The name change seems to have been connected with making Alois a legatee of his will. At Nepomuk's death in , his expectant heirs were told, to their surprise, that there was nothing to inherit. But only six months later Alois Hitler, up to then without any notable amounts of money to play with, purchased a substantial house and adjoining property not far from Spital, costing between 4, and 5, Gulden.
It seems conceivable, then, that Nepomuk, not Johann Georg, was the actual father of Alois, that Johann Georg had rejected Alois, the son of his brother, at the time of his marriage to Maria Anna, but that the family scandal had been kept quiet, and that a change of name had not been possible as long as Nepomuk's wife had lived.
However, there is no proof and, even after his wife's death, Nepomuk, if he was himself the actual father, was keen to avoid public admission of the fact. But this would be to interpret too much from the adoption of one form of a name which remained fluid and fluctuating before the late nineteenth century. Whatever the reason for the selection of the form of name, Alois seemed well satisfied with it.
The third possibility is that Adolf Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Rumours to that effect circulated in Munich cafes in the early s, and were fostered by sensationalist journalism of the foreign press during the s. But the most serious speculation about Hitler's supposed Jewish background has occurred since the Second World War, and is directly traceable to the memoirs of the leading Nazi lawyer and Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank, dictated in his Nuremberg cell while awaiting the hangman.
Frank claimed that he had been called in by Hitler towards the end of and shown a letter from his nephew William Patrick Hitler the son of his half-brother Alois, who had been briefly married to an Irish woman threatening, in connection with the press stories circulating about Hitler's background, to expose the fact that Hitler had Jewish blood flowing in his veins.
Allegedly commissioned by Hitler to look into his family history, Frank reportedly discovered that Maria Anna Schicklgruber had given birth to her child while serving as a cook in the home of a Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz. Not only that: Frankenberger senior had reputedly paid regular instalments to support the child on behalf of his son, around nineteen years old at the birth, until the child's fourteenth birthday. Letters were allegedly exchanged for years between Maria Anna Schicklgruber and the Frankenbergers.
According to Frank, Hitler declared that he knew, from what his father and grandmother had said, that his grandfather was not the Jew from Graz, but because his grandmother and her subsequent husband were so poor they had conned the Jew into believing he was the father and into paying for the boy's support.
Frank's story gained wide circulation in the s. But it simply does not stand up. There was no Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz during the s. In fact, there were no Jews at all in the whole of Styria at the time, since Jews were not permitted in that part of Austria until the s.
A family named Frankenreiter did live there, but was not Jewish. There is no evidence that Maria Anna was ever in Graz, let alone was employed by the butcher Leopold Frankenreiter. No correspondence between Maria Anna and a family called Frankenberg or Frankenreiter has ever turned up.
The son of Leopold Frankenreiter and alleged father of the baby according to Frank's story and accepting that he had merely confused names for whom Frankenreiter was seemingly prepared to pay child support for thirteen years was ten years old at the time of Alois's birth. The Frankenreiter family had moreover hit upon such hard times that payment of any support to Maria Anna Schicklgruber would have been inconceivable.
Equally lacking in credibility is Frank's comment that Hitler had learnt from his grandmother that there was no truth in the Graz story: his grandmother had been dead for over forty years at the time of Hitler's birth.
And whether in fact Hitler received a blackmail letter from his nephew in is also doubtful. If such was the case, then Patrick -- who repeatedly made a nuisance of himself by scrounging from his famous uncle -- was lucky to survive the next few years which he spent for the most part in Germany, and to be able to leave the country for good in December Nor did a number of different Gestapo inquiries into Hitler's family background in the s and s contain any reference to the alleged Graz background.
Indeed they discovered no new skeletons in the cupboard. Hans Frank's memoirs, dictated at a time when he was waiting for the hangman and plainly undergoing a psychological crisis, are full of inaccuracies and have to be used with caution. With regard to the story of Hitler's alleged Jewish grandfather, they are valueless. Hitler's grandfather, whoever he was, was not a Jew from Graz. The official version always declared Johann Georg to be Adolf's grandfather.
The evidence is insufficient to know. And perhaps Adolf did not know, though there is no firm reason to believe that he doubted that it was Johann Georg Hiedler. In any case, as regards Adolf the only significance is that, were Nepomuk his grandfather, the family descent would have been even more incestuous than if his grandfather had been Johann Georg: for Nepomuk was also the grandfather of Adolf's mother.
Klara Polzl, who was to become Adolf Hitler's mother, was the eldest of only three surviving children out of eleven -- the other two were Johanna and Theresia -- from the marriage of Nepomuk's eldest daughter, Johanna Huttler, with Johann Baptist Polzl, also a smallholder in Spital. Klara herself grew up on the adjacent farm to that of her grandfather Nepomuk. Klara's mother, Johanna, and her aunt Walburga had in fact been brought up with Alois Schicklgruber in Nepomuk's house.
Officially, after the change of name and legitimation in , Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl were second cousins. In , aged sixteen, Klara Polzl left the family farm in Spital and moved to Braunau am Inn to join the household of Alois Hitler as a maid.
By this time, Alois was a well-respected customs official in Braunau. His personal affairs were, however, less well regulated than his career. He would eventually marry three times, first to a woman much older than himself, then to women young enough to be his daughters. A pre-marital liaison and his last two marriages would give him nine children, four of whom were to die in infancy. It was a private life of above average turbulence -- at least for a provincial customs officer.
He had already fathered an illegitimate child in the s. In he married Anna Glassl, then aged fifty. It is unlikely to have been a love-match. The marriage to a woman fourteen years older than himself had almost certainly a material motive, since Anna was relatively well off, and in addition had connections within the civil service. Within a short time, if not from the outset, Anna became ill. Her illness cannot have been helped by knowledge of the affair Alois was conducting by the later s with Franziska Fanni Matzelberger, a young maid at the Gasthaus Streif, where the Hitlers lived.
By Anna had finally had enough, and was granted a legal separation. Alois now lived openly with Fanni, one of whose first acts was to insist that Klara Polzl, a year older than she was and evidently regarded as a potential rival for Alois's favours, should leave the Hitler household. In Fanni gave birth to a son, baptized Alois Matzelberger but legitimized as soon as Anna Hitler's death in cleared the way for the marriage, six weeks later, between Alois and Franziska.
A second child, Angela, was born less than two months after the wedding. But in Fanni developed tuberculosis, and she died in August that year aged only twenty-three. During her illness, Fanni had been moved to the fresh air of the countryside outside Braunau. For someone to look after his two young children, Alois turned straight away to Klara Polzl, and brought her back to Braunau.
While Fanni was dying, Klara became pregnant. Since they were officially second cousins, a marriage between Alois and Klara needed the dispensation of the Church.
After a wait of four months, in which Klara's condition became all the more evident, the dispensation finally arrived from Rome in late , and the couple were married on 7 January The wedding ceremony took place at six o'clock in the morning.
Soon after a perfunctory celebration, Alois was back at his work at the customs post. The first of the children of Alois's third marriage, Gustav, was born in May , to be followed in September the following year by a second child, Ida, and, with scarcely a respite, by another son, Otto, who died only days after his birth.
Further tragedy for Klara came soon afterwards, as both Gustav and Ida contracted diphtheria and died within weeks of each other in December and January By the summer of Klara was pregnant again. In the very first sentences of Mein Kampf , Adolf was to emphasize -- what became a Nazi stock-in-trade -- how providential it was that he had been born in Braunau am Inn, on the border of the two countries he saw it as his life's task to unite.
He remembered, however, little or nothing of Braunau, since in his father was promoted to the position of Higher Collector of Customs -- the highest rank open to an official with only an elementary school education behind him -- and the family moved to Passau, in Bavaria, before he was three years old and was based for a time on the German side of the border. It was one of numerous changes of address which the young Hitler was to experience.
The historical record of Adolf's early years is very sparse. His own account in Mein Kampf is inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation. Post-war recollections of family and acquaintances have to be treated with care, and are at times as dubious as the attempts during the Third Reich itself to glorify the childhood of the future Fuhrer. In material terms, the Hitler family led a comfortable middle-class existence.
In addition to Alois, Klara, the two children of Alois's second marriage, Alois Jr before he left home in and Angela, Adolf, and his younger brother Edmund born in , but died in and sister Paula born in , the household also ran to a cook and maid, Rosalia Schichtl.
In addition, there was Adolf's aunt Johanna, one of his mother's younger sisters, a bad-tempered, hunchbacked woman who was, however, fond of Adolf and a good help for Klara around the house. After his inheritance and property purchase in , Alois was a man of moderate means. His income was a solid one -- rather more than that of an elementary school headmaster. Family life was, however, less than harmonious and happy.
Alois was an archetypal provincial civil servant -- pompous, status-proud, strict, humourless, frugal, pedantically punctual, and devoted to duty. He was regarded, with respect by the local community. But both at work and at home, he had a bad temper which could flare up quite unpredictably.
He smoked like a chimney, and enjoyed a few drinks after work and a discussion around the beer table more than going back home. He took little interest in bringing up his family, and was happier outside rather than inside the family home.
His passion was bee-keeping. His daily half-hour walk to and from his bees from his Passau work-post before visiting the inn on his way back doubtless marked a peaceful respite from a boisterous household of young children.
His aim of owning a plot of land where he could keep his beehives was realized in when the legacy from Nepomuk helped him to buy a property near his birthplace at Spital in the Waldviertel. Though he sold this three years later, he went on to buy two further plots.
At home, Alois was an authoritarian, overbearing, domineering husband and a stern, distant, masterful, and often irritable father. And even after his death, she kept a rack of his pipes in the kitchen and would point to them on occasion when he was referred to, as if to invoke his authority. What affection the young children missed in their father was more than recompensed by their mother. According to the description given much later by her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, after his own forced emigration from Nazi Germany, Klara Hitler was 'a simple, modest, kindly woman.
She was tall, had brownish hair which she kept neatly plaited, and a long, oval face with beautifully expressive grey-blue eyes. In personality, she was submissive, retiring, quiet, a pious churchgoer, taken up in the running of the household, and above all absorbed in the care of her children and stepchildren.
The deaths within weeks of each other of her first three children in infancy in , and the subsequent death of her fifth child, Edmund, under the age of six in , must have been hammer blows for her. Her sorrows can only have been compounded by living with an irascible, unfeeling, overbearing husband. It is scarcely surprising that she made an impression of a saddened, careworn woman.
Nor is it any wonder that she bestowed a smothering, protective love and devotion on her two surviving children, Adolf and Paula. Klara was in turn held in love and affection by her children and stepchildren, by Adolf quite especially. Her portrait stood in his rooms in Munich, Berlin, and at the Obersalzberg his alpine residence near Berchtesgaden. His mother may well, in fact, have been the only person he genuinely loved in his entire life. Adolf's early years were spent, then, under the smothering protectiveness of an over-anxious mother in a household dominated by the threatening presence of a disciplinarian father, against whose wrath the submissive Klara was helpless to protect her offspring.
It was especially my brother Adolf who challenged my father to extreme harshness and who got his sound thrashing every day How often on the other hand did my mother caress him and try to obtain with her kindness what the father could not succeed [in obtaining] with harshness!
He did not love his father, he said, but instead feared him all the more. His poor beloved mother, he used to remark, to whom he was so attached, lived in constant concern about the beatings he had to take, sometimes waiting outside the door as he was thrashed. Quite possibly, Alois's violence was also turned against his wife. A passage in Mein Kampf , in which Hitler ostensibly describes the conditions in a workers' family where the children have to witness drunken beatings of their mother by their father, may well have drawn in part on his own childhood experiences.
What the legacy of all this was for the way Adolf's character developed must remain a matter for speculation. That its impact was profound is hard to doubt. Beneath the surface, the later Hitler was unquestionably being formed. Speculation though it must remain, it takes little to imagine that his later patronizing contempt for the submissiveness of women, the thirst for dominance and imagery of the Leader as stern, authoritarian father-figure , the inability to form deep personal relationships, the corresponding cold brutality towards humankind, and -- not least -- the capacity for hatred so profound that it must have reflected an immeasurable undercurrent of self-hatred concealed in the extreme narcissism that was its counterpoint must surely have had roots in the subliminal influences of the young Adolf's family circumstances.
But assumptions have to remain guesswork. The outer traces of Adolf's early life, so far as they can be reconstructed, bear no hint of what would emerge. If we exclude our knowledge of what was to come, his family circumstances invoke for the most part sympathy for the child exposed to them. The childhood years were also punctuated by the instability caused by several changes of home. Alois's promotion in brought the move to Passau.
Klara remained there with the children, now including the new baby Edmund, when her husband was assigned to Linz in April The separation from the family, interrupted only by brief visits, lasted a year. With his mother taken up by the new baby, and his stepsister and stepbrother Angela and Alois Jr busy with their schooling, Adolf had for a time the run of the house. He showed in these months the first signs of tantrums if he did not get his way. He would, remark much later that even as a boy he was used to having the last word.
But for the most part, he was free to play cowboys and Indians or war games to his heart's content. In February , Alois had bought a small farm in the hamlet of Hafeld, part of the community of Fischlham, near Lambach, some thirty miles away from Linz, and two months later the family joined him there.
It was at the tiny primary school at Fischlham that Adolf began his schooling on 1 May , and for the next two years he made good headway, attaining high marks for his schoolwork and behaviour. Be able to teach Alois Hitler to your students? Our worksheet bundle includes a fact file and printable worksheets and student activities. Perfect for both the classroom and homeschooling!
Great for home study or to use within the classroom environment. Download Alois Hitler Worksheets. Download free samples. Resource Examples. Click any of the example images below to view a larger version. Fact File. Student Activities. Table of Contents. Add a header to begin generating the table of contents. The Biography of Alois Hitler, Sr. Key Facts And Information. Alois Hitler Sr. His mother later married Johann Georg Hiedler. Aged 13 he moved to Vienna to become an apprentice shoemaker, but he left the trade in to become a customs official.
Alois Schicklgruber changed his name in to Alois Hiedler, or Hitler, having had Johann Georg Hiedler officially recognised as his father. Alois and Klara had six children, but only two survived to adulthood — Adolf and Paula. Alois was said to be very rough with his family, and had a particularly difficult relationship with his son Adolf. Alois died on 3 January after collapsing suddenly at an inn.
He did not live long enough to see what his son would become. In Austria at that time, it was not unusual for children to be born out of wedlock — the country had the highest rates of illegitimacy in Europe. So, Alois may not have faced any negative social consequences for his lack of a father in childhood.
When Alois was five years old, his mother married a travelling miller who had come to live in the family home. But he eventually returned home to take care of Klara, who'd been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Hitler cooked his mother's favorite meals and even did some cleaning. At the time he also restrained his temper and impatience while with his mother, which was unusual behavior for him. When Klara passed away on December 21, , Hitler was devastated. Her doctor, Eduard Bloch, would later write, "I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.
Bloch was Jewish, prompting some speculation that Hitler's violent anti-Semitism arose, at least in part, because of Klara's death. However, years later the doctor fared better than other Jews who were subject to Hitler's rule.
Bloch was able to emigrate to America — along with his wife, daughter and son-in-law — at a time when many others were kept from leaving. This preferential treatment was likely the result of his caring for Klara. Her portrait was placed in his rooms, and apparently was the only personal picture displayed. And during his last days in a Berlin bunker, where he committed suicide on April 30, , Klara's picture was still with Hitler.
Two separate miracles of healing were credited to Mother Teresa after her death, which made it possible for her to be canonized as Saint Teresa. The royal couple's love story had a romantic beginning but their relationship was rattled by her early ascension to the throne five years into their marriage.
On that tragic day in , the future president wrote in his diary, "The light has gone out of my life. The first lady continued to wear the outfit covered in her husband's blood to convey a message and as a way of coping with her own trauma. Ever mine.
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