Triumph of the Will?: How Two Men Hypnotised Hitler and Changed the World

By David Levering Lewis

This book sets out to solve one of modern history's most baffling mysteries. Before the start of World War One, Adolf Hitler was living rough on the streets of Vienna. During four years of fighting he never rose above the rank of lance corporal. His superior's did not believe he had the personality to ever lead.
Yet, by 1933, he was on his way to becoming the one of the world's most ruthless, yet charismatic, leaders. What happened to transform him from a purposeless drifter into a man capable of mesmerising and manipulating millions of Germans to his will.
The answer, I argue, lies in his chance meetings with two hypnotists.
On October 15, 1918, Hitler was blinded during a British gas attack. The frontline doctors diagnose his condition as due, not to physical injuries, but mental breakdown. In the medical jargon of the times he was suffering from "hysteria." This was successfully treated by an eminent German academic, medical doctor and hysteria specialist, Dr Edmund Forster. He used hypnosis to restore the lance corporal site. But the method he chose also led Hitler to becoming convinced that he had been singled out, by some divine power, to lead his country from the humiliation of defeat to glory and world domination. In 1930 he met up with the second hypnotist, a Moravian Jew masquerading as a Danish aristocrat. Eric Jan Hanussen was a clairvoyant, an astrologer, a magician, and a hypnotist. He was also a multimillionaire media tycoon who published hugely popular astrological newspapers in Germany. He befriended the Nazis, funded the brown shirted SA and promoted Hitler in his journals. He became the Fuehrer's friend and showbusiness mentor, coaching him in public speaking and teaching him the techniques of mass hypnosis. My book describes how these three men not only changed world history , but set in motion the events leading to their own brutal ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MLI Press, Falmer, Brighton
• Release date: May 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781513641409

David Levering Lewis

Dr David Lewis read for a doctorate at the Department of Experimental Psychology, at the University of Sussex. After qualifying as a clinical psychologist and psychopathologist, that is someone who studies mental illness, he founded a registered UK charity to help people with stress and anxiety problems. More recently he set up a not-for-profit website, from which he provides free guidance and answer questions sent in by visitors. Over the past years, he has published more than 30 books on psychological topics, most of which can be purchased from Amazon or Amazon resellers. He has also appeared in numerous television and radio programmes on psychological and medical topics, including Secret Eaters and Embarrassing Bodies (Channel 4). He lives near Brighton on the south coast of England and is chairman of Mindlab International, an independent research laboratory based at the University of Sussex.

Book preview

humanity.

Chapter 1

HITLER LACKED THE

PERSONALITY TO LEAD!

We all believe on this earth in Adolf Hitler, our Leader. We believe that this God has sent us Adolf Hitler so that Germany should be as a foundation stone in all eternity.

Hitler Youth poster, 1934¹

September 7th, 1948, was an overcast day² that allowed only occasional glimmers of sunshine to penetrate the grime-smeared windows of Courtroom Number Two in Nürnberg’s ancient Palace of Justice. From those windows, stretched out on either side of the Pegnitz River, could be seen the broken buildings of a once beautiful medieval city. Allied bombing had razed to the ground or opened to the sky more than six thousand of the picturesque, high-gabled houses with their steeply pitched roofs. Among the ruins, flanking its narrow streets, were the homes of Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer³ and the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs.⁴

Three years earlier, major Nazi war criminals had been tried in this medieval courthouse.⁵ By 1946, their places had been taken by bureaucrats, who, through their dedication to the Party, had kept the wheels of government turning even as the Third Reich collapsed into rubble around them. In the oak-panelled courtroom, 49-year-old Robert Wasili Kempner, wearing the uniform of a US Army Captain, was questioning former German diplomat Fritz Wiedemann. The only German-born Jewish member of the US prosecution team at the International Military War Crimes Trial, Kempner⁶ had started his legal career during the twenties as an advisor to the Prussian police. After failing in an attempt to have the Nazi Party declared illegal, he sought to indict Adolf Hitler on treason charges and have him deported as an illegal Austrian immigrant. Not surprisingly, once the Nazis came to power, Kempner had been arrested and thrown into prison by the Gestapo. Released thanks to the intervention of influential friends, he fled to the United States. Two years later, he became Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, he had returned to his shattered home country, the only German-born member of America’s prosecution team, to assist in the prosecution of Nazi officials who, in the words of United States Chief Counsel Justice Robert H. Jackson had ‘created in Germany, under the ‘Führerprinzip’, campaigns of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian ages.’⁷

Kempner vs. Wiedemann

While Kempner came across in court as methodical but plodding, the same could not be said of the witness he was cross-examining. Fritz Wiedemann, despite his greyish pallor after four years in detention and an ill-fitting, prison-issued suit, dominated the courtroom with his confidence and air of authority. A professional soldier from the age of nineteen, Wiedemann had graduated from the Munich Military Academy shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914. In 1916, when a Regimental Adjutant with the 16 Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, he met 27-year-old lance-corporal Adolf Hitler for the first time and had been distinctly unimpressed.

‘Hitler did not cut a particularly impressive figure,’ he recalled. ‘His posture was careless and his answers when one asked him a question were always sloppy. He held his head a little to the left and all these things made him look very unmilitary.’⁸

At the end of the First War, Wiedemann bought a farm in southern Germany and might well have remained a simple farmer for the rest of his life had he not, in 1933, stage-managed a meeting with Hitler at Munich station. This, as he had hoped, led to an offer of employment as the Führer’s personal adjutant, a position he held until 1939 when he had the temerity to question Hitler’s determination to go to war. Banished from Berlin, he went as Consul General to San Francisco at his own request. American journalist Sidney Roger, who met him frequently during his time in California, remembers him as ‘one of those tall, handsome men, with a title like Baron so-and-so. (He) drove a super expensive Mercedes-Benz sports car and played polo. The social upper crust of San Francisco went wild for him, paraded him at their posh parties and were not fazed by the fact that he flew the swastika banner over his residence.’⁹

At the end of June 1941, when the German consulates in the USA were closed down, Wiedemann transferred to the Chinese coastal city of Tientsin. In 1945, he asked the Swiss consul to send a message to Lord Halifax, former British Foreign Secretary and now British ambassador to the United States. A week later, he was being interrogated by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington. Accepting that ‘a number of unspeakable crimes’ had been committed under the Nazi regime, he co-operated entirely with his interrogators.

‘He offered character analysis of the Nazi leaders and advocated the death penalty for most former leaders still alive,’ says historian Thomas Weber, ‘…detailing the workings of Hitler’s chancellery in the 1930s and explaining why any protestations by German leaders and their underlings not to have known what was going on in the concentration camps were implausible.’¹⁰

The proceedings involving Kempner and Wiedemann, listed on the Court’s schedule as Case Number 11, soon became known as the Wilhelmstrasse Trial, since all twenty-two defendants had worked for various Nazi Ministries. Among them was Otto Meissner, once State Secretary in the Presidential Chancellery and, in the words of Otto Friedrich, ‘A factotum of such chameleon talent that he served in the same capacity under both Friedrich Ebert and Adolf Hitler.’¹¹

Summonsed as a character witness for Meissner, Wiedemann had made a favourable impression on the judges. As he rose to start his cross-examination, Kempner knew he must try and discredit this impressive witness by branding him as Hitler’s unrepentant disciple. With this in mind, he started by asking, ‘You knew Hitler from the First World War when he was your messenger?’¹²

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell us what this job entails?’

‘A messenger has the assignment of collecting messages dictated by Regimental and Battalion staff and delivering them to companies. I believe the English expression is ‘Dispatch Rider’.’

‘Hitler was a lance-corporal, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you explain why you did not consider him suitable for promotion?’

Wiedemann hesitated for a moment and then replied frankly, ‘Hitler was an excellent soldier. A brave man, he was reliable, quiet and modest. But we could find no reason to promote him since he lacked the necessary qualities required to be a leader.’

Robert Kempner paused, savouring what he believed would be his moment of triumph. By attacking Hitler’s leadership abilities, he hoped and expected Wiedemann would feel obliged to defend his former boss. By doing so, he would reveal a commitment to the Nazi cause that he was striving to conceal from the Tribunal. ‘Put simply,’ he said, ‘Hitler lacked the personality to ever become a leader!’

Kempner expected to provoke an indignant denial. But to his astonishment, and the amusement of the court, Wiedemann’s merely nodded in agreement, ‘Genau das!’ (Exactly so!) was his curt reply.

This was spoken with such feeling that everyone in court, including the defendants, burst out laughing.

‘Professor Kempner considered he had made a good joke,’ Wiedemann recalled. ‘Yet what he had said was perfectly true. When I first knew him, Hitler possessed no leadership qualities at all.’¹³

The Transformation of Adolf Hitler

In the chaos following the end of the First World War, there was no shortage of would-be despots in Germany. Men only too eager to seize power. Each one of them, whether from the far left or extreme right of politics, convinced that only they possessed the answers to their defeated nation’s immense social and economic problems.

Hitler, no matter how spell-binding his oratory or passionate his self-belief, could never have achieved power without the thugs of Ernst Röhm’s Storm Abteilung (S.A.) or Brownshirts; the organisational brilliance of Hermann Göring; the propaganda skills of Joseph Goebbels; the miscalculations of politicians such as Franz von Papen or the greed of industrialists like Hjalmar Schacht, Gustav and Alfred Krupp and Fritz Thyssen.

Even though National Socialism was a multi-headed monster, it would never have come to power but for the supremacy of one man’s will.

‘Will-power, latent and then deliberately cultivated, is what Hitler was about,’ comments journalist Neal Ascherson. ‘Hitler is the supreme product of the ‘Age of Will’ … He cultivated his will-power as other boys cultivate their physical muscles – to the same end of acquiring forms of influence over others.’¹⁴

So where did his ‘will’ come from? What, in the words of the American historian Rudolph Binion ‘wrought that change’ and transformed a man who never rose above the rank of lance-corporal into one who British politician Lloyd George described as ‘a born leader, a magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose’?¹⁵

In this book, I will argue that it was not his will that transformed a purposeless drifter into one of the twentieth century’s most powerful and ruthless despots, but the ‘will’ of two men whose names are now largely lost to history. The first was Dr Edmund Forster, an eminent and widely respected German academic and nerve specialist. The second was Erik Hanussen, a Moravian Jew who found fame and fortune in 1930’s Berlin as a clairvoyant, media tycoon and Nazi supporter.

‘More than any other single person, Hitler made the 20th century and largely created the world we live in today,’ comments Frederick Spotts in his book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. ‘He created a new world by destroying the old one. He ushered in the atomic age, decolonisation and the Cold War. Culturally as well as politically he finished Europe off as the centre of Western life. He left the world poorer by 16 million souls.’¹⁶

This is the story of how one man brought those cataclysmic changes about and how two other men helped him do so.

Chapter 2

THE HITLER OF NÜRNBERG

My Führer! …we …wait solely for your order and your order alone. And we, comrades, know only one thing: to follow the orders of our Führer and to prove that we have remained exactly the same – to be loyal only to our Führer – Adolf Hitler Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!1

Viktor Lutze, 1934

The fact that Wiedemann had dismissed Hitler’s leadership abilities in Nürnberg was especially ironic. Neither Munich, where the Party was born, nor Berlin, from which the Nazis exercised their power, was as intimately linked to the National Socialists as this 11th-century city. Over a six-year period, it had not only played host to the Party’s grandiose annual rallies but it was there, on September 15th, 1935, that the Nazis promulgated their infamous Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. By expelling Jews from mainstream German society, this notorious law paved the way for Einsatzgruppen (death squads), concentration camps, gas chambers and the Holocaust.

Nürnberg had first attracted the attention of the Nazis in 1923 when Julius Streicher, a secondary school teacher and anti-Semitic rabble-rouser, was searching for a suitable venue for their rallies. The city’s location at the junction of seven main railway lines made it easy for party members to travel there from all over Germany. Furthermore, because the old centre was relatively compact, even the fledgling Nazi Party’s modest membership could make an impressive show of strength as Storm Troopers paraded along the narrow streets and massed in the ornate squares.

Practicalities aside, the 11th-century city, with its steeply pitched roofs, narrow, winding cobbled streets and ancient bridges also provided the perfect backdrop against which to act out the Nazis’ pseudo-mythological and romantic ‘volkish’ fantasies. It was in Nürnberg that the 19th-century poet Ludwig Tieck re-discovered German art and culture, and here, too, where the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs sang in one of Hitler’s favourite operas, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which speaks of the violence lurking in the heart of all men.

Captivated by its history and architectural delights, Hitler and the Party set about transforming Nürnberg into a citadel of National Socialist culture. On the south-east outskirts, they constructed a complex series of buildings and open-air arenas to provide dramatic backdrops for their annual rallies. These included three gigantic parade-grounds, each capable of holding around half a million people; the Märzfeld (one of a number of arenas in which military manoeuvres were held under public gaze) and the Grosse Strasse, a mile-long, hundred-yard wide paved area along which massive formations of troops and armoured vehicles could parade. They were, in the words of author Alan Wykes, ‘gigantic melodramas glorifying the implacable monster of Nazism.’ Ones in which ‘no cheap theatricality was omitted nor expense…In a blaze of searchlights, framed by towering banners, fireworks and mock battle, thunderous martial music and mesmeric chanting drown rationality – but not the Führer’s screeching, hate filled tirade.’²

In preparation for their rallies, which took place between 1923 and 1938, the Nazis erected a vast, tented city on the outskirts capable of accommodating two hundred thousand visitors from all over Germany. All aspects were meticulously planned with rules and procedures in place for everything from dealing with thunderbolts to unblocking latrines.

From 1929 onwards, every rally included the same key elements, each designed by the Nazis to mesmerise those present. A ‘Cathedral of Light,’ was created by using 130 anti-aircraft searchlights placed 12 metres apart and pointed skywards to surround spectators with vertical columns of white light. There were thundering Wagnerian overtures, stirring martial songs, multitudes of banners, streamers, flags and standards. There were hundreds of thousands of goose-step marchers in highly disciplined formations, torchlight processions, massive bonfires, and magnificent firework displays. Every major public building, and a majority of private homes, were festooned with huge flags, swastika banners and other Nazi insignia.

Against the backdrop of the Nürnberg stadium, its podium dominated by a gigantic swastika-bearing eagle, spectacles involving hundreds of thousands of the Nazi faithful reached their climax with the solemn ‘consecration of the colours’. To a rendering of the Nazi hymn, the Horst Wessel marching song, new S.A. and S.S. banners and standards were carried forward to be reverently touched against the Blutfahne (Blood Banner), the tattered flag the Nazis claimed had been soaked with the blood of those slain in Hitler’s abortive Munich Putsch of 1923.

The stage-managed rallies were meticulously designed to create a mood of hysterical adoration among Hitler’s followers. As the American journalist William Shirer noted in his Berlin Diary, ‘Like a Roman emperor Hitler rode into this medieval town…past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Nazis who packed the narrow streets…Tens of thousands of Swastika flags blot out the Gothic beauties of the place, the facades of the old house, the gabled roofs. The streets, hardly wider than alleys, are a sea of brown and black uniforms…a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel shouting: ‘We want our Führer’ …They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.’³

At the heart of the spectacle was Adolf Hitler, the divinely inspired leader and mesmerising orator with his intense blue eyes and brisk, aggressive gestures, working his magic on the masses and, through the use of repetitive rhythms of speech, generating in them an almost hypnotic state so they came away with ‘shining faces and dreamy eyes.’

‘No one in history has understood the basic principles of mass persuasion better than Hitler, and no organisation expended more labour and material in perfecting and using its techniques than did the Nazi Party during its turbulent and vicious life,’ comments author Barrie Pitt. ‘Every art, every subterfuge and contrivance was employed to hammer into the spectators and participants the message that Nazism was the only religion and Hitler its God.’⁴

‘Nazi devotion took many forms,’ observed Ernst von Weizäcker. ‘Some tried to touch Hitler, as though he were endowed with thaumaturgic powers. Others built little domestic shrines to him. Widows sent him small gifts. A tubercular party member gazed at the Führer’s portrait for hours ‘to gain strength,’⁵ schoolgirls painted swastikas on their fingernails, and a group of blonde maidens vowed to ‘Heil Hitler’ at the point of orgasm. ‘There was only one thing for me,’ explained one devout male believer, ‘either to win with Adolf Hitler or to die for him.’’⁶

Nowhere is the portrayal of Hitler as Germany’s Messiah more vividly apparent than in the documentary of the 1934 Nazi Rally Triumph of the Will. While not director Leni Riefenstahl’s first choice of title,⁷ it perfectly describes Hitler’s conviction that only through an unwavering faith in the ultimate and predestined triumph of his own will would Germany regain its former power and glory. Her film opens with a lyrical aerial sequence of cumulus clouds. These slowly disperse to reveal an aircraft flying over thousands of brown-shirted storm troopers marching in a seemingly endless procession. To a symphonic rendition of the Nazi anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel March’, the shadow of the aircraft appears as a black cross moving over the swarming masses. Riefenstahl is symbolically representing Hitler as descending from the heavens and bringing not merely military and political glory but a new religious order.

‘The Führer was able to transmit this faith not only to his immediate followers most of whom, like Goebbels, allowed themselves to be mesmerised by him,’ notes author Piers Brendon. ‘He could also project his charismatic presence onto a wider screen. At such an apocalyptic moment, the power of his personality cult was overwhelming.’⁸

Hitler’s power over his supporters was such that even with Berlin in flames around him, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels could still proclaim, ‘The times through which we are passing demand of a Leader more than vision and energy. They need a kind of toughness and endurance, of courage of heart and soul such as seldom appear in history, but when they do lead to wonderful achievements of the human spirit. To whom but our Führer could these words apply…Who but the Führer can show the way? If history tells of this country that its people never abandoned their leader and that their leader never abandoned his people that will be victory.’⁹

The Destruction of Nürnberg

It was because the medieval city so potently symbolised all that was most bestial and malign about Nazism that the Allies earmarked it, early in the war, for complete destruction. As a Bomber Command Intelligence report in 1943 makes clear, the medieval city was condemned to obliteration mainly because it represented ‘a political target of the first importance and one of the Holy Cities of the Nazi creed.’¹⁰

The rallies of the twenties and thirties, just as much as the devastation and destitution which confronted the German people in the forties, bore witness to the hypnotic power of Adolf Hitler and his ability to manipulate the minds of millions. All that followed from his ascendancy to power in 1933 can be traced to the overriding will of that one man. Without his will to achieve political supremacy for himself and National Socialism, Hitler could neither have gained nor sustained his hold on power.

That Hitler genuinely believed himself guided and guarded by some divine power is apparent from his frequent references to providence and predestination. As early as February 1930, at a time when the Party’s future remained uncertain, he confidently and presciently predicted ‘the victory of our movement will take place…at the most in two and a half to three years.’¹¹

On another occasion, he confided to an associate, ‘The impossible will become possible, miracles will happen.’¹² Emerging unscathed from a serious car accident during the twenties, for example, he reassured his aides by saying they had no need to be concerned about his physical safety since it was impossible for anything to happen to him until his mission had been completed.

Once in power, his conviction that his every action was predetermined and therefore infallible only grew stronger. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop once remarked on ‘the absolute certainty’ with which Hitler took major decisions on the basis that because his judgement was infallible a favourable outcome must be inevitable. ¹³

Exactly when and where Hitler became possessed by this unshakeable belief in his divinely ordained mission is not in doubt. He often recounted how in 1918, while being treated for gas-induced blindness in a military hospital at Pasewalk, his historic mission as the ‘people’s deliverer’ had been revealed to him supernaturally by means of ‘ecstatic visions of victorious Germany’.

Although the notion of Hitler’s ‘ecstatic vision’ was largely a Nazi myth – like so much else about his carefully reimagined life story – an event of great significance in his life did occur at Pasewalk.

It was here Hitler was hypnotised by neurologist Dr Edmund Robert Forster in an attempt to cure his psychosomatic blindness. While Forster’s unconventional treatment succeeded, it also convinced him of his ‘divinely inspired’ mission to ‘liberate the German people and make Germany great again’.

Chapter 3

A WOLF IS BORN

No change in childhood’s early day,

No storm that raged, no thought that ran,

But leaves a track upon the clay,

Which slowly hardens into man.

Georges Romanes¹

lf Hitler was born at 6.30pm on Easter Saturday, April 20th, 1889. It was in bedroom number 3 at the Gasthof-zum-Pommer in the little Austrian border town of Braunau-am-Inn. His father, Alois, was a burly, 51-year-old customs officer; his slightly-built mother, Klara, a 29-year-old farmer’s daughter.

It was a gloomy and humid evening with low clouds, which, combined with the proximity to the River Inn, made the small bedroom dark and dank. By the time midwife Franziska Pointecker delivered Klara’s baby son, the exhausted mother was soaked with perspiration.² But it was fear as much as the humid atmosphere and exertion of childbirth that caused Klara to perspire so freely during the long hours of delivery. In four years of marriage she had already lost three children, two sons and a daughter, under the age of two. Now Klara and Alois, who desperately wanted a family, had pinned all their hopes on this, their fourth child.

Holding the squealing infant in her arms, she vowed that no matter what sacrifices entailed, this baby boy would grow to manhood.

At 3.15pm on April 22nd, Easter Monday, the infant was baptised by the parish priest, Father Ignaz Probst. He was christened Adolphus, meaning ‘noble wolf’, a name he came to consider symbolic of his personality. Early in his political career he adopted the pseudonym ‘Herr Wolf’; he named his war headquarters in Eastern France Wolfsschluchut (Wolf’s lair), that in East Prussia Wolfschanze (Fort Wolf) and his temporary base inside Russia Werewolf. Werewolf was also the name chosen for the group of resistance fighters trained to operate behind Allied lines after the invasion of Germany between 1944 and 1945. His favourite dogs were that most wolf-like of breeds, the German shepherd and his favourite, Blondi, shared his last hours with him in the Führerbunker deep beneath the Chancellery. Albert Speer observed, ‘The German shepherd probably played the most important role in Hitler’s life: it was more important than even his closest associates.’³

As he splashed Holy Water onto the baby and admitted him to the Catholic faith, Father Ignaz could hardly have regarded the youthful Klara and her middle-aged husband Alois as two of the Church’s most devout followers. The brawny customs official, who described himself as a ‘free-thinker’, was frequently involved in heated attacks on clerics and religion. Apart from getting married or attending burials and baptisms, the only time he attended church was on the birthday of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary.

Even less commendable, from the priest’s point of view, must have been Alois’ private life which, characterised by promiscuity and adultery, had long been a local scandal. In the late 19th century, Braunau-am-Inn retained the character more of a village than a town and, as in every small community, the private affairs of its citizens were very much a matter of public discussion.⁴ Not that the gossip was without foundation. By the time Adolphus was born, his twice-married father had not only taken a bride twenty-three years his junior, but a woman closely related to him by birth. It was also rumoured, probably with justification, that he also kept a mistress in Vienna.

Although the townsfolk were always polite and respectful, a respect Alois pompously demanded in view of his official Government position, relationships with his neighbours were formal rather than friendly. When, a few years after Adolf’s birth, he was promoted to the rank of Customs Officer Grade 1 and transferred to Passau, a paper manufacturing town with a population of around 16,000, neither he nor Klara can have regretted the change.

Alois regard his promotion as not only a well-deserved reward for more than thirty years of loyal service to the Austro-Hungarian State but also a fitting conclusion to the life of a poor village boy who, through his own efforts, had made something of himself.

The Boyhood of Hitler’s Father

Alois was born burdened by the stigmas of illegitimacy and poverty. In 1836, his mother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, a 42-year-old unmarried farmer’s daughter, became pregnant. Her outraged parents ordered her out of the house. It was only through the kindness of a villager in the nearby hamlet of Strones that when Alois was born, on June 7, 1837, he was delivered in a cottage bedroom rather than an open field. A weakly child who was not expected to live more than a few hours, he was baptised the same day by the Döllersheim parish priest. Somehow, he survived and in spite of the family’s poverty contrived to flourish.

In 1842, Maria Anna married Johann Georg Hiedler or Hütler (the spelling of the name varies), a spendthrift journeyman miller so idle that he scarcely did a day’s work in the five years between their marriage and Maria Anna’s death in 1847 at the age of fifty-two. During those years she struggled to provide for both her indolent husband and child and the family gradually sank into destitution. With their furnishings sold around them, Johann Georg was forced to sleep in a cattle trough. Following the death of his wife, the erstwhile husband disappeared from the scene, not to reappear in Alois’ life for another thirty years. The abandoned five-year-old would have been in desperate straits but for his uncle Johann von Nepomuk. Unlike his indolent younger brother, Johann von Nepomuk was a hardworking and prosperous farmer in the nearby village of Spital. Although he provided his nephew with board and lodging, Alois’ childhood was an unhappy one with Johann making it clear he had no prospect of inheritance.

Thirty years later, Johann Georg Hiedler came back into his son’s life and had Alois’ birth legitimised by producing a legal document showing him as the young man’s father. The local parish priest, Josef Zahnschirm, altered the records by scratching out the remark: ‘Male, illegitimate’ and then filling in the name ‘Georg Hiedler’ in the previously blank space under ‘Father’. He also noted, ‘It is confirmed by the undersigned that Johann Georg Hiedler, whose name is here entered as Father, being well known to the undersigned did accept paternity of the child, Alois, according to the statement of the child’s mother Anna Schicklgruber.’⁵

Alois celebrated his legitimacy by subtly distancing himself from both Johann von Nepomuk Hütler and Georg Hiedler, by combining both their surnames into