Historians have always been puzzled why the legal identity of Alois’s father was determined, and his name changed, so late.4 If Johann Georg Hiedler was truly Alois’s father, as became the orthodoxy in the Third Reich, why had he not acknowledged his son when he married Marie Anna in 1842? And why had he let his brother raise the boy? Was Johann Nepomuk, as some have speculated, perhaps the true father?5 The fact that Johann Nepomuk, and not Alois himself, initiated the name change would seem to speak for that scenario. But why then did Johann Nepomuk not admit that he was Alois’s natural father, preferring instead to hide behind his long-deceased brother? Was he trying to head off a family scandal? Or did he just want to free his foster son, whose social rise had greatly impressed him, from the stigma of his illegitimate birth? The late date of Johann Nepomuk’s trip to the notary would argue against this: the circumstances of Alois Schicklgruber’s birth do not seem to have harmed his career prospects all those years. There is considerable evidence that the farmer, who was as sly as he was wealthy, wanted to shield his inheritance from the Austrian tax authorities. Alois was Johann Nepomuk’s main heir, and as an officially acknowledged blood relation, he had to pay less tax on what he inherited.
Whatever the truth may be, the identity of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather remains uncertain. It is hard to overlook the irony that the man who would later demand that all Germans prove their “Aryan origins” was himself incapable of demonstrating his own—no matter how much the Führer’s official genealogy tried to convey the contrary impression. On 12 March 1932, one day before the election that pitted Hitler against Hindenburg for the office of Reich president, the Bayerischer Kurier newspaper remarked how strange it was that “the talkative Adolf Hitler is so silent about his ancestors and about how far back his family name goes.” A short while before, the Viennese newspaper the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung had sensationally revealed that Hitler’s father had actually been called “Schücklgruber” (sic) and that the name had been changed for inheritance purposes.6
Rumours that there were Jews in Hitler’s family have no proven foundation. They sprang up in the early 1920s, and after the Second World War they seemed to be supported by a reliable source. In his memoirs, written before the notorious general governor of occupied Poland was executed in Nuremberg in 1946, Hans Frank wrote that Hitler’s paternal grandfather had been a Jewish merchant in Graz named Frankenberger, in whose household Marie Anna Schicklgruber had worked.7 But subsequent research revealed that no Jewish family by that name lived at the time in either Graz or indeed the entire Steiermark region.8 There is no evidence that Hitler ever took speculations about his supposed Jewish grandfather seriously—to say nothing of feeling threatened by them.
We could dismiss the 1876 name change as a rather bizarre tangential episode, if it had not had such momentous historical importance. “Nothing that the ‘old man’ did pleased Hitler more than that,” the Führer’s childhood friend August Kubizek later recalled. “He thought ‘Schicklgruber’ was too coarse, too rural, too complicated and impractical. ‘Hiedler’ was too boring and soft for him. But ‘Hitler’ had a nice ring to it and was memorable.”9 In fact, there is every reason to doubt that someone named Schicklgruber would have ever been able to play the role of political messiah. “Heil Schicklgruber!” would likely have elicited only laughter.
In public, Alois Hitler wanted to be seen as an upstanding civil servant. A former colleague in Braunau described him as an unlikeable pedant who insisted on procedure above all else and lived a withdrawn life, with little social contact.10 Photographs show him trying to look dignified in his official uniform, with its buttons spit-polished and a flashing sabre at his side. But Alois Hitler’s private life was less orderly and controlled. An internal restlessness led him to change addresses frequently, and in his love life the seeming paragon of respectability was also remarkably fickle. Indeed, for the times and the moral conventions of his social circles, he was positively debauched. He married three times. His first marriage came in 1873, at the age of 36, when he wedded Anna Glasl, a civil servant’s daughter from Braunau who was fourteen years his senior; they were divorced seven years later. The customs official had begun a fling with a 19-year-old barmaid named Franziska (“Fanni”) Matzelsberger, which could hardly fail to attract attention in a town of 3,000 inhabitants. In May 1883, one month after the death of his first wife, Alois married his lover, who had borne him an illegitimate son, also named Alois, two years previously. Two weeks after their wedding ceremony, Fanni gave birth to their second child, a daughter named Angela.
But the family’s fortunes took a downturn. That year, Fanni caught tuberculosis, a common disease at the time. While she was wasting away, Alois began a relationship with Klara Pölzl, a former housekeeper whom he hired to look after his two children. Born in 1860 in Spital, Klara was twenty-three years his junior. She was the daughter of a small farmer named Johann Baptist Pölzl and his wife Johanna, who was herself the daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler.11 That means, if the notarised declaration of 1876 was correct, that Alois and Klara were second cousins; and if Johann Nepomuk was actually Alois’s true father, Alois would have been Klara’s half-uncle. In August 1884, Fanni died at the age of 23, and as Klara was already carrying his child, Alois decided to forgo the customary year of mourning and to marry her immediately. That was easier said than done, however: the local pastor refused to marry the two because they were so closely related. Alois Hitler thus had to petition the bishop’s seat in Linz for special dispensation and, after some back and forth, it was granted.12 On 7 January 1885, Alois and Klara were finally allowed to get married.
Klara Hitler gave birth to three children in quick succession—Gustav in 1885, Ida in 1886 and Otto in 1887—but all died young. This was not uncommon at a time of high child mortality. At around 6:30 p.m. on 20 April 1889, she brought her fourth child into the world on the second floor of an inn in Braunau where the Hitlers were living. The child was baptised Adolf on Easter Monday.13 His mother was 28; his father 51 years old.
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There are few reliable eyewitness accounts of Adolf Hitler’s earliest years. What Hitler himself wrote about his childhood in Mein Kampf is a calculated mixture of half-truths and legends which the leader of the 1923 putsch, imprisoned in Landsberg Castle, hoped would put him in a good light and help him become the Führer of a new greater German empire. After 1933, Hitler arranged for the confiscation of all private documents that might have revealed information about his childhood and youth. In April 1945, a few days before his suicide in his Berlin bunker, Hitler had his adjutant Julius Schaub destroy these records.14 Most of the information we do have, therefore, is second-hand titbits and contemporaries’ later sketches, which must be taken with a grain of salt since they were informed by knowledge of Hitler’s subsequent life.15
“Today I consider it a lucky twist of fate that Providence deemed I would be born in Braunau am Inn,” Hitler wrote in the first lines of Mein Kampf. “For this small town is located on the border between those two German states whose reunification must be, at least for those of us who are young, a lifelong goal to be achieved with any and all means.”16 But Braunau did not actually play much of a role in Hitler’s childhood. In 1892 his father, who had been promoted to senior customs official, was transferred to Passau on the German side of the border. It was here that Hitler acquired the Bavarian accent which he would retain throughout his life and which would help make him such an effective rabble-rouser in the Munich beer halls of the early 1920s.17
In later years, Hitler liked to imply that he had grown up in humble circumstances, but this was far from the case.18 As a senior customs official Alois Hitler earned an annual salary of 2,600 crowns—roughly the same as what a school principal would have made. Even when he retired in 1895 at the age of 59, he received a pension of 2,200 crowns and would not have had to make many cutbacks.19 The Hitlers were comfortably middle class. The household consisted of Alois, Klara and Alois’s two childre
n from his second marriage, Alois Jr. and Angela; and of Adolf, his brother Edmund (who was born in 1894 but died in 1900 of rubella) and his sister Paula, who was born in 1896. Also residing in the Hitlers’ apartment was Klara’s younger, unmarried sister Johanna Pölzl, who helped out with the family. Aunt “Hanni” had a hunchback and, apparently, mild learning difficulties.20
Alois Hitler was a strict, short-tempered patriarch who demanded unquestioning respect and obedience from his children and used the switch whenever his expectations were not met. His oldest son Alois Jr. suffered particularly from his temper and left home at the age of 14. Adolf, who was seven years younger, also came in for the odd beating, but his sister Paula was probably exaggerating when she claimed during an interrogation in 1946 that he had received “a good thrashing” every day.21 The senior customs official was not all that concerned about his children. He devoted most of his free time to his hobby, beekeeping, and enjoyed going to taverns to drink a few glasses of beer and discuss the state of the world with acquaintances.22 We should also be sceptical about Hitler’s later claims that his father’s alcohol consumption was excessive and that he had once had to carry him home, drunk, from the tavern.23 Hitler tended to depict his father negatively to cast his mother in a more favourable light. After a conversation with the Führer in August 1932, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Hitler endured almost an identical childhood to mine. His father a domestic tyrant, his mother a source of goodness and love.”24
Klara Hitler was a quiet, modest, obedient woman who patiently bore her husband’s self-important airs and protected her children as best she could from his outbreaks of rage. The early death of her first three children was an enormous loss, and she was all the more determined to shower her fourth child Adolf with maternal care. He was the coddled favourite, while Klara’s stepchildren, Alois and Angela, often felt neglected. “He was spoiled from early morning to late at night,” opined William Patrick Hitler, Alois Jr.’s son, in New York in 1943. “The stepchildren were forced to listen to endless stories about how wonderful Adolf was.”25 For the young Hitler, maternal affection compensated for excessive paternal strictness. “Without exception he always spoke of his mother with profound love,” August Kubizek recalled.26 Even late in life, Hitler carried a small photo of Klara in his breast pocket, and an oil portrait of his mother was one of the few personal possessions that he kept in his bedroom right up until his death.
Most psychologists assume that the first years of an individual’s life determine how his personality develops, and few historians (and even fewer psychological historians) have been able to withstand the temptation to find traces of the monster in the young Hitler. The violence he suffered at his father’s hand has often been cited as a source of the murderous policies he pursued as a dictator.27 But biographers should be careful about drawing far-reaching conclusions from Hitler’s early childhood. Physical punishment was an accepted method of child-rearing in those days, and it was hardly uncommon for turn-of-the-century middle-class families to feature an authoritarian, punitive father on the one hand and a loving mother on the other. From all we know, Hitler seems to have had a fairly normal childhood. In any case there are no obvious indications of an abnormal personality development to which Hitler’s later crimes can be attributed. If Hitler had a problem, it was an overabundance rather than a paucity of motherly love. That may have contributed to his exaggerated self-confidence, his tendency towards being a know-it-all and his disinclination to exert himself in areas he found unpleasant. These characteristics were already evident during Hitler’s schooldays.
In 1895, the year he retired, Alois Hitler acquired a farm in Hafeld, an area of the town of Fischlham. There that May, the 6-year-old Hitler started attending the one-room schoolhouse. “When I was in the first grade, I listened in on the pupils from the second and later the third and the fourth,” Hitler later said.28 In 1897, Alois sold the farm and rented an apartment in the nearby market town of Lambach, where Hitler continued his schooling and was briefly a member of the boys’ choir at the local Benedictine monastery. In the autumn of 1898, the family moved yet again, this time to the village of Leonding near Linz, where Alois Hitler had purchased a house right next to the town cemetery. It would later become a site for Nazi pilgrimages after the Anschluss between Germany and Austria in 1938. “Very small and primitive,” Goebbels remarked after visiting Hitler’s boyhood home in March 1938. “I was led into the room that was his empire…This was where a genius was made. I was overcome by a feeling of solemn significance.”29
Adolf Hitler was a lively pupil who easily mastered the challenges of the village school and got excellent marks. “The laughably easy task of learning at school left me so much free time that I saw more of the sun than of my room,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.30 He played soldiers with the other village youngsters and enjoyed taking command. “The Boer War was going on,” recalled one of Hitler’s classmates. “The kids from Leonding under Hitler’s leadership were the Boers while the kids from [nearby] Untergamberg were the English. Things often got pretty heated afterwards at the Hitlers’ house as well, because our commander Adolf left his father waiting for so long for the tobacco he was supposed to buy.”31
In the evening, like many boys his age, he devoured the Westerns of novelist Karl May. He read them “by candlelight and, with the help of a magnifying glass, by moonlight,” Hitler recalled in a February 1942 monologue at the Wolfsschanze.32 During the Second World War, especially at difficult times, Hitler would frequently take out a book by May and praise the Native American character Winnetou as “the embodiment of a company leader.”33 Hitler saw himself as “the leader of a little gang” of his Leonding schoolmates and a class photo supports that idea.34 The 10-year-old occupies the middle of the top row with his arms crossed and his face slightly overexposed “in a pose of demonstrative superiority.”35 The young boy was obviously not plagued by self-doubt.
But in September 1900 the transition from a village primary to an urban secondary school in Linz brought an abrupt end to Hitler’s sunny childhood. Hitler, now 11, had to walk an hour to and from school, and he was no longer the indisputable leader of the class. He was just one of many pupils and he also carried the stigma, in the eyes of his well-heeled Linz classmates, of being a country yokel. Hitler had a hard time submitting to a more regimented school routine, and he no longer effortlessly got good grades as he had before. Already in his first year he failed maths and natural science and had to repeat a grade. In the years that followed, he barely progressed. In 1924, his former teacher Eduard Huemer remembered him as a “gaunt, pale youth” who was “definitely talented” but “not diligent.” Considering his “undeniable gifts,” Huemer said, Hitler “should have done far better.” With his teachers, Hitler was “rebellious, independent, dogmatic and hot-tempered,” often reacting to their corrections and admonitions with “scarcely concealed distaste.”36 As he entered puberty, the lively, curious young boy became an introverted, moody adolescent who positioned himself as an outsider.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler characterised his poor school performance as an act of rebellion not so much against his teachers as against his father. His father, he claimed, had wanted to force him down the path towards a career as a civil servant, which ran completely contrary to his nature. “I never wanted to become a civil servant, no, no, no,” Hitler wrote. “The thought of being trapped in an office, of no longer being the master of my own time but rather being compelled to devote my entire life to filling out forms, made me yawningly nauseous.”37 There are good reasons to doubt Hitler’s depiction, however. If his father had truly intended for him to enter the civil service, he would have sent him to a classical Gymnasium and not to a Realschule, which steered pupils towards technical and mercantile jobs.38 Hitler’s talent for drawing was recognised at an early age, and this seems to have been the reason for Alois’s decision. But contrary to what he wrote in Mein Kampf, this does not mean that Hitler decided at the age of 12 to devote himself t
o art rather than become a civil servant. His father’s embittered rejection of Hitler’s artistic ambitions—“Artistic painter, never, over my dead body!”—is most likely the stuff of legend.39
We can safely assume, though, that the tension between father and son was increasing at this time. Alois Hitler must have sensed that his adolescent son was becoming more independent and rebellious. But what likely angered him most was not some disagreement about his son’s future career, but rather Adolf’s demonstrative unwillingness to put in the work needed to get into a better school. Born out of wedlock in the rural provinces, Alois had laboured hard to climb the social ladder, and he expected his son, who had enjoyed a far better start in life, to be diligent and determined about securing his status in society. In the best of all worlds, his son would have climbed a few rungs in the social hierarchy to a level that Alois’s humble origins and lack of education had put beyond his reach. Instead, the adolescent Adolf was surprisingly lazy and intractable. This no doubt enraged his ambitious father.
But on 3 January 1903, before the conflict could truly come to the boil, Alois Hitler suddenly died at the age of 65 while having a morning drink in the Wiesinger Inn in Leonding. This unexpected event “plunged us all into the deepest sorrow,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.40 In truth, the sudden passing of the patriarchal tyrant probably came as a relief to Alois’s wife and even more so to his children. The family was provided for: Klara Hitler received a widow’s pension sufficient to maintain a comfortable existence.41 Usually she spent her summers with Adolf and Paula at her sister’s home in Weitra. His cousins would later recall that Hitler had played with them occasionally but preferred to go off on his own and paint, draw or read one of the books he had brought along.42
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