I guarded Albert Speer

Adrian Greaves, the last surviving soldier to guard Hitler’s architect in Berlin, learnt Eva Braun’s secret from the lying charmer

In Berlin in 1961, aged 18, serving with the Royal Sussex Regiment, I was detailed for my first two-day duty as guard commander at the nearby gloomy Spandau Prison.

It housed the last three Nazi war criminals: Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess; the Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Shirach; and Hitler’s architect and Armaments Minister, Albert Speer. I ended up guarding Speer for three years.

I was particularly interested in meeting Hess. In 1941, Hess flew to Scotland in a misguided attempt to make peace with Britain. My father, a recently married artillery officer, was on a course in Wales; his wife was a typist in one of the ministries in London. He was unexpectedly detailed to escort Hess to Surrey for medical reasons – afterwards, the newly married pair met up and, nine months later, I was born.

The British prison governor at Spandau showed me round the prison. I requested his permission to speak to Hess. We reached the cell corridor just as the duty warder was unlocking the prisoners’ cells. It was a short walk from their bleak cells to the extensive prison garden for their afternoon of ‘free time’.

The garden and the prisoners’ activities were under the watchful eyes of my soldiers manning the six observation posts. Slowly, the three prisoners, dressed in ill-fitting prison uniforms, emerged and stood motionless in front of their cells.

On noticing the governor, they shuffled to attention. The governor nodded to me. I stepped forward and introduced myself to Rudolph Hess with the sentence that started my relationship with Albert Speer: ‘Herr Hess, without your peace-seeking flight to Scotland, I would not have been born. So thank you.’

Both Hess and Shirach ignored me and sloped off. In perfect English, Speer paused and invited me to join him in the prison garden. That was the beginning of my three-year association with him. Thereafter, to advance my secret conversations with Speer, I volunteered to ‘fill in’ when guard commander vacancies occurred.

Speer was amused that I was such a young army officer and teasingly suggested I should still be at school. He took a shine to me, and I would learn much from him – about his rise to power, his attitude to Hitler’s henchmen, and his own appointment as Hitler’s personal architect before he became the Third Reich’s Armaments Minister.

Despite our disparate ages and positions, he clearly enjoyed our conversations, which I recorded at the time in an old schoolbook. His attitude to me was always friendly and courteous, and he spoke excellent English. Hess and Shirach continued to ignore me.

Speer fascinated me. He always denied any knowledge of the brutality of Hitler’s Third Reich or the cruel fate of German Jews and peoples of neighbouring German-occupied countries. Millions were displaced to Germany as forced labourers in inhuman conditions. Many in Speer’s factories were beaten, shot out of hand or sent to concentration camps, mysteriously without Speer’s knowledge.

Speer frequently reminded me that any challenge to Hitler’s orders risked arrest, along with that of family members and work colleagues – and likely their execution.

He sometimes took me by surprise, especially when he admitted his intense long-standing relationship with Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress. Braun was vivaciously attractive as a young woman.

For several years, at Hitler’s request, she had accompanied the Speers on their holidays, to give Eva ‘a break’. Frau Speer was well aware that her husband spent long weekends at Hitler’s Alpine retreat, often in the sole company of lonely Eva. Hitler thought Speer was a safe companion for her during Hitler’s constant late-night military briefings.

Speer confided in me about another mystery that has always confused Speer experts. Why, having flown from Hamburg to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin to make his farewell to Hitler, did Speer again fly, two days later, back to Berlin just before Hitler’s suicide? The answer was that he tried to save Eva Braun. Even after he’d plied her with champagne, she refused.

Another bombshell concerned Speer’s urgent post-capture interrogation by senior Americans when he proved that conventional bombing would take years to defeat Japan. He advocated they drop an atom bomb; they did. Still, Speer always lied. He denied war profiteering, but his death revealed his valuable collection of stolen paintings, which his daughter gave to an Israeli charity.

Our conversations, always in the prison garden, were conducted in both English and German. Speer was keen to improve my linguistic skills which, under his tutorship, enabled me to pass the Civil Service German interpreters’ examination at my first attempt. On leaving the army in 1964, I became an interpreter working in Germany.

In 1970, I joined Kent Police, reaching the rank of superintendent. After retirement, I qualified as a clinical psychologist. Aged nearly 80, I am now the last person alive who regularly spoke with Speer in prison.

Bunkered: Eva Braun and Albert Speer

Dr Adrian Greaves is author of Albert Speer: Escaping the Gallows (Pen & Sword)