Demolition Man, Hitler: From Braunau to the Bunker

By TD Conner

Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Fuhrer, is recognized as the most wicked, bloodthirsty mind of the 20th Century. But what drove this face-in-the-crowd from rural and small town Austria to commit his hate-fueled aggressions and atrocities? How did a high school dropout come to rule from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea? How was he able to persuade a great, civilized nation to march in lockstep with him past the very gates of Hell? When Hitler was done, 60 million people were dead and a continent lay in ruins. He introduced mankind to unspeakable evil--automated, assembly-line, never-ending death. Men in the 21st Century must now face the question: did Hitler's Nazi creed really die when he crunched his teeth down on his poison capsule in the damp underground pit where he took his own life? Or does the seething hatred he represented still breathe and fester today?

• Language: English
• Publisher: TD Conner
• Release date: Mar 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311318695

TD Conner

TD Conner is an ex-newspaper man. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia. He lives on Wilmington Island, GA

Book preview

Demolition Man:

Hitler from Braunau to the Bunker

TD CONNER

[e-mail]

2015

WRITEPLACE PRESS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

INTRODUCTION

During his time on the world stage, and of course since April 30 1945, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Fuhrer, has come to represent the embodiment of evil in the minds of many people interested in  mankind’s often-sordid past. There can be no question--his offenses were breathtaking and monumental. History--and the mass media--has judged him to be the predominant villain of the 20th Century.

However it is not uncommon for people rise to powerful positions and then commit monstrous crimes: Caligula, Vlad the Impaler (Dracula), and Attila come to mind from antiquity. In addition to Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong in modern times, many US presidents offer ready examples of seemingly ordinary men who became blood-lusty killers, or it might be said that theirs are the smiling human faces appearing on well-oiled death machines.

Latter day mass-killers use calculated public relations onslaughts, a tame corporate press, and soothing, euphemistic words to mask and obscure their crimes.*

However, Hitler remains a boar of a somewhat different bristle. Not only did he do evil, he routinely spoke of the very darkest evil, hate, and violence, often before massive, ecstatic, cheering crowds. After 1932, he also had a fully-controlled media fawning on him just as today‘s leaders do. His police beat people to death openly on the streets with few or feeble objections, opened and ran torture centers, and disappeared people in all walks of life to fill them, just as occurs today in the United States and Great Britain as of our 2014 press time.

Hitler’s death and labor camps functioned day and night for all to see, many of them near large cities and alongside well-traveled railroad tracks, their starving, ill-clad inmates often observed trudging through or even working in municipal streets, goaded by murderous, whip-wielding guards, or jammed and locked helplessly into cattle cars with barbed-wire threaded across the air holes, easily visible at train stations all over Europe, the  rolling Nazi prisons packed with starving, thirst-tortured, dying people, often parked cheek-by-jowl near passenger and commuter trains taking people to work, to shop, to visit friends, or enjoy an evening out, the high-arcing, black palls of smoke from Nazi crematoria clearly seen from cities like Munich, Stuttgart, Stettin, and Berlin. (Instead of whips and rifles, today’s guards carry Tasers and automatic weapons.)

People all over Europe often looked on idly while Nazi soldiers and police rousted undesirable people out of their homes, then beat them with whips and rifle butts, chased them with dogs through busy city streets, then kicked and clubbed them into trucks and trains, never to be seen again.

Today’s high-ranking killers hide behind a screen of soothing, oft-repeated lies, abetted by scoundrel print scribblers and talking-point falsehoods from grinning, pomaded coat-and-tie and hairdo parrots on television, and paid shills on talk radio, their stream of death and destruction usually directed at poverty-stricken people in poor, pushover nations whose leaders have sold them out to murderous foreigners, today’s unspeakable crimes committed with dreadful, death-spewing, illegal weapons primarily to satisfy too-big-to-fail bankers, salesmen hawking illegal arms, corporate contractors, and domestic and foreign lobbyists demanding that the politicians they have purchased send troops and money to fight the enemies of the countries or interests represented by those lobbyists, then paying well when their orders are followed.

At least Hitler was committed to his own wicked philosophy and usually quick to discuss it in detail. No lobbyist, banker, or foreigner ever owned or controlled him, though en route to power, he did pay a certain amount of lip-service to big-money German industrialists.

A failed artist, a painter who had no feeling, Hitler will likely be remembered as the predominant historical figure of the 20th Century, vintage films often seen nowadays on cable television, where he has become a star, portraying him behind his microphone-banks as his sometimes-soothing, often-snarling, guttural voice enchants massive crowds of  devotees, bringing them to their feet in their thousands as they rapturously fling out their arms in the stiff-arm Nazi salute he popularized, while many, especially women, (but men as well, and even small children and wizened, elderly people,) are seen near tears and trembling with joy as their Fuhrer’s orgasm of words slowly drives them toward some twisted ecstasy, roars of approval heaving out of their collective chests, their faces often stretched into expressions of wildest glee and near-rapture as Hitler, with his wild eyes, punctuation-mark mustache, and sweaty face poses, struts, and postures before them, growling out his odd, hateful dogma and threats.

After ascending to power in 1933, at about the same time as the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (and staying in power only a few days longer than Roosevelt, who died during his fourth term,) Hitler came to be seen by the  majority of the German people as a demigod, aloof, with little or no personal life, a man dedicated solely to the work of restoring his adopted land and its people, an entire nation unceremoniously booted into the dustbin of history after a humiliating defeat in the 1914-1918 Great War, to its former glory and rightful place of pride and dignity, this lofty, idealistic image fostered and carefully cultivated by Hitler himself and his clever minister of propaganda, the limping, smirking, yes-man Dr. Josef Goebbels, a failed novelist.

In his wordy, dry, near-incoherent book, Mein Kampf, written--or dictated--during his nine-month stretch in Landsburg-am-Lech Prison, Hitler, a high school dropout, details, with a good bit of window-dressing (and considerable omission,) his early days growing up in his native Austria, his time as a  vagrant in Vienna, (though he depicts this period as one of  work and study,) his service in Germany’s List Regiment as a soldier during the War to End All Wars, and the beginning of his days as a loudmouth beer hall demagogue and rabble-rouser in Munich’s  morass of postwar ultra-rightwing politics.

He paints the picture of a brave, dedicated man, virtually alone, battling furiously against daunting odds for the life and rightful return to a   predominant place among nations for Germany and her downtrodden, defeated people.

The original title he had for his book was A Retrospect, later changed after the  first volume of the book was finished to My Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Cowardice, and Stupidity, but again changed, so the story goes, by the publisher, Hitler’s crony Max Amman, shortly before the book was released. Thus, Mein Kampf features two volumes, the second part published roughly a year after the first (part two is called simply The National Socialist Movement,) both later combined under the Mein Kampf title.

(There is a little-known, unheralded sequel, published in New York in 1961 by Grove Press, under the American title Hitler’s Secret Book.)

Some say Mein Kampf was at least partially written by Hitler’s party associates and close friends, the two skull-breakers Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice. Sections of it are dedicated to Maurice, Hitler‘s on-again, off-again friend. There is another dedication at the end of it to Dietrich Eckart, Hitler’s racist, dope-addict mentor.

Both Maurice and Hess are known to have engaged in at least the physical writing of Hitler’s words as their Fuhrer paced moodily back and forth diagonally across his prison cell, growling out his hateful thoughts to each of them in turn after the Nazis’ failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and the disastrous, deadly march into downtown Munich which followed it. (Hess and Hitler were convicted of high treason against Germany’s so-called Weimar government afterward. Maurice, though a putsch participant, was not put on trial, but was simply allowed to spend time in the prison with his master by pro-Nazi judicial and corrections authorities.)

Maurice is said to have scribbled madly with a pen as Hitler began snarling out his racist philosophy and memories as he paced diagonally across his jail cell--Hitler never walked a north-south or east-west route when he paced. Then finally, as Hitler’s twisted tsunami of venom began flowing more freely, Hess was called in, pounding  a battered Remington  after taking over from Maurice, who apparently couldn‘t scribble fast enough to keep up with Hitler‘s onslaught of detestations.

(Eckart, a heroin addict, was also jailed after the putsch, but released shortly afterward by sympathetic authorities due to his failing health. He died in December 1923 and is buried at Berchtesgaden, the tiny hamlet where he was the first to introduce the lederhosen-clad Fuhrer and his dog, Prinz, around to the local volk.)

Much information about Hitler’s personal and private life has never come to the fore, or has been ignored, suppressed, or denied, even by the press and publishing agencies in the countries which formed the alliance that defeated the Nazis.

Hitler appears to have had a somewhat full life, nowhere near as aesthetic as is often pictured or as was presented by his hobbling henchman, Herr Doktor Josef Goebbels. In fact, the Fuhrer’s life was  dotted at various times with  people, both male and female, who became very close to him, yet who  often remain faceless and unmentioned by many historians concerned with the big picture, though  it is true that Hitler remained essentially a loner most of his life.

His loyalty was never bound to any one person other than his mother, and possibly his younger brother Edmund, who died in his early childhood. Hitler seemed to often use and  then abandon people who befriended him and to whom he had for a time extended what appears  today to have been genuine, albeit very limited friendship.

After attaining dictatorial power, Hitler would occasionally restore a relationship with a friend who surfaced from his past, providing he felt it would not damage his image before the German people, August Kubizek and Emil Maurice being examples of  such once-sundered friendships, patched up years after Hitler had ended them for one reason or another. Other friendships were permanently abandoned to the foggy chasms of time, some ending in the worst sort of tragedy for the onetime friend, Ernst Rohm and Hans Mend being examples in this category though Hitler also resurrected friendships with each of them for a while.

Some writers, notably the University of Bremen’s Professor Lothar Machtan, whose 2001 book with the English-language title, Hidden Hitler, and Mend, a fellow WWI soldier who knew Hitler personally and wrote a book about the dictator in the 1930’s (or allowed his name to be displayed on such a book,) assert that the Fuhrer was homosexual or leaned toward homosexuality, and that some of his friendships involved such a lifestyle, however there is little proof of such claims, though Mend wildly--and dangerously-- claimed to have been an eyewitness to Hitler’s assignations.

Mend’s refusal to simply shut up and/or stop antagonizing the Fuhrer led first to his imprisonment, then, finally to his jailhouse demise, death in custody and a vague excuse supplied to the victim’s survivors a very common Nazi way of  getting rid of undesirables and tying up loose ends. Sometimes the person‘s family might get a small urn containing ashes, as is currently done in the United States--families of Seal Team Six and journalist Michael Hastings being some modern examples.

I try to offer a non-judgmental approach, however I have sought herein to cover all relevant ground, and I mention and attribute assertions such as those of Mend and Machtan when and where they occur, along with a list of women Hitler is alleged to have romanced, and, if known, what some of these women said about their dalliances with the Fuhrer.

Modern-day experts claim without proof that at any given time, 10 per cent of the male population on earth is homosexual, claiming that many men, at some point in their lives, (as this school of thought holds--there is no proof,)  have either engaged in or might be inclined to engage in, homosexual activity. (Such pronouncements are not often made about women.) 

Having now survived many years on our mortal coil, I can’t say if this (or anything else such experts might allege, though they say and write it loud and often) is true or not, however as everyone knows, people arrive on this planet with built-in reproductive equipment, and use it or not as they like, seldom reporting what occurred in this compartment of their lives to anyone, least of all academic-style monitors and questioners.

No matter what Hitler was or was not, for the record, I see nothing wrong with consensual sex between adults, however, again, as is well known, until the last few years of the 20th Century, homosexuality was bitterly and loudly condemned by most religions and theologians, and by most cultures and virtually all authority-figures and legal systems in most countries.

However in the 21st Century, that all quickly changed radically.

Homosexual rights and marriage became popular causes championed unceasingly by those wielding power in many western countries, and statutes favoring homosexuals and their lifestyles or, as in the case of the Matthew Shepherd Hate Crimes Act, signed into law by US President Barack Obama in 2010, served to place them in a protected class, well above the rule of law.

                                      *             *               *

Some of Hitler’s friends later became his  enemies, and, as noted, a few of those, Ernst Rohm, Gregor Strasser, and Hans Mend for example, paid the heaviest price imaginable for antagonizing the Fuhrer, though in light of modern research, it now appears that Rohm was ambushed and framed by a triumvirate of Hitler’s high-ranking subordinates, Hermann Goring, Josef Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, each jealous of the threat they thought the  grotesque-looking old battler Rohm posed to their  spheres of power.

Mend, as noted, simply made a nuisance of himself, and Strasser, though he resigned his political positions, swore never to become a rival to Hitler, and went back to filling prescriptions at his drugstore, was still seen as a political threat and done in long after his departure from Nazi politics.

All three henchmen, Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering, are now known to have supplied Hitler with a stream of forged documents painting Rohm to be a worse villain than he really was, and all of them badgered Hitler to get rid of him. See below.

Mend, it appears, simply didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, but after 1945 a smattering of evidence arose that seems to indicate Mend may have been manipulated by the pre-war German anti-Nazi resistance.

I seek to cover such terrain, as well, differentiating throughout between legitimate friends and those who were mere useful acquaintances or even sycophants who supported Hitler to varying degrees because it served their own purposes. People like Goring, Goebbels, and Himmler of course receive ink herein, and there is no doubt that each of them and others like them had excellent relations with the Fuhrer until the closing months of WWII. However, for the purposes of this presentation, they are seen more as associates, rather than close friends-- or perhaps cronies or partners-in-crime are better word choices.

On the other hand, Hess, Emil Maurice, despite having Jewish roots, Albert Speer, and, as noted, Rohm were indeed close friends with the Fuhrer.

Goebbels --Wotan’s Mickey Mouse--basked in Hitler’s favor for years, but

badly lost ground when the tide of WWII turned against the Nazis and was utterly ignored at the end, even when he eagerly indicated he also planned suicide, just like his Fuhrer, along with approving the murders of his six children.

After entire careers spent infighting among themselves, (just the way Hitler liked it,) most of the top Nazis angrily fell out for good with each other and with Hitler in the final days, when only one person stayed with him--Eva Braun-Hitler, the longtime lover he finally married as enemy shells burst above their heads, and with the tinny sound of the tune Blood Red Roses Speak of Happiness to You scratching on the phonograph in the damp, smelly underground pit where they lived just before the two of them took their sordid leap into eternity.

Hitler espoused three main goals, loosely enunciated in both his Secret Book, and in Mein Kampf: he wanted to stamp out Bolshevism and colonize all land between Russia west of the Urals and East Prussia; purge Europe of its Jewish population; and unify Germany--or at least all German-speakers who were not Jews.

Other achievements he desired but was willing to put off until Endseig--final victory-- were to crush and deeply humiliate France just as Germany had been humiliated in 1918, and to curb forever the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, and other Christian sects along with it, all of which he said were based on Jewish tenets and under Jewish control. Certainly he would also have been happy if he could have eliminated Freemasonry, which he always claimed was also controlled by Jews.

During his time in power, he did eliminate trade unions, another longtime goal. He also authorized the murder of 15,000 Gypsies and large numbers of homosexuals, and an uncertain number of German children and undesirables in his T-4 program, estimates of this massive, largely hidden, crime ranging up to 400,000 dead.

Two of Hitler’s main goals had been achieved by the passage of time as of the 1990’s. Bolshevism/Communism had been cast into the scrap heap of history, and much of Germany was unified, albeit with Austria and Sudeten Czechoslovakia, (the Sudetenland now a part of the Czech Republic,) Danzig and East Prussia, Memel, and what was once called Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad-- all of which Hitler wanted to be part of his new, unified Germany-- left out of the modern-day loop.

China still pays lip-service to the symbols and dogma of Communism, but is in essence now a sky’s-the-limit capitalist wonderland, albeit one with limited civil rights, but where the commissars cruise to  their cell meetings in Cadillacs produced in the many General Motors plants which rapidly moved to China from the US after their 21st Century US taxpayer bailout; Cuba recognizes the Communist credo, but both its leaders and its people seem to be seeking to sidle away from realistic hands-on Marxist practices.

North Korea appears to be a cruel, Orwellian totalitarian nation which prattles about Communist teachings, but begs help to feed its starving masses from enemy countries all the same, a Communist nation in the thoughts and desires (and propaganda,) of its ruling elite, but not so much in deed. But then Hitler never concerned himself with the status or fate of countries filled with what he saw as subhuman untermenschen anyway.

And Hitler must be recognized today as the indirect founder of the State of Israel, the great evil he unleashed on Europe’s Jews creating a large, homeless, dispossessed population in the wake of WWII, many of these people with one unifying desire: to move to Palestine, seize the land from those who lived there, and create a Jewish nation.

A note on footnotes: I have tried to use original documents wherever possible, and offer a Bibliography for readers interested, as I have always been, in what others have written about Nazism and Hitler. The chapter-head blues references spring from my lifelong belief that blues is truth. Perhaps had Hitler been more exposed to this heart and soul-cleansing art form, and less to the music of the racist composer Richard Wagner, 20th Century world history might not have been the bloody, abysmal record of sick crimes, flowing blood, and unspeakable violence which it is.  

                                        *                   *                 *     

* Ronald Reagan’s administration fomented the so-called Contra War waged during the 1980’s across Central America by  the US intelligence agencies and US-paid mercenaries (most of them brutish former Nicaraguan National Guardsmen forced to flee when the Somoza dictatorship was ousted by Sandinista forces in the summer of 1979,)  a conflict which took an estimated 200,000  civilian lives. Reagan called the Contras freedom fighters. US corporate media happy talkers gave little coverage to this secret war.

Reagan’s administration also fomented, abetted, and funded Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s eight-year war against Iran, supplying Washington’s puppet strongman du jour  at the time with chemical and biological weapons  along with massive amounts of US taxpayer money, and conventional weapons as long as the conflict lasted, resulting in one million deaths, both civilian and military.

One Reagan administration-supplied death-bringer was mustard gas, an illegal, outlawed weapon, which Hussein used against both Iranian troops and against Kurds living in Iraq itself. 

(During his time in office, Ronald Reagan repeatedly, loudly voiced concern that Planet Earth might someday be attacked by monsters from outer space, eagerly discussing his fears about such an invasion with amazed foreign leaders on several occasions and  strongly suggesting to them details about how to join forces and conduct a united defense against such space invaders.)

George H.W. Bush’s administration perpetrated the 1991 invasion of Iraq and the use of chemical and Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons there. This bloodletting was given the name Desert Storm, sometimes also called the Video Game War. For years after this assault, the US instigated and patrolled an illegal no-fly zone above Iraq, embargoing shipments of food and medicine destined for the Iraqi civilian population.

In order to reduce and/or put an end to titillating press coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, wherein President William Clinton engaged in  sex acts over an 18-month time frame with a young female intern, Clinton’s administration began an undeclared war in regions of former Yugoslavia and in Kosovo, using smart bombs and American and US-controlled puppet troops from NATO to attack civilian populations and bomb Belgrade.

NATO is made up of European mercenaries from nations whose ruling cliques have been taking US taxpayer money given to them by US corporate and pro-war interests since the end of WWII. In turn, NATO supplies these mercenaries for use by US war-making interests. Clinton’s administration also continued fighting in Somalia initially fomented by the G. H. W. Bush administration. US media parrots and hairdos smilingly and repeatedly called the bloody attacks in Kosovo a humanitarian intervention between tire, burial insurance, fast food and itch powder commercials.

(Later, when out of office, former President Clinton also voiced fear that Planet Earth would someday be invaded by space monsters.)

As of the 21st Century, US warmakers had taken to drone-bombing Somalia, also paying Ethiopian and Kenyan mercenaries to invade that Horn of Africa nation, even as certain favored Somalian warlords were also paid to become US allies.

George W. Bush’s administration launched an illegal invasion of Iraq based on a web of lies and elaborately-spun television propaganda about WMD (weapons of mass destruction, as nuclear bombs are called these days,) which ended in the death of 1.5 million Iraqi civilians and the collapse of Iraqi society and infrastructure, while also destroying the US economy other than the large banks, which were bailed out with US taxpayer money. His administration also sponsored the illegal invasion of Afghanistan and the death of thousands more civilians, and began launching ground, air, and drone attacks against civilians of still other nations not at war with the United States, Pakistan and Yemen, as noted, along with Algeria, Iran, Somalia, and Mali. US-made drones also landed in Syria, but the claim was made that the US did not launch them.

It was said of the attack on Afghanistan that Osama Bin Laden, who it was claimed lived in a cave somewhere in the area, had used a laptop to beat a $60 billion air defense system and caused the collapse of three buildings in lower Manhattan by  having young subordinates hijack and crash airplanes into two of them, triggering a US response, a story still eagerly endorsed by US media presstitute scoundrels and solemn-voiced coat-and-tie and hairdo parrots amid their endless onslaught of  laxative, sugar-soda, pimple-cream, burial insurance, and  cat food commercials.

Barack Obama’s administration pressed on with the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the illegal drone bombings both of those nations, also continuing illegal drone attacks on Pakistan and Yemen, Libya, Iran (leaders of which  claim to have shot down several drones launched against their country,) Somalia, Mali, and Algeria.

The Obama administration, as of our 2014 press time, has never admitted to the use of drones against targets in Algeria and Mali, however US troops are stationed in or near each nation, and so-called enemy factions allege drone attacks have occurred there.  As of 2014, US transport planes were ferrying puppet troops from one African nation to another to put down dissidents and US warmakers were gleefully discussing yet another attack on Iraq.

Under Obama, drones first took to the skies above the United States itself, including drones operated by foreign governments given clearance to spy on the American people.

Mainstream media parrots call them surveillance drones, while grinning and gurgling  about what a wonderful boon to mankind they are, just as they do about the tanks and armored vehicles dispersed to all parts of the US by the Department of Homeland Security, but no one has proven conclusively that each  drone currently operating above the US is not armed, and portals for .50 caliber machine guns can be clearly seen on the tanks and assault vehicles  taken from war zones and now based in cities and small towns all across the US.

President Obama ended the illegal US occupation of Iraq when representatives of the puppet government installed there told him American troops would be subject to prosecution after 2010 for criminal, civil, and war crimes. His administration was thwarted in an attempt to launch an illegal attack on Syria at the end of the summer of 2013 by negative world public opinion and a no vote in the British Parliament (British forces until then having eagerly, willingly, and brutally attacked other nations whenever ordered to by their US rulers.)

After US Senate filibusters halted two very strong attempts in 2013 to erase the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, President Obama convinced lawmakers to put an end to the practice of using the filibuster.

--Frogmore, SC, 2014

1

THE WALDVIERTEL: FAMILY TIES

I’m some sweet woman’s angel baby child.

--Willie McTell

There is a vast district of northwest Austria, heavily forested even in modern days, sliced by several rivers, sectioned by their valleys.

It is known as the Waldviertel.

The German-language word means Forest Quarter, or more broadly, Place of Large Forests.

Despite today’s tourist brochures and happy-talk travel films, which gurgle and chirp merrily about bike trails, rafting, the local strains of whiskey and the peat harvest, the Waldviertel remains a raw, hard land of endless stretches of misted, mysterious moorlands and tiny specks of villages sparsely populated by poker-faced, frugal, introverted, and inbred peasants, a place usually far distant from the crossroads of history, though it has been touched in the past by the Peasant Wars, various violent religious conflicts, the Thirty Years War, Napoleon‘s roving armies, and even the Black Death.

Generally speaking, the Waldviertel is still a harsh, lonely region with a wistful, gloomy sort of beauty, dotted with caves, meadows of ancient, cracked stone, relatively poor soil, and dark, brooding waters.

On June 7 1837, Adolf Hitler’s father was born here, in a crossroads farm village called Strones, to a domestic servant named Maria Anna Schickelgruber, 41 years of age, who had been employed in Graz prior to giving birth.

Since Strones had too few people to constitute a church parish, Maria Anna later took her baby to the priest at nearby Dollersheim so as to place the child’s name in the Baptismal Registry of the Catholic parish in that hamlet. The infant was christened Aloys Schickelgruber.

No name was given for his father. The boy was illegitimate, at the time a common occurrence in much of Europe.

Thus, the identity of the Fuhrer of Germany’s paternal grandparent is not known for certain, a source of much worry and angst for the dictator-to-be.

(Aloys, who would later change his last name to Hitler, changed the spelling of his name to Alois in later years.)

In 1842, records show Maria Anna married a wandering mill worker named Johann Georg Heidler, said by some historians to have been her second cousin.

Heidler’s last name, and variations on it, are thought to be of Czech origin, and are common throughout the Waldviertel: Hiddler, Huttler, Hutler, Hiller, etc.

                                               A FARM IN SPITAL

When he was five, Alois’ mother died, and Heidler apparently resumed his roaming in search of work in the mills of the day. Alois then was taken in by Georg’s brother, Johann Nepomuk Heidler, who owned and worked a farm in the village of Spital. Johann Georg Heidler died in 1856.

Alois stayed on the farm until he was 13. Then, as his son, who became the Fuhrer of the German people, put it in Mein Kampf:

"When he was barely 13 years old, he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from ‘experience,’ he went to Vienna to learn a trade there." 1

Alois became the apprentice of a Vienna shoemaker and applied himself. Soon he had mastered the trade. However, at the age of 18, he decided  the future offered by life as a cobbler wouldn‘t suit him, so he enlisted as a border guard with the Austrian Ministry of Finance’s  Department of Inland Revenues (the Customs service,) a  position requiring the donning of a uniform. Alois would wear a government uniform for the rest of his life. No one was more proud of Alois’ progress in life than Johann Nepomuk Heidler, the man who had raised him, the brother of the man who had married his mother five years after his birth.

Alois apparently was a hard worker and a quick study. He passed all civil service examinations presented to him and had earned supervisory rank by the time he was 24.

In 1873, at the age of 36, Alois married the first of his three wives, a woman 14 years older than himself, Anna Glassl-Horer, the daughter of an official with the Imperial Tobacco Monopoly. 

Some historians say he may have married Anna for the money she had from a previous marriage.

In 1875, Alois was appointed senior assistant inspector of customs at Braunau, an Austrian hamlet just across the Inn River from Germany.

It appears he paid scant attention to his wife shortly after marrying her, and showed very little interest in their marriage.

She developed medical problems not long after the marriage and Alois is known to have dawdled with several of the female employees at the inn where the couple had lodgings, his strong interest centering on a girl named, Franziska Fanni Matzelsberger, a waitress at the inn. Soon Alois’ sickly wife moved out, but she stayed married to him until 1880, when she filed for a legal separation.

In 1876, for still-unknown reasons, on June 6, the illiterate Johann Nepomuk Heidler and three equally-unschooled relatives went to Weitra, a town not far from the Bohemian border, where they met with the local notary. Before him, they testified that Heidler’s brother, the then-deceased Johan Georg Heidler, (whose name was spelled as Hitler by the notary,) had stated prior to his death that he was the father of Alois, and  they now wanted Alois to be named his legal heir.  For a fee, the notary filled out and stamped the appropriate forms.

On June 7, Nepomuk Heidler and his kinsmen set forth to Dollersheim, bearing their notarized papers, Dollersheim being the place where Alois’ birth had been officially registered at the local church in 1837. There they showed their legal papers to the parish priest.

The old cleric was cooperative, but also a bit cagey.

He apparently sensed something was askew. Nepomuk told the priest that his foster son, who was now a mid-level government official, was the son of his dead brother Georg. The old clergyman then agreed to alter the parish registry, crossing out the name Schickelgruber under Name of the Baptized, and writing in the blank space under Father’s Name: Georg Hitler, Cath. religion, resident of Spital. He also crossed out the word illegitimate, and wrote in legitimate. 

However the priest did not write in another name in the space provided after crossing out the Schickelgruber moniker.

He also did not date the new information on the parish registry, nor did he sign his own name anywhere on the form. However the priest dashed off a short note at the bottom of the registry form:

"It is confirmed by the undersigned that Georg Hitler whose name is here entered as Father, being well known to the undersigned, did accept paternity of the child Aloys, according to the statement of the child’s mother, and did sign his name to be entered in the register of baptisms of this parish."

PARENTS NO LONGER LIVING

Of course the cleric knew all along that a court ruling was needed to establish any deceased man as the father of a child, and that the mother also needed to accept and agree to the statements made. Possibly Nepomuk simply told the priest this was impossible since both parents were deceased.

Then Nepomuk and his kinfolks made a mark looking more like a cross than an X, the priest signed their names nearby on the paper, and Alois Schickelgruber had a new last name.

No one knows why old Nepomuk made this change.

Some historians say that since he had only daughters, he wanted the family name carried on and simply didn’t realize that the notary and the priest had spelled the name on the papers in a different manner than his name was spelled.

Others say correct spelling on some piece of paper was the least of the problems faced by any Spital hardscrabble farmer and that Nepomuk could have cared less how the name  was spelled, since he couldn‘t read anyway.

Of course this was a fortuitous stroke of luck to the man who would one day become Fuhrer of Nazi Germany.

There can be little doubt that Heil Schickelgruber! has a much different ring to it than does Heil Hitler!

Some say that Nepomuk offered Alois a sum of money to make the change to his name.

Others have claimed that Alois’ mother worked as a servant for the Jewish family of Leopold Frankenburger in Graz, and that the 19-year-old son of the head of the household in Graz, Leopold Junior, was actually Alois’ father, and moreover, that the Frankenburger family had paid support money to, first, Maria Anna Schickelgruber, and then to the Nepomuk Heidler family for Alois’ support until he was a teenager.

It has been suggested that as Alois climbed the ladder of success as a Customs official, it would not have been helpful to have it known that his father was Jewish, a catalyst for Alois’ cooperation with Nepomuk Heidler in having the parish registry changed and accepting his new name. It is known that shortly after Nepomuk Heidler died, Alois Hitler purchased a modest-sized farm for 5,000 florins.

                                        *                  *                *

Once in power, Adolf Hitler had his lawyer, Dr. Hans Frank, later the honcho of Nazi-truncated Poland, research the alleged Frankenburger link to his family.

Frank confirmed to his Fuhrer that it was a fact-- Leopold Frankenburger gave money for his father’s support for many years during Alois‘childhood.

Exactly how Frank arrived at this conclusion is unknown, but he did dare to explain the situation to Hitler.

Strangely, Hitler seemed to take this revelation in stride.

Then he told Frank it didn’t matter, that no Jew could be his grandfather under any circumstances. He even added that his grandmother had told him of the payments made by Frankenburger! 2

He said she told him she took the money only because she was poor. Of course Hitler was lying to Frank. (And Frank must have been lying to Hitler.)

Adolf never met his grandmother, who died decades before he was born, the curious angle being that he did not immediately angrily deny outright the idea that Frankenburger’s money had gone, first to his grandmother, then to the family that took in his father.

Frank, the Butcher of Poland, was hanged after WWII for crimes against humanity. The volumes of his Diary are today in the hands of the US government.

Some modern-day experts claim without proof that the possibility of having a Jewish grandparent weighed very heavily on Hitler’s mind throughout his life, given the fact that no one could ever be certain who his grandfather really was, and that this alleged doubt was part of the cause for the deep rift which developed between the young, maturing Adolf and his father, Alois.

Such analysts say that this feeling--that both his father and thus he himself were part-Jewish-- spurred Hitler’s virulent, death-dealing anti-Semitism, the unproven suggestion being that young Adolf saw his father, whom (according to such unproven theories) he suspected of being Jewish, beating and/or sexually violating his mother, the greatest love of his life.

However this seems unlikely.

Hitler himself said his anti-Semitic ideas solidified during his time as a tramp, idler, and layabout in Vienna and Munich when he was young.

As a boy in Linz, attaching possible Jewish ancestry to his father likely would not have occurred to him, though it is known that he became rebellious to all authority while he lived in Linz.

He may or may not have even known about the payments alleged to have been made to his maternal grandmother by the Frankenburger family at that time, and it would never have been possible for him to meet his paternal grandmother.

The friend of his youth, August Kubizek, however, said he occasionally heard Hitler mouth anti-Semitic slurs as far back as their Linz days, and that Adolf’s anti-Semitism became noticeably more pronounced when they roomed together later in Vienna.

The Frankenburger family issue becomes more complicated when the results of studies undertaken after WWII by researchers at Austria’s University of Graz are considered.

The University’s investigation clearly indicates that no Jewish family named Frankenburger lived in Graz at the time Maria Anna is said to have worked there as a household servant, that indeed all Jews had been ordered expelled from the area after 1490 by government edict, followed by forcible ouster of any Jew seeking to stay on.

No proof has ever been offered that a man named Leopold Frankenberger and/or his family ever existed or that they lived in Graz at the time in question, or in any other place at any other time.

Nonetheless, allegations are still made without proof that Hitler may have been haunted during his adult life by the nagging thought that he could have Jewish blood.

                                   GOOD LITTLE ANIMALS

As Fuhrer, he often alluded to the subject of blood in general. The vegetarian dictator once jokingly offered to donate his own drawn blood to some meat-eating guests so they could make blood sausage. He enjoyed watching his quack physician, Theodor Morell, frequently draw blood from his arm. He said the pollution of German blood had become the sin of all humanity.  Hitler also enjoyed having his blood sucked out of him by leeches now and again. He called them good little animals.

He kept a collection of test tubes containing his blood handy and was often seen staring at them, lost in thought.

One of his first actions as dictator of Germany was to decree the Law for the Protection of the Blood, a vicious racist measure designed to restrict, degrade and curb the freedoms of the Jews and end their citizenship rights.

He loudly claimed that he was married to the German people but another reason he often gave in private for remaining a bachelor was that he might pass on bad blood to children who might emerge from any marriage of his.

(Hitler knew he had several cousins on his mother’s side of his family who were mentally handicapped-- a condition  described by Hitler as feeble-minded, and that his mother’s sister, his Aunt Johanna Polzl, was a hunchback. Once in power, his policy was to routinely have such people murdered.)

                                             THE T-4 PROGRAM

As Fuhrer, Hitler approved the so-called Aktion T-4 program, which led to the deaths of  between 200,000 and 400,000 German children, elderly, and disabled people--his first victims-- most of them hospitalized with mental problems or in some cases with  severe physical disabilities or incurable illnesses--no one knows the actual death toll from this program.

As T-4 expanded, certain people not even in hospitals were rounded up and brought in to be executed--vagrants, the work-shy as they were called in Nazi Germany, social misfits, petty criminals with lengthy rap sheets, the chronically unemployed, known carriers of venereal diseases, and alcoholics. T-4 seemed to come to an end (but was only more vigorously covered up) when prominent German clergymen spoke out strongly against it. More on Aktion T-4 below.

Following the 1938 Anschluss, the joining of Austria and Germany, Hitler caused all land and buildings in the village of Dollersheim to be purchased by the Nazi government.

He was aware that people still lived there who remembered him and his family, and Dollersheim was a place where he knew records on his family were kept. He ordered all residents to move away from the area.

Then he had the buildings leveled and the land turned into an artillery range. It is still used today as an Austrian armed forces base, known as the Allentsteig Military Training Area.

                                            *                *               *

While still married to his first wife, Alois Hitler was also carrying on with Miss Franziska Fanni Matzelsburger, at the Pommer Inn in Braunau, where Alois and his wife lived. While dallying with Fanni, Alois was also able to persuade Nepomuk Heidler to allow his young grand-daughter, the pretty 16-year-old Klara Polzl, to come to work at the inn where her uncle-of-record Alois and his ailing wife lived. Some historians say Alois then began romancing Klara, right along with Fanni.

When his legal spouse moved out, Fanni assumed the role of Alois’ common-law wife. One of her first decrees was that Klara must leave the inn.

In 1882, Fanni delivered a baby boy out of wedlock, Alois Junior. In 1883, Anna, the wife from whom Alois was separated, died. On May 22 1883, Alois married Fanni, who was at the time pregnant with another child. Shortly after the wedding, Alois formally adopted Alois Junior. Soon thereafter, Fanni gave birth to a daughter, Angela.

Then it was found that Franziska Hitler had developed tuberculosis.

She was taken away for treatment and to keep the condition from spreading to the rest of the family. Alois called his niece, Klara, back to the inn at Braunau so as to help with the children. By this time, Klara was 24 years old and Alois was 47. Fanni died August 10 1884.

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KLARA AND ALOIS HITLER:

Adolf Was Born to Them April 20 1889 

Image 1

Alois married Klara on January 7 1885. She was pregnant at the time.

Alois would have married her sooner, but found he needed to get a papal dispensation from the Catholic Church since she was listed as his niece-of-record. (Since it is likely Georg Heidler was not his father, as the altered Dollersheim parish records showed, they were probably not blood relations in the first place.)

Klara Polzl would become the mother of Adolf Hitler, and he remained devoted to her memory throughout his life. He always kept a picture of her in any bedroom he used, frequently commenting that he had her eyes, his most remarkable physical feature.

Klara, at the time of her marriage, was a tallish, rather stately young woman with her luminous, striking blue eyes and dark hair which she sometimes arranged in curls across her forehead. She was well-mannered and quiet.

It is said that she never raised her voice to anyone.

When she first moved in with Alois, she called him Uncle Alois.

She became an excellent substitute mother for Alois’ previous two children, Angela and Alois Junior, and, in the course of her marriage, she gave birth to six of her own children. However only two  of them survived, Adolf and Paula.

A son, Gustav, died at the age of two in 1886; Ida, born in 1886, died in 1887; Otto, another son, died only a few days after his birth.

Adolf was born in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, on April 20 1889. 

Notes Chapter 1:

1.  Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, London 1942

2.   Frank, Hans, Diary, unpublished. US National Archives Microfilm File  

     #T992. (Forty-three volumes taken as evidence, Nuremburg War

     Crimes Trials.) Has Frank’s Tagebuch entries, and some speech

     manuscripts from October 1939 through March 29 1945, with some time

     periods missing.

2

A  GROWING BOY

Jack of Diamonds is a hard card to play.

--Mance Lipscomb

In 1892, Alois was transferred to Passau, across the Inn River in Germany, where the Austrian and German Customs officials had their shared offices and sheds. The family moved there with him. On March 23 1894, Edmund, Adolf’s younger brother, was born in Passau. Klara gave birth to her youngest child, Paula, in 1896. Paula would live, under the name Paula Wolf, until 1960. Gustav and Ida both succumbed to diphtheria. Edmund would later die of measles, creating a turning point in his brother’s life.

Braunau was little more than a riverside hamlet; however Passau was a full-blown city, retaining much fine architecture from its historic past in the castles and churches spread throughout and near the town, built during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. People who heard Hitler speak later in life said they felt he had somehow retained the intonations and accent of this old border region of Germany in his speech, though as an adult he was also prone to using Austrian slang and words of endearment from time to time.

Hitler knew no foreign language; however Nazi propaganda later claimed (though records show he failed French in school) that he captured some French soldiers during WWI, ordering them to the rear by speaking to them in their own tongue.

Shortly after Edmund’s birth, Alois was transferred again, to Linz, Austria. This time the family decided it would be best for Klara and the children to stay on in Passau for awhile, since Edmund was too young to travel. Alois journeyed to his new posting alone.

Some historians say that wandering about Passau with the German children he met there as his new friends is where Hitler first developed his lifelong interest in architecture, or at this young stage of his life, simply noticing and enjoying the sight of the city’s many large and imposing or beautiful and historic buildings, an interest he would continue and  greatly expand over time, showing a pronounced desire later in life to alter or even demolish, then reconstruct famous or historic buildings his way. 

                                       *                        *                        *

As the Russian shells thudded down across bombed-out, ruined Berlin in late April 1945, and with his final few hours rapidly drawing nigh, the Fuhrer was often seen spending long hours, often in the middle of the night while enemy bombers roared overhead, brooding over a scale model of Linz and its fine buildings which he had specially built, still deeply contemplating and creating the great architectural changes and additions he had planned all his life for the town of his youth.

Today’s analysts have repeatedly offered the idea that Hitler was a monorchid, a male born with only one testicle. After the Great War, Hitler never allowed anyone to give him a full medical examination sans clothing, however his WWI Army commander confirmed in a letter to the German newspaper Die Zeit, published December 21 1971, that Army rules required officers in the trenches to routinely examine the genitals of each of their men to look for incipient venereal diseases. He said he clearly saw that Corporal Hitler was missing a testicle during these repeated checks.

The five Russian doctors who examined what was claimed to be the charred body of the Fuhrer in the Chancellery garden following April 30 1945 also made the claim that he lacked one testicle, however the body they said they found was never produced outside the Iron Curtain, their report was not published until the late 1960’s, and no burial site for Hitler’s alleged remains was reported at the time, though the Russians are said to have produced his teeth and his dental records and X-rays.

During  the 1960’s, an American specialist, Dr. William Niederland, wrote  that young monorchid boys, in his experience, often manifest an urgent desire to first tear down, then rebuild larger structures familiar to them. Niederland cited the idea that such young males inwardly hope to counter their own insecure feelings about their personal lacks by improving on the inanimate structures which surround them. The desire to destroy and rebuild was often expressed by Hitler throughout his life.

Throughout his public life, as seen in multiple films and photos, Hitler appears to be overprotective of his genital area, or at least more so than most males, often clasping his hands across his lap while seated or placing one hand atop the other across his groin while standing.

Some pictures show him holding his hat across his genital area as well, another type of protective gesture.

As a struggling politician in Munich, and later as dictator, Hitler always kept two Walther semi-automatic pistols handy, one a 7.65 caliber weapon, which usually was placed on his bedside table, the other a 6.35 Walther model which he carried always in a special leather holster he had sewn into his trousers, its weight and shape pressing in hard against his upper right leg. Both pistols were kept nearby every night in any room where he slept. When he ended his life, one, likely the 7.65 model, was used, along with a cyanide capsule, as recommended by Hitler’s physicians Drs. Werner Haase and  Ludwig Stumpfegger, to facilitate his death.  1

Both weapons were found in the room where Hitler and his wife ended their lives. Were the two always-convenient firearms subliminally used to offset feelings of inadequacy the Fuhrer may have felt due to his missing testicle?

Among Hitler’s many phobias, discussed further below, was the fear and dislike of actual, living horses and bulls. However he enjoyed looking at pictures and sculptures of such animals, both long-recognized symbols of virility and male sexuality in art, drama, myth and legend.

The New Reich Chancellery, designed by Hitler and his longtime friend Albert Speer, featured sculptures of two massive, apparently cantering stallions. In the Chancellery garden stood a statue of an uncircumcised Teutonic warrior wrestling a gigantic bull, and two more hulking, uncircumcised male nudes rendered by the sculptor Arno Brecker stood at the building’s main entrance, said to be representations of the Nazi Party, and the German Army. Another Brecker statue, depicting a larger-than-life bucking stallion, decorated the Chancellery’s so-called Marble Gallery. 

                                             A MAMA’S BOY

With his father now gone for long periods of time, and his mother doting on her darling child (and the older Hitler children, including Adolf’s half brother and sister, in school,) it is said that Adolf became a mama’s boy, a muttersohnchen, was the term used in Passau.

In 1895, Alois suddenly retired from the Customs service.

He bought about nine acres of land in Hafeld, a small village south of Linz. He put in a large garden and set up a network of beehives to tend, beekeeping having been his longtime hobby. He also attempted to work some crops, but he found the land was unproductive.

In July 1897, Alois sold the place and moved the family to an apartment in Lambach, halfway between Linz and Passau. Lambach was another town with a historic past, also, like Passau, retaining a wealth of fine old buildings, one being a Benedictine monastery. Adolf was enrolled in a school at the abbey run by the Benedictine clergy.

Adolf did well in the school and sang in the church choir. He later said he loved observing the church’s ancient religious rituals playing themselves out while the abbot ruled supreme, both over his flock and his minions, the silent, ubiquitous black-clad monks. Adolf would later report that he loved listening to the strains of the sacred music and that he enjoyed the frequent holiday festivals and the rituals often staged by the church.

There was a bit of trouble when one of the teachers caught Adolf smoking a cigarette. The cleric scolded the boy, but Hitler later recalled that

the monk’s  anger passed quickly and he was forgiven, promising never to smoke again. However Hitler said he did smoke until about 1922 when his political campaigning first began to pay off. He said he stopped smoking because he was afraid it might harm his voice or damage his lungs. Later in life, he said he felt smoking tobacco was a waste of money. He became a powerful anti-tobacco campaigner and no smoking was allowed near him.

Carved above the main gate of the school and also at points inside the abbey itself are several renditions of the German hakenkreuz, the swastika. Doubtless Adolf observed this symbol on a daily basis during his comings and goings. A former abbot, Theodorich von Hagen, who presided at the monastery for many years in the mid-1800’s, used the symbol in his coat-of-arms. It is suggested that the abbot, by posting such a symbol, was merely making a pun on his own name: Hagen/Haken.

In 1898, Alois purchased half an acre of land and a small home next door to a cemetery in Leonding, a village just outside Linz, and moved his family there. He again began to indulge in his hobbies, gardening and beekeeping.

Adolf attended school in Leonding, a Volksschule, or grammar school.

While Adolf studied, his older half-brother Alois Junior bristled under the constant strong discipline maintained in the family by his father. He, like his father before him, finally left home as a young teenager.

However, where the father had buckled down and learned a trade in Vienna, Alois Junior was rootless, roaming across Europe, working as a waiter.

He is known to have lived in France, Germany, Ireland, and England. In Liverpool, he met and married an Irishwoman named Elizabeth Dowling and they had a son, William Patrick Hitler.

Shortly before WWI, Alois left England (and his wife and son,) and moved to Germany. Court records show that Alois Junior was dealt a six-month jail term for bigamy in Hamburg in 1924.

After Adolf came to power, his half-brother opened a restaurant in Berlin called Café Alois. Of course it drew many Nazi customers who may have thought Alois had more clout with Adolf than he did by that time. Alois Junior survived WWII. In 1945, he changed his last name to Hiller and disappeared.

                                         BEATEN WITH A WHIP

Hitler’s half-brother said publicly that his father often beat him with a hippopotamus-hide whip, and that he was a frequent, but not the only target of the old man’s anger. He said both Adolf and the family dog regularly came due for switchings, the dog, at least during Alois Junior’s tenure with the family, apparently getting the worst of it. He said the family pet would often  whine and wet the floor as a result of the pain from the beatings it took at old Alois‘ hands, and he still remembered Adolf‘s screams as the old man‘s whip stung him as well.

However, physical discipline for unruly children was common and not much frowned upon in the Europe of the day.

After Alois Junior left home around 1900, the father focused more on Adolf. In Mein Kampf, Hitler says that this was the time his father often discussed his future with him, or attempted to.

The old Customs official was determined that Adolf would follow him into a government service career, the very idea of which repulsed the son, who said he wanted to be an artist.

Hitler says in his book that their difference of opinion didn’t bother him much initially and that he didn‘t speak much about his own plans for his future to his father, he just let the old man‘s enthusiastic pep talks about a government career go in one ear and out the other. He says that he had shown marked talent in his classes as a painter and up until about 1900, his grades had been excellent at the Volksschule.

In Mein Kampf, he writes that one day when he was almost 12 years old, his final year at elementary school, things came to a head:

"When as a result of my renewed refusal to adopt his favorite plan, (Ed.: to become a civil servant,) my father asked me for the first time what I myself really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself automatically. For a while, my father was speechless. A painter? An artist-painter? he exclaimed… Artist? Not as long as I live, never. 2

Hitler adds, The resulting situation was not pleasant.

He wrote that after that confrontation with his father, he gave up trying for any sort of success in any school, saying that from then on, he studied only the subjects which he felt might assist him with his future success as a painter. He further states that this was the period in his life he became a nationalist, and that following this particular outburst with his father, he began to grasp the true meaning of history.

In February 1900, his younger brother Edmund died of measles at age six.

The exact date of Edmund’s passing is not known. Following the death of his brother, Adolf Hitler’s personality underwent a cataclysmic change. Not much is known about Edmund, and Hitler seldom spoke about his younger brother, however Edmund must have been extremely important in Adolf‘s life.

The boy’s demise was a life-altering crossroads in the life of his older brother.  Following Edmund’s passing, Adolf became openly defiant,  rebellious, and totally uncooperative at school, his grades dropped barometrically, and his arguments with Alois became louder and more frequent, leaving both father and son red-faced and in towering rages.

No one knows why, but Adolf’s parents did not attend Edmund’s funeral or the graveside service, nor did they ever mount a memorial stone or plaque over Edmund’s grave. Some historians have said this was because old Alois was anti-clerical and couldn’t get along with the parish priest who handled Edmund’s send-off. The child was buried nearby, in the cemetery just across from the family’s home.

Hitler said the beatings meted out by his father continued as well,  but he read in  a book by Karl May, a German author who wrote fanciful tales about the American West, though never having traveled there, that the measure of a man was how stoic he could be while bearing up under pain.

Hitler said the next time after Edmund’s death that Alois began a switching, he simply took it, remaining silent.

He said that was the last time his father beat him.

The following September Alois sent Adolf to a Realschule in Linz, an institution concentrating more on technical and scientific subjects, equivalent to what is  often called a trade school in the United States.

Hitler said