Sachsenhausen district, now works on projects worldwide.

Today, Speer tries to play down the significance of his father’s name although he admits that it shaped his career.

“I am the eldest son of that father and don’t see any reason to take another name. But the name certainly didn’t help me.

“Maybe it’s true, however, that with such a name, you really try hard. Perhaps that’s why this office developed with a big focus on ecology, sustainability and compatible architecture, rather than preconceived architectural structures.”

“Maybe one feels especially obliged to produce humane architecture and city planning when you have had such a father. My ambition to do something for other people is something to do with the name.”

Speer, whose father started plans to build Hitler’s imperial capital city to be called ‘Germania’ spent part of his childhood at the dictator’s Obersalzberg mountain retreat.—Reuters