Hitler's Father: Hidden Letters: Why the Son Became a Dictator

By Roman Sandgruber

The bundle of 31 letters, the pages of which had long yellowed with age, had lain hidden in the attic where they were found for over a century. Only when the razor-sharp script was examined further did historians discover just who had written them – and that person, Alois, was Adolf Hitler’s father. Born Alois Schicklgruber on 7 June 1837, the identity of his biological father still undisclosed, Alois eventually became a civil servant in the Austrian customs service. At around the age of 40, Alois changed his family name from Schicklgruber to Hitler – his infamous son being born some eleven years later. The contents of the re-discovered letters have allowed the renowned historian and author Roman Sandgruber to reassess the image that we have of Alois, offering the world a completely new and authentic impression of the man. In Hitler’s Father, Sandgruber re-examines Alois’ personality and how he significantly shaped the young Adolf. The letters also shed further light onto the everyday life of the Hitler family as whole, a story which is often characterized by myths, inventions and assumptions. They have given the author the opportunity to recount the childhood and youth of the future dictator, painting a dramatic picture of the ‘Führer’ growing up. These letters also help answer the question that is so often asked: How could a child from an Upper Austrian province, seemingly a failure and self-taught, rise to a position of such power? Indeed, Adolf Hitler’s father and ‘the province’ seemingly lay heavily on him until his suicide in the Führerbunker in 1945. The author examines how the young Hitler’s lowly upbringing may have affected him in the years that followed – years which shaped the history of the whole world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399019286

Book preview

Hitler’s Father

Hitler’s Father

Hidden Letters – Why the Son Became a Dictator

Roman Sandgruber

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Frontline Books

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Roman Sandgruber 2022

ISBN 978 1 39901 927 9

ePUB ISBN 978 1 39901 928 6

The right of Roman Sandgruber to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Contents

The Difficulty of Writing about Hitler

Preface

The Riddle of Hitler

Problematic Sources

The Burden of Coming from the Province

Alois Hitler, Alias Schicklgruber

The Myth of the Ahnengau

Hitler’s Grandmother

From Schicklgruber Comes Hitler

The Experience of Living as a Customs Officer

Customs Officers and Smugglers in Pinzgau

The Myth of Braunau

Strokes of Fate and Marriage Strategies

The Third Marriage

Adolf’s Providence

The Desire to Become a Farmer

Wertheimer and Wieninger

Passion for Bees – Passion for Agriculture

‘My wife likes to be tough’

The Customs Branch in Passau

Urfahr, the Forgotten Residence

‘If this Hafeld is not quite a forsaken place’

Financing

‘I still have to be well in this house’

Slaughtering Pigs and Baking Bread

The Pension

The Troubles of Rural Life

Adolf Starts School

Is it Possible to Stay Here?

The Dream of Being a Politician

‘In Lambach, where I have probably passed by many times …’

The Pension Shock

Boy Singer and Altar Boy

Hitler’s Leonding

Politics in the Boarding House

Hitler’s Leondinger Elementary School Years

The Consequences of Losing One’s Father

Linz and the Province

Turning Point 1900

The Secondary School

The Father–Son Conflict

The Loving Mother

The Father’s Death

The Great Disorientation

The Mother’s Death

The Financial Legacy

The Impossibility of Escaping the Province

The Shadow of the Father

Hitler’s Upper Austrian German

Hitler’s Austrian Religion

‘I became a nationalist’

Hitler’s Anti-Semitism

Hitler’s Racial Biology

The Monstrous Provincial Artist

Notes

Bibliography

Picture Credits

Not a pleasant family man and citizen: at home a patriarch, at work a pedant, in public opinionated, for the children a brutal despot – this is how the contemporaries of Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father, saw him.

The Difficulty of Writing about Hitler

Foreword

Adolf Hitler came from the province, Austria. He could not escape the province: not the burden of the dark spot in his origin and the gap in his sixteen ancestors, which he had demanded from all Germans, but about which he was never able to talk about himself. Nor the burden of his childhood marked by repression and violence, from which he tried to free himself in numerous stories, but which nevertheless defined him in his opinions and actions. Nor the burden of his provincial environment, which gave him the knowledge of very different milieus, but not only made it impossible for him to build friendly relations, but also did not give him a cosmopolitan and modern education.

Adolf spent the first third of his life, the youth years from 1889 to 1907, in Upper Austria; his father Alois two thirds, practically his entire adult life. Between 1837 and 1903 Alois spent almost all of his time in the province: first in the Forest Area and then in Salzburg and Upper Austria. He made a career there and achieved some standing, but also had to accept a lot of frustration and suffering. His son Adolf saw his time in Upper Austria as the most important and fortunate years of his life, although they were not as happy as they were for him in retrospect. There he memorised and took up the decisive lines of his disastrous thinking and acting. The impressions and experiences he gained in Upper Austria did not leave him until his end in the Berlin Führerbunker.

Hitler’s own account of his youth is dominated by two themes: the conflict with his father and the conflicts in the multinational Habsburg monarchy.

Adolf Hitler is one of the few people of whom one can say with some justification that history would have been different without them.1 No one in recent world history has gained so much power out of nowhere in such a short time, abused it so limitlessly, and with his own downfall, dragged so many people to their deaths and influenced their fates as he did. His path led more clearly than any other politician to total disaster. When he was born in Braunau am Inn in 1889, however, one could not have guessed in any way what physical and mental devastation his person would one day leave behind: not the atrocities of the expulsion and murder of the Jews, not the euthanasia murders, not the persecution of gypsies, homosexuals or politicians. Not the discrimination against the churches and religious communities, not the exploitation of forced labourers, not the Second World War unleashed by him, not even the First World War, which was co-triggered by the Habsburg monarchy. However, racism, anti-Semitism, imperialism, eugenics and nationalism were already present everywhere in the nineteenth century. But this ‘fin de siècle’, in which the young Hitler grew up, also spread so much success, so much progress and so much self-satisfaction that one did not want to perceive the dark sides and the planting of cells of disaster and even today recognises them only reluctantly behind the shiny façade of this dreamtime.

Hitler admired his father’s history of advancement, achieved through ‘diligence and energy’ from the smallest of circumstances, but set the frightening idea of having to ‘sit in an office like his father as an unfree man’ against his dreamed existence of being an artist. The much more powerful and devastating life goal of a political existence was not yet envisaged, but it was already laid down in school: ‘I became a nationalist’. And: ‘I learned to understand history’, which he regarded as the recognition of world-historical causalities dictated by foresight.2 Biographers have once again gained a great deal of value in historical research because they are not only able to connect the micro and macro levels, but also because they can also incorporate many fields of research that have become modern, from everyday history to psychohistory. In Nazi research, they have had a special significance from the very beginning, on the one hand because in dictatorships the individual decisions of the actors and perpetrators are of greater importance, on the other hand because in a tyranny the fate of the victims deserves all the more attention.

The spectacular discovery of hitherto completely unknown sources and the new possibilities of digital research in well-known sources gave me the impetus to write this book. Together with my knowledge of historical contexts from my lifelong economic, social and contemporary historical research work and the insights into the regional mentality and way of life resulting from my own life-historical experience, the decision was formed on a topic from which one could be convinced that it has already been researched from front to back to the end or cannot be researched at all. It is a delicate topic because many emotions resonate here and it is not easy and also not justifiable to always maintain the distance necessary for historical research. I hope that I have not only corrected a number of facts, but have also been able to contribute to a better understanding of the development of Adolf Hitler, the life story of his father and also of the social and ideological milieu in which he moved.

My thanks go above all to Mrs Anneliese Smigielski, who saved Alois Hitler’s letters addressed to her great-great-grandfather and made them available to me, as well as Mayor Martin Bruckner, of Großschönau, who made it possible to contact sources about Wörnharts. Mrs Auzinger, who made the documents of her grandfather August Kubizek accessible to the public, and, of course, numerous colleagues who have been available with advice and help: the director of the Linz City Archive Dr Walter Schuster and his predecessor Dr Fritz Mayrhofer, from the Upper Austrian Archives; Dr Cornelia Sulzbacher; Dr Jakob Wührer and Franz Scharf, in Leonding; Dr of Engineering Gerhard Tolar, in the Upper Austrian Landes-Kultur GmbH; Dr Thekla Weißengruber, in Braunau Mag.; Florian Kotanko, Department of History of Lower Austria in St Pölten; Dr Christian Rapp, from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for War Consequences Research; Dr Hannes Leidinger at the Linz City Museum Nordico Mag.; Andrea Bina, from the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance Mag.; Dr Gerhard Baumgartner and at the Institute of Social and Economic History of the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Univ.-Prof. Dr Michael John and Univ.-Prof. Dr Ernst Langthaler; Dr Andreas Maislinger, House of Responsibility in Braunau; as well as Fritz Fellner, Freistadt Castle Museum and Historic Customs Collection. Above all, I thank my nephew and friend Mag. Georg Ransmayr, who not only read the manuscript critically, but also made numerous valuable suggestions and corrections, and my wife Margith, who thought carefully and challenged and encouraged me with a critical counter-speech.

I would like to dedicate the book to my highly revered Viennese teacher, Mr em. o. Univ.-Prof. Dr Michael Mitterauer, who with his research on single mothers and illegitimate children provided important socio-historical foundations for this book and helped me to make decisive professional and personal assessments.

The Riddle of Hitler

Hitler is probably the personality with whom historical science has dealt most, according to objective counting. It has been shown by many examples that the national socialist system of rule represented a multiheaded polyocracy and was controlled by a number of different actors. But Hitler was the unambiguous leader and set the essential course himself, not only crossing all basic ethical lines, but also not allowing foreign expert opinions to apply and ignoring them. He was not a ‘weak’ dictator, but a ‘ruthless’, violent man.

The young Hitler offers a wide field for conjecture and constructions because of the dramatic courage of sources and methodological vagueness. Researchers searched for the family, incestuous or homophile upheavals, the Catholic roots, the ideological pioneers and the spiritual role models. Deep psychological and milieu-related explanations were found. For some, Adolf Hitler is the child beaten by his father and made tender by his mother, for others the cranked student and failed artist, the vagabonding man’s home dweller or the petty bourgeois living beyond his means. For some he is a mediocre provincial, for others, already in his youth, a charismatic man of violence. For Peter Longerich, one of the latest biographers, a teenager, a ‘nobody’, for others a ‘someone’ whose aspiration to lead was predetermined in childhood and adolescence.

But much is surrounded by mystery. How could a child from the most remote corner of the country and without a really good education, actually a failure and self-taught, celebrate such successes? How could such a dictatorial character develop in the provincial milieu in which he grew up and be able to captivate so many? How could a family that contained little that was conspicuous to its contemporaries be developed into an idea capable of destroying an entire country and triggering the extermination of so many Jews and other racially discriminated groups? How, when and why did Hitler’s models of thought, prejudices develop?

For Hitler’s behaviour as a dictator and for his irresponsible and criminal decisions, his childhood and youth are an important key. Not only his language and rhetoric and his taste in art were founded in his youth, but also his nationalist xenophobia, his hostility to the Church, his antiSemitic extermination thinking and his racist goals. Deep imprints from his origin, his family and his economic, social and cultural environment remained throughout his life. Hitler was particularly inclined not to move away from ideas, objectives and decisions once he had made them throughout his life.

There is no other historical figure in more books – scientific and trivial – than Adolf Hitler. The estimates amount to up to 150,000 book and magazine titles dealing with National Socialism and the Nazi system. There are several hundred biographies of Hitler, several of which are very distinguished and very detailed, but which usually only deal with the youth years more or less cursorily, and also a few dozen monographs about the youth years. There are books on all sorts of facets, stations and companions of his life, from his habitual homosexuality to the women around him, from his charisma to his taste in reading, his religion and his understanding of art to the roots of his ideology and his spiritual pioneers. You can find biographies about Hitler’s photographer, press chief, lawyer, banker, chauffeur, personal physician and chief astrologer. About his secretary, dietitian, midwife, about his mother and sister. About his half-brother, his niece, his nephew, even about his grandmother and about alleged children, Of course about his lover and later wife, but none about Hitler’s father.

The fact that Alois Hitler is missing may be due to the lack of sources. Apart from two requests for the reimbursement of his service deposit in dry official German, two or three private letters and several greeting cards, no personally written documents were known from him until now. The personnel file has disappeared. The professional data is incomplete or poorly read and the eyewitness accounts contradictory, whether they date from the Nazi era or from the post-war period. There are only three somewhat more detailed writings on Hitler’s childhood and youth history with Alois as a source character, from which all further depictions are based. Sources in the historiographic sense cannot be called in any sense at all, because they all three actually represent more or less fighting scripts for very different motives: First, Hitler’s own autobiography Mein Kampf, which was explicitly intended as a propaganda medium and as such a conglomerate of truths, half-truths that are difficult to unravel, and outright lies. Even the critical edition could provide little additional clarity as to the childhood and youth history of Hitler. The two publications by Franz Jetzinger and August Kubizek, which are available as the most important foundations for Hitler’s youth, are not sources in the technical sense, but also combat writings. Both are full of prejudices and errors, but are nevertheless irreplaceable as the starting point of all further research on the young Hitler, whereby the errors contained there often propagate through all subsequent publishings.

Several important sources have now emerged: firstly, a thick bundle of yellowed letters from Alois Hitler in Gothic handwriting, which were written in an attic about the clear-cutting of the Nazi era, were saved and made available to the author.3 These very substantive letters and documents, which Alois Hitler sent to the road maintenance officer Josef Radlegger, not only multiply the personal documents on the Hitler family before the First World War in one fell swoop, but also open up a completely new and more precise view of the person who undoubtedly had the greatest influence to Adolf Hitler’s career: his father.

In addition, the contract for the sale of Alois Hitler’s house in Wörnharts has also emerged and thus brings more clarity to the financial situation of the family. Last but not least, with the discovery of the handwritten original version of Kubizek’s book from 1943, a much more critical view of Hitler’s Linz youth has become possible. The fact that it was also possible to prove a one-year stay the family had in Urfahr in the years 1894–95 with additional reporting dates not only eliminates the claim that Alois lived separately from his wife and children for a year, but also raises new questions, because the then head of the family was one of the richest Jews in Linz.

Even long-known sources suddenly flow much more abundantly through the possibilities of data processing. Access to the parish registers has become much easier. Above all, the digitisation of newspapers and magazines has opened up new insights. Above all, the Linz Daily Post, which was not only regularly read by the Hitler family, but for which Alois Hitler himself wrote letters to the editor and articles and in which he repeatedly placed advertisements, complements the newly published sources. How important this daily newspaper was for the family and also for Adolf Hitler’s youth, he affirmed in 1944: The Führer was very sad, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary in 1944, that the newspaper had appeared in Linz, which he had read in his earliest youth and bought for his father.4 Even August Kubizek also recalled repeatedly that he had met Mrs Klara while reading the Daily Post.5

Problematic Sources

In addition to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and August Kubizek’s eyewitness account, Franz Jetzinger’s depiction of Hitler’s youth from 1956 is the most important source. Jetzinger’s book is actually to be classified as a work of historic writing and not as a contemporary witness report. He did not know Hitler personally and never met him, but he is indispensable because he interviews contemporary witnesses who are no longer available today and has collected important documents, even if his work is full of mistakes due to the circumstances of the time.6 Nevertheless, the result is a meritorious scientific work. Considering the possibilities of the post-war period, the absolute lack of sources about Hitler’s early days and the extreme spoilage of these sources by the extermination actions of the National Socialists and by contemporary witnesses who were very implausible in every respect, Jetzinger has the merit of reconstructing for the first time the basic features of Hitler’s childhood and youth.

Jetzinger had to endure a lot of frustration, both about his botched life, which had robbed him of all his friends, and in his Hitler research, where August Kubizek, who had received some data from him, had preceded him with the release. And his frustration would have been even greater if he had had to experience how later science devalued his results and classified him as a scientific amateur – he had actually been a professor of Old Testament at a theological school in his first profession – and praised his competitor Kubizek, who he rightly criticised.7

While Jetzinger worked like a historian and could not relate to his own experience, August Kubizek has the benefit of being of an immediate contemporary witness. The upholsterer apprentice and enthusiastic music lover had met the young Hitler at the end of 1905 on the stage of the Linz State Theatre and was in close contact with him for the next two years in Linz and then for about four months in Vienna, before losing touch with him completely. He completed his music studies in Vienna in 1912, but could not make anything of it after the war and worked as a municipal official in Eferding. It was not until 1938 that the childhood friends met again briefly in Linz. Hitler greeted Kubizek, but addressed him as ‘you’ and invited him to the 1939 Bayreuth Festival. In 1942 Kubizek joined the NSDAP and, while continuing to work as a community secretary, was commissioned to record his memoirs. Of the two issues that were written in 1943, the second part was always known, while the first part about the Linz years has only now emerged.

After the Nazi era and sixteen months in the American re-education and denazification camp ‘Camp Marcus W. Orr’ in Glasenbach, Kubizek tried to exploit this preparatory work in a book. From his own experience, he was able to cover about two and a half years, although he had gained fewer insights than he pretended, and much more than all other contemporary witnesses from Hitler’s childhood and youth. Kubizek was not a good writer and stylist, probably not a convinced National Socialist, but well connected in pansophical circles.8 With the help of two experienced ghostwriters, the high-ranking National Socialists Karl Springenschmid and Dr Franz Mayrhofer, Kubizek’s manuscript was expanded into a book oriented towards the reader’s taste and supplemented by a love story.9 The fact that their influence could not have been insignificant is evident from the fact that the three authors were to split the royalties in thirds or, on the publisher’s proposal, in a key five to four to three, even though Mayrhofer, who was born in Linz in 1908, could not contribute any experience of his own for Hitler’s youth and Karl Springenschmid, who was born in Innsbruck in 1897, had lived much further away from the action. However, the three used considerable energy to make Hitler’s youth history appear as a preschool of his later appearance as a ‘führer’: as a genius, idealist, anti-Semite, urban planner, builder. For a new edition, they considered even more highlights: the young Hitler as an inspiring fire speaker and early party programmer, and also thought of a film project and a musical drama about Hitler’s hidden love affair. If Kubizek had not died in 1956,10 Karl Springenschmid’s storytelling talent may have been important to the publisher, with whom he had already scored points as a ghostwriter for Luis Trenker before 1938 and with whom he earned his money after the war with countless ethnic farming and mountaineering stories.11 Franz Mayrhofer, the nephew of Adolf Hitler’s Leonding guardian Josef Mayrhofer, as a studied geography and history teacher, probably contributed his regional and cultural knowledge of the Linz area, which he was able to take from his own experience and from his dissertation, which was printed in 1940.12

Kubizek’s book publication is fourfold error-suspicious: firstly, because of the almost fifty-year time gap with gaps in memory, secondly because of the commission by the NSDAP and the resulting party proximity, thirdly because of his efforts to relieve himself after 1945 and at the same time to make himself more important than he was, and fourthly because of the involvement of Karl Springenschmid and Franz Mayrhofer as co-authors, who were not only heavily burdened from the Nazi era, but could also never detach themselves from their ideological positions even after 1945 and in no way were the converted high-ranking National Socialists able to meet a correspondingly high need for communication and justification.

One must therefore speak of luck that the second part of the original version from 1943 has emerged. This covers the time in Vienna in a fifty-one-page, type-written copy in the style for which Jetzinger was always known. The first part about the Linz period has also emerged in handwritten form with 106 sheets in two-line, large font from the possession of the granddaughter.13 From the approximately sixty printed pages, which would have resulted from the two parts of the original manuscript, the three authors made a book with 339 to 352 pages, depending on the edition.14 The two versions of 1943 and 1953 differ not only in scope but also in their focus. The first version, made without outside support, is not only much shorter, but also much more authentic. The differences to the later printed text are significant, not so much because of the linguistic weakness of the first version and the pleasing parts, which were completely re-added in 1953, but because of those passages that were included in 1943 and were deleted in 1953 and the anti-clerical, anti-modernist and racial biological tendencies already in the young Hitler that are shown much more clearly.

Jetzinger and Kubizek worked on their publications at the same time after 1945 and initially supported each other, but became bitter competitors when Kubizek published his book three years earlier than Jetzinger. Jetzinger not only accused him of plagiarism, but was also able to prove numerous mistakes, an accusation, from which, conversely, you can’t really spare Jetzinger. Since Brigitte Hamann’s Vienna book, Kubizek’s text has been judged much more positively: his book represents a rich source that is unique for the early Hitler era, was her summary.15 Jetzinger, on the other hand, claimed that 90 per cent of Kubizek’s book was invented – one may argue about the percentage, but the fact that not much of it was actually experienced or experienced by Kubizek is undeniable. It goes without saying that Kubizek’s book publication must be judged much more critically than has been done so far. Brendan Simms favours this scepticism in his latest biography of Hitler, which led to the elimination of Kubizek as a source altogether. However, he overlooks the fact that the literature he used on the young Hitler is even more based on Kubizek’s account. This makes Kubizek’s original version, written in 1943, all the more important, which never found its way to the public or into any party archive, especially since Kubizek also dared to contradict individual statements of Hitler from Mein Kampf in 1943.16

Remaining as the third more extensive source for Hitler’s childhood and youth is his own autobiography. But my struggle is not a life story, but a fight story. That he wrote this, to a large degree himself, without the involvement of ghostwriters, should be clear by now.17 However, it was based on pre-images. Hitler constructed his life according to the pattern of classical autobiographies and educational novels. And he created a new type of political autobiography that is not about accountability or explanation, but about aims and objectives and propaganda, written not in the autumn of life, but at the age of 35 at the starting point of his political career. Even more problematic than Mein Kampf are Hitler’s occasional excursions into his youth history, which he made at the table discussions or even with individual companions and employees. Not only is the reproduction by the guarantors controversial and unverifiable, but also Hitler’s own credibility in these records must also be questioned accordingly.

Another contemporary source, die Jugend-Erinnerungen eines zeitgenössischen Linzer Realschülers, now renamed Aus Adolf Hitlers Jugendzeit (The Youth Memories of a Contemporary Linz Secondary School Boy), by Hugo Rabitsch (Munich, 1938), on the other hand is usually pushed aside as ‘without any value’, ‘since the author neither knew the young Hitler nor made any contributions to his biography’.18 That is true, but grossly unjust. Rabitsch, who was seven years younger than Hitler, attended the same secondary school in Linz and knew the professors and the milieu. Although Rabitsch did not spare Hitler praise, it was received very critically by him and the book never came on the market in Germany, because some passages contradicted Hitler’s own representations and statements in Mein Kampf.19

Also difficult to assess are the memories of the Jewish doctor of Hitler’s mother, Eduard Bloch, who characterised Adolf very positively in 1938 in the face of the very threatening situation for him, but nevertheless reaffirmed this representation in 1941 in the USA, when the danger was explicitly over for him. However, Bloch was already marked by increasing forgetfulness in old age.

Contradictory and often completely useless are the excerpts of many other contemporary witnesses, whether they come from the time before 1945 or afterwards. In some way, they are always coloured and influenced. Since then, many authors have dealt with Hitler’s youth, first of all those who worked on an overall biography, but above all those who have turned specifically to childhood and youth history, including numerous developmental psychologists, pedagogues and theologians, who find many pieces of the mosaic and could add interesting insights. But all too often they have also taken many things unchecked and, above all, have found it very difficult to deal with the spatial, political and social conditions in Upper Austria due to a lack of regional knowledge.

Last but not least, the glaring lack of sources has led to fictitious constructions and bizarre historical distortions that do not need to be addressed at all, such as Norman Mailer’s novel on the young Hitler Das Schloss im Wald or Ilse Krumpöck’s Hitler’s Grandmother historical novel, because it was already a vocation for this purpose.

Out of the capable mouth, the necessary was said.20

The dark point in Adolf Hitler’s origin was