We warmed up and finished our wursts at a table beneath the “Disco Abend” poster before approaching the gaggle of locals clustered around the fireplace to ask them what they knew of a place called Döllersheim. He’d heard of it, yes, said the proprietor wrapped in winter clothes and wearing his Tyrolean hat indoors against the drafts from the storm outside. He’d heard about it, but it was . . . complicated. A map was summoned up, a big folded map of Austria that, Waltraud later informed me, bore the markings of the Austrian Freedom Party; it was an election-year giveaway of the party of Jörg Haider, the charismatic former male model and führer of Austria’s far right (some call it neo-Nazi) movement.
The proprietor traced his finger from our location at the inn north and west along the road we were on. “You pass the castle of Ottenstein,” he said. “It’s up on a hill to the left, then continue on across the river until,” his finger reached a shaded region where, he said, all is “verfallen.”
Alles verfallen?
He began pointing to a dotted line around a shaded area. Next to the name of each tiny village and town within it, there appeared the word “verfallen.” Strones verfallen, Spital verfallen, a half dozen or so towns verfallen—that is destroyed, ruined. Finally, in the midst of it all there was Döllersheim—verfallen.
“Ruined how?” Waltraud asked.
“Long ago” was all he said.
The snow was still pelting the countryside as we skidded back onto the road from the courtyard of the inn. The number of barns and habitations had thinned out, the piney woods had thickened. At last, we saw a small sign that read “Ottenstein,” and up on a cliff loomed the snowy outlines of a Schloss, the castle of Ottenstein.
The family-romance genealogical speculations might be conceptual castles in the air, but here were the snowy turrets of the real castle in Maria Schicklgruber’s life, the only castle the peasant serving girl was ever likely to see—unless, of course, one believes the story spread by the Austrian secret police that she’d gone to work in the Vienna palace of Baron Rothschild. But seeing the snowy desolation that settled as early as autumn upon Maria’s native land, it would not be impossible to imagine an unmarried forty-two-year-old domestic serving woman vulnerable to an intrigue with the type of exotic or wealthy employer envisioned by the family romances.
Who was this woman, Maria Schicklgruber, who left such a maddeningly ambiguous legacy to Hitler and to history? It is easy to project too much retrospective mystery upon her due to the disproportionate importance of her grandson. What is more interesting is how the serving-girl seduction romances of the two other Hitler women to figure prominently in subsequent Hitler-explanation controversies—his mother, Klara, and his half-niece, Geli Raubal—seem to reflect, even recapitulate the sexual mystery Maria Schicklgruber left behind. What is it about the amorous master/ambivalent serving girl relationship that causes it to figure in three successive generations of Hitler women and the controversies surrounding them?
Consider Hitler’s mother, Klara, often portrayed by chroniclers (taking their cue from her devoted son’s description of her) as a simple, saintly, self-sacrificing servant of her husband and children. In fact, a closer look at her role reveals Klara—a serving girl in the Alois Hitler household during his first two marriages—was capable of participating in complicated, illicit, clandestine (and borderline incestuous) intrigues with the imperious head of the household. We know, for instance, that at sixteen Klara was willing to move into the cramped quarters of a married man (Alois) twenty years older than she, a man not so distantly related to her (she was his niece), under pretext of being his serving maid.
It was 1867, and Hitler’s father was then living with his first wife, a relatively wealthy woman thirteen years his senior, who was ailing when he married her, most probably for her money. As John Toland describes it, Klara, an attractive teenager “with abundant dark hair . . . was installed with the Hitler’s in an inn where Alois was already carrying on an affair with a kitchen maid, Franziska,” who would become his second wife when his first finally expired. After his first wife died, developments in the Alois Hitler né Schicklgruber household began to take on the appearance of a maimed French farce. After a period of living conjugally but without benefit of clergy with the kitchen maid, while simultaneously enjoying the services of the even younger maid (and niece) Klara, he married the older one. Only to find wife number two “was only too aware of how tempting a pretty maid could be to the susceptible Alois,” Toland says, and one of Franziska’s first acts after the wedding “was to get rid of Klara.”
But not for long. Wife number two developed tuberculosis. As soon as Franziska left to seek treatment elsewhere, “it was only logical for [Alois] to seek help from his attractive niece [Klara].” Even when the wife returned—soon to die—young Klara remained, “and this time,” says Toland, “she became housemaid, nursemaid and mistress.”
It was shortly after this that the incest problem arose, and the sordid comedy in the Hitler apartment became a matter of official concern to the papacy in the Vatican.
When wife number two died, Alois sought to legitimize his live-in liaison with his maid/mistress Klara, but there was a barrier: “bilateral affinity in the third degree touching the second” as Alois’s petition to the local bishop (prepared with ecclesiastical assistance) described his complicated family relationship to Klara. (If we accept the official version of Hitler’s descent, then Alois’s father and Klara’s granduncle were the same person: Johann Georg Hiedler.) The local bishop thought this “third degree affinity touching the second” too touchy to approve on his own authority and instead forwarded the petition to Rome with a plea for a papal dispensation. But even after the Vatican granted the dispensation, Klara continued to call her new husband what she called him when she was still his maid/mistress: “uncle.”
“Uncle.” That’s exactly what Adolf Hitler’s own housemaid/niece Geli Raubal called him when she moved into his apartment in 1929 and they began their intense, controversial (then and now), and ultimately fatal relationship, the third erotic serving-girl drama in the Hitler saga.
I’ll return later to look more closely at the Geli Raubal tragedy, pausing here to note only those elements that make it such an uncanny recapitulation of the family romance of Maria Schicklgruber and the mysterious stranger. There was, in Geli’s case, a suspected Jewish seducer, a (rumored) pregnancy, and a tormented affair with the master of the house in which she served. And with Geli, as with Maria, there is the abyss between two conflicting views of the essential nature of the serving maid in question: Was she an innocent, a blameless maiden, an “angel” (as many called Geli), or was she a scheming, intriguing seductress who used provocation and deception to advance herself?
Further evidence for how highly charged the serving maid–Jewish master fantasy was in Hitler’s own mind can be found in its prominence as a pornographic motif in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, in Hitler’s peculiar ecstasy over Streicher’s coverage of the Hirsch case, a celebrated 1920s trial of a Jewish master for the rape of his Aryan serving girl. And in Hitler’s denunciation of Matthias Erzberger, one of the “November Criminals” (the men who signed the “stab in the back” November 1918 armistice), as “the bastard son of a Jew and a serving girl.”
And then, as Robert Waite has pointed out, there is the serving-girl codicil which Hitler insisted on including in the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, a codicil that not only specifically outlawed intercourse between Jews and Aryans but also explicitly forbade Jews even to employ Aryan women under the age of forty-five in their homes. It is a bizarre legislative provision, in that it seems to have a pornographic fantasy embedded within it. It’s a subversively ambiguous fantasy at that: While it seems to say that Jews could not be trusted with nubile Aryan women in their employ, the fact that the prohibition extended not just to the act of miscegenation but to the possibility of a Jewish master and Aryan maidservant being in each other’s presence carries an implicit hint that the Ar
yan maids themselves might not be trusted. This deeply embedded distrust, or at least deeply divided view of the serving girl and her relationship to the shadowy pater incertus who may be her master, is at the heart of the enigma of Maria Schicklgruber and the fantasies projected upon the blank line on the baptismal certificate she filed in Döllersheim.
No explicit eyewitness or documentary evidence has survived to support this dark view of Maria. The rumored paternity correspondence that would document the story of a liaison between Maria and a wealthy Jew she served, the “Jew from Graz” cited by Hitler’s personal attorney Hans Frank in his Nuremberg memoir, has never surfaced. There is no testimony from Maria’s contemporaries to indict her, to indicate she was anything other than a simple good-hearted peasant woman, even a courageous single mother who defied poverty and advancing age to bear a child without benefit of clergy or paternal support at an age, forty-two, when other peasant women might have resigned themselves to declining years of childless drudgery.
And yet there is testimony, reported testimony, from a descendant. A story about Maria, a sordid story of low, mean sexual intrigue, fraud, and blackmail that makes her out to be a cunning and deceitful anti-Semitic extortionist. It’s a story we might otherwise ignore were it not for its source—a man specifically assigned by Adolf Hitler to investigate the circumstances of Maria’s pregnancy, an attorney who claimed he got his seamy, disreputable portrait of Maria from a member of her own family. To be more precise: from Adolf Hitler himself.
CHAPTER 2
The Hitler Family Film Noir
In which we meet two generations of Hitler family con artists
It was still a shock to see it, or what was left of it, when we finally found it. We’d been traveling—snowplowing really—for about five miles into the verfallen world, on a road lined with barbed wire and marked conspicuously with frequent signs warning unsuspecting motorists about the hidden danger of venturing into the seemingly innocent pastoral landscape. There were unexploded shells lurking beneath the snowy fields. One translation of Jetzinger’s Döllersheim-destruction hypothesis describes this realm as a “once flourishing and fertile region [that] is today a ghastly desert where malevolent death lurks in the form of unexploded shells. Its former inhabitants have been dispersed to all points of the compass.”
Buried bombshells: Throughout Hitler’s political career, his emissaries and his enemies made pilgrimages to Döllersheim to search for metaphorical bombshells buried in the church registries, in the memories of local residents and relatives, for explosive revelations that might expose or explain the source of Hitler’s strangeness. And at last, around a bend in the road, there it was, all that was left of it.
A small sign on the side of the road announced “Döllersheim.” As we pulled to a halt, we could see, up the snowy slope of a small hill, the pale ruins rising out of the deep drifts; a maimed Stonehenge of worn stone walls standing alone without buildings. Less a ghost town than an archaeological ruin. Rising over the bare ruined choirs of the parish church was one lonely, relatively intact rectangular wall. Into the top of it were inset two stone-arched window frames, empty of glass, eyeless sockets through the vacancies of which the snow-clouded sky stared.
On the last leg of the drive, I’d been reviewing the maddeningly unresolved testimony that had brought me here, the controversial Hitler explanation that has kept obscure events at Döllersheim a century and a half ago in the forefront of furious debate ever since the story surfaced in 1953. It has become the fabula incerta, the unfathomable crux, the veritable curse of the Hitler explainers: the Hans Frank story.
I’d been researching the Hans Frank story and its reception for some years by the time I arrived at verfallen Döllersheim. And in reviewing my files and the preliminary study I’d done of the Hans Frank story and a compilation of four decades of polemical arguments over it by an array of Hitler explainers, I found myself struck by three strong impressions:
1. How widely this uncorroborated tale has been accepted despite the numerous efforts to refute it. And how frequently it’s become the very cornerstone of larger efforts to explain the origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. That a story of this bizarre and improbable nature—a story about a mysterious Jew named Frankenberger whose nineteen-year-old son supposedly impregnated Maria Schicklgruber—has crept so far into the status of received wisdom is testament as much as anything to the poverty and inadequacy of other rival explanations for Hitler’s psyche.
Most enthusiastic in their reception have been psychoanalysts and psycho historians such as Alice Miller and Robert Waite. But even those who are obviously uncomfortable with the Hans Frank story, such as Bullock and Fest, can’t feel confident enough about the facts to dismiss it; they feel compelled to cite it as a possibility and declare it neither proved nor disproved. And so, after the polemical smoke has cleared, the Hans Frank account of Maria Schicklgruber’s liaison with a Jewish lover remains standing, albeit by default, as the most ambitious contender for the ultimate prize of Hitler studies—the explanation for the origin, the special virulence of his anti-Semitism.
2. And yet what also remains clear is the enduring reason for resistance to the Hans Frank story: that it is too neat, too symmetrical. One hesitates to call it too good to be true, but its suspiciously symmetrical ironies, its plentitude, its patness as explanation inspire distrust.
3. If it’s overvalued as a disclosure of the hidden truth about Hitler’s origins, as the missing explanation of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the Hans Frank story may be undervalued as an evocation of the Hitler mind-set, of the blackmail-riddled Munich demimonde he arose from. In its gritty specifics of sexual blackmail, sleazy small-time extortion, it’s far different from the vague and grandiose Rothschildian variants of the Hitler family romance. The Hans Frank story is the Hitler family film noir.
Of all the war criminals executed at Nuremberg, none had a more peculiar posthumous life than Hans Frank. He was, in life, little more than a murderous flunky, a Nazi Party lawyer who sucked up to Hitler so successfully in Munich that he was elevated to chief party attorney. More important and less publicly, he gained Hitler’s confidence as a personal attorney, the man Hitler called upon to deal with the recurrent sleazy blackmail and extortion plots that dogged him and the seedier members of his entourage, such as SA chief Ernst Roehm, who repeatedly had to contend with homosexual lovers peddling his pornographic correspondence to the press.
Hitler himself called on Hans Frank in September 1931 when he was desperate to stop his journalistic nemesis, the socialist Munich Post, from printing scandalous speculation about the nature of his relationship to his young half-niece Geli Raubal and the nature of his role in her mysterious death. For such efforts, and perhaps because of the secrets he became privy to, Frank was elevated to national prominence after Hitler came to power, first as Reichsminister for Justice. Then, after the conquest of Poland, Hitler made him governor-general of the occupied sector. It was chiefly for the crimes he committed in this post—his eager participation in the extermination process—that he was convicted at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, sentenced to death, and executed.
Frank’s behavior during his confinement at Nuremberg was unusual. He underwent a conversion to Catholicism and—unlike the other defendants, who tried either to minimize their own guilt or that of the Nazi regime—Frank at first publicly flagellated himself and his cohorts for their guilt over the extermination of the Jews. He proclaimed in open court “a thousand years shall not suffice to erase the guilt brought on our people by Hitler’s conduct.” After the court condemned him to death, he ostentatiously waived his right to appeal (although he permitted his lawyer to do so and began to speak of the Allied devastation of Germany as “balancing” the crime of the Nazis). With his appeal denied, Frank spent the remaining months of his life before he was hanged composing—with the encouragement of his priest confessor and a secular confessor, the American psychologist G. M. Gilbert—a memoir of his career with Hitler
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Hans Frank’s thousand-page handwritten memoir (the original of which now reposes in the files of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial) would probably have been forgotten completely had it not been for the bombshell buried in it. Amid Frank’s ostentatiously tormented reflections on how he came to be mesmerized by Hitler, amid his post hoc critique of Hitler’s excesses (which is still in thrall to the notion of Hitler’s “greatness”), Frank includes a two-page account of a highly charged blackmail case he handled on Hitler’s behalf back in 1930. One that involved the sensitive subject of Hitler’s “family history,” one in which, Frank claims, he went beyond his role of private attorney to become a kind of genealogical private eye.
The threat emerged at a crucial moment in the course of Hitler’s resurgent political career. Frank recalls it as the latter half of 1930, a time when Hitler was in the midst of a political campaign that would mark his first giant step back from obscurity and marginality, the Reichstag elections that would raise the party’s strength in the national legislature from 12 to 107 seats and make Hitler, in the midst of the Depression-induced political crisis, a serious contender for national political power. It was a moment also when Hitler—for many years a forgotten, near-comic figure outside Germany since the failed 1923 putsch—had suddenly become the subject of worldwide press scrutiny and was reacting to it with a furious defensiveness, particularly to any inquiries into his family history.
The Hans Frank story begins with just such an unwelcome intrusion. Word reached Hitler that his two troublesome relatives by marriage in Liverpool were negotiating with the Hearst syndicate to sell a story about the famous German führer they were related to. They were troublesome in that they’d already brought embarrassing attention to his family: Mrs. Bridget Hitler had been married to Adolf’s wayward half brother Alois Jr. when the latter, a traveling salesman and waiter, settled in Liverpool, England, in 1910. He’d disappeared from Liverpool shortly before World War I, leaving behind his wife and a son, William Patrick Hitler. The mother and son thought him dead until the Hitler name hit the headlines with the failed putsch attempt in 1923. Their attempt to find news of Alois Jr., their long-lost husband and father, through Adolf led to the discovery that Alois was alive and well, living bigamously with a German wife and child. The trouble and the court case that ensued put Adolf on his guard against the English branch of the family. And when he learned in late 1930 of their attempt to sell a story about the Hitler family, Hitler hastily summoned the half-nephew to Munich, where he dressed him down and ordered him to deny he was related to the famous Nazi Party leader—to tell Hearst he’d been mistaken, his relative was a different Hitler.
Explaining Hitler Page 9