Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (4 page)

This book does not pretend to offer a fully new interpretation of history. In light of the achievements of my predecessors from Heiden to Kershaw, that would be utterly arrogant. But I do hope that the first volume of this biography succeeds in bettering our understanding of the man Stefan Zweig described as “bringing greater disaster upon the world than anyone in our times.”
⁴⁶
In particular, I hope that Hitler’s personality emerges more clearly in all its astonishing contradictions and contrasts so that our picture of the man is more complex and nuanced. Hitler was not a “man without qualities.”
⁴⁷
He was a figure with a great many qualities and masks. If we look behind the public persona which Hitler created for himself and which was bolstered by his loyal followers, we can see a human being with winning and revolting characteristics, undeniable talents and obviously deep-seated psychological complexes, huge destructive energy and a homicidal bent. My aim is to deconstruct the myth of Hitler, the “fascination with monstrosity” that has so greatly influenced historical literature and public discussion of the Führer after 1945.
⁴⁸
In a sense, Hitler will be “normalised”—although this will not make him seem more “normal.” If anything, he will emerge as even more horrific.

Writing about the pivotal figure in German and European history is without doubt the most difficult task for a historian and demands the greatest responsibility. There will always be aspects of Hitler we cannot explain. German publisher Rudolf Augstein was probably right in his review of Fest’s work when he questioned whether there could ever be
the
definitive biography of Hitler.
⁴⁹
People will never stop pondering this mysterious, calamitous figure. Every generation must come to terms with Hitler. “We Germans were liberated from Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off,” Eberhard Jäckel concluded in a lecture in 1979, adding: “Hitler will always be with us, with those who survived, those who came afterwards and even those yet to be born. He is present—not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of.”
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1

The Young Hitler

“I have no idea when it comes to my family history,” Hitler remarked in August 1942 in one of his countless monologues at his Wolfsschanze headquarters. “I’m the most limited person in the world in this area. I am a fully non-familial being, someone who by his very nature isn’t focused on relationships. It’s not in me. I belong to my ethnic community.”
¹
The German dictator had good reason to declare his lack of interest in family history. Several obscure bits of his family story had already begun to occasion rumours and speculation when Hitler began his political career in the early 1920s. They have made historians rack their brains ever since, and even today not all of the questions surrounding Hitler’s origins have been cleared up.

Hitler’s family biography takes us to Waldviertel, an agricultural region of northern Austria that borders on Bohemia in what is now the Czech Republic. On 17 June 1837, in a village called Strones, an unmarried daughter of a small farmer, named Marie Anna Schicklgruber, gave birth to a son she named Alois. Children born out of wedlock were nothing unusual—that sort of thing happened all the time in the countryside. But at the age of almost 42, the mother was extraordinarily old for the times. Nonetheless, five years later she married the 50-year-old miller’s assistant, Johann Georg Hiedler, from the village of Spital. The couple apparently lived in poverty, and as far as we know, even before Marie Anna’s death in 1847 the child was entrusted to Johann Georg’s younger brother Johann Nepomuk, who was one of the wealthier farmers in Spital. The younger Hiedler brother—who spelled his last name Hüttler—raised his foster son as his own. Alois grew up in a sheltered environment with Hiedler’s three daughters. He went to a vocational
Volksschule
and then learned the cobbler trade in Vienna.

For a young man of such humble origins and limited education, Alois Schicklgruber had a remarkable professional career. In 1855, at the age of 19, he decided to give up his trade and get a job in the financial administration of the Austrian monarchy. A shining example of both ambition and devotion to duty, he climbed the social ladder, rung by rung. By 1875 he had become a customs official in the town of Braunau, a rank in the Austrian civil service normally reserved for people who had attended a university-track academy or
Gymnasium
.
²
But then, one year later, something strange happened. In early 1876, Johann Nepomuk and three witnesses turned up at the office of notary Josef Penker in the town of Weitra, not far from Spital, and declared that Alois Schicklgruber was actually the biological son of his brother Johann Georg Hiedler, who had died nineteen years previously. In the protocol drawn up by the notary and signed by the three witnesses, the name was recorded as “Hitler”—in those days the spelling of names seems to have been considered relatively unimportant. One day later, the pastor in the township of Döllersheim, where Strones is located, amended the parish register, adding “Georg Hitler” as Alois’s father, striking the name “Schicklgruber” and replacing “illegitimate” with “legitimate.”
³

Historians have always been puzzled why the legal identity of Alois’s father was determined, and his name changed, so late.
⁴
If Johann Georg Hiedler was truly Alois’s father, as became the orthodoxy in the Third Reich, why had he not acknowledged his son when he married Marie Anna in 1842? And why had he let his brother raise the boy? Was Johann Nepomuk, as some have speculated, perhaps the true father?
⁵
The fact that Johann Nepomuk, and not Alois himself, initiated the name change would seem to speak for that scenario. But why then did Johann Nepomuk not admit that he was Alois’s natural father, preferring instead to hide behind his long-deceased brother? Was he trying to head off a family scandal? Or did he just want to free his foster son, whose social rise had greatly impressed him, from the stigma of his illegitimate birth? The late date of Johann Nepomuk’s trip to the notary would argue against this: the circumstances of Alois Schicklgruber’s birth do not seem to have harmed his career prospects all those years. There is considerable evidence that the farmer, who was as sly as he was wealthy, wanted to shield his inheritance from the Austrian tax authorities. Alois was Johann Nepomuk’s main heir, and as an officially acknowledged blood relation, he had to pay less tax on what he inherited.

Whatever the truth may be, the identity of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather remains uncertain. It is hard to overlook the irony that the man who would later demand that all Germans prove their “Aryan origins” was himself incapable of demonstrating his own—no matter how much the Führer’s official genealogy tried to convey the contrary impression. On 12 March 1932, one day before the election that pitted Hitler against Hindenburg for the office of Reich president, the
Bayerischer Kurier
newspaper remarked how strange it was that “the talkative Adolf Hitler is so silent about his ancestors and about how far back his family name goes.” A short while before, the Viennese newspaper the
Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung
had sensationally revealed that Hitler’s father had actually been called “Schücklgruber” (
sic
) and that the name had been changed for inheritance purposes.
⁶

Rumours that there were Jews in Hitler’s family have no proven foundation. They sprang up in the early 1920s, and after the Second World War they seemed to be supported by a reliable source. In his memoirs, written before the notorious general governor of occupied Poland was executed in Nuremberg in 1946, Hans Frank wrote that Hitler’s paternal grandfather had been a Jewish merchant in Graz named Frankenberger, in whose household Marie Anna Schicklgruber had worked.
⁷
But subsequent research revealed that no Jewish family by that name lived at the time in either Graz or indeed the entire Steiermark region.
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There is no evidence that Hitler ever took speculations about his supposed Jewish grandfather seriously—to say nothing of feeling threatened by them.

We could dismiss the 1876 name change as a rather bizarre tangential episode, if it had not had such momentous historical importance. “Nothing that the ‘old man’ did pleased Hitler more than that,” the Führer’s childhood friend August Kubizek later recalled. “He thought ‘Schicklgruber’ was too coarse, too rural, too complicated and impractical. ‘Hiedler’ was too boring and soft for him. But ‘Hitler’ had a nice ring to it and was memorable.”
⁹
In fact, there is every reason to doubt that someone named Schicklgruber would have ever been able to play the role of political messiah. “Heil Schicklgruber!” would likely have elicited only laughter.

In public, Alois Hitler wanted to be seen as an upstanding civil servant. A former colleague in Braunau described him as an unlikeable pedant who insisted on procedure above all else and lived a withdrawn life, with little social contact.
¹⁰
Photographs show him trying to look dignified in his official uniform, with its buttons spit-polished and a flashing sabre at his side. But Alois Hitler’s private life was less orderly and controlled. An internal restlessness led him to change addresses frequently, and in his love life the seeming paragon of respectability was also remarkably fickle. Indeed, for the times and the moral conventions of his social circles, he was positively debauched. He married three times. His first marriage came in 1873, at the age of 36, when he wedded Anna Glasl, a civil servant’s daughter from Braunau who was fourteen years his senior; they were divorced seven years later. The customs official had begun a fling with a 19-year-old barmaid named Franziska (“Fanni”) Matzelsberger, which could hardly fail to attract attention in a town of 3,000 inhabitants. In May 1883, one month after the death of his first wife, Alois married his lover, who had borne him an illegitimate son, also named Alois, two years previously. Two weeks after their wedding ceremony, Fanni gave birth to their second child, a daughter named Angela.

But the family’s fortunes took a downturn. That year, Fanni caught tuberculosis, a common disease at the time. While she was wasting away, Alois began a relationship with Klara Pölzl, a former housekeeper whom he hired to look after his two children. Born in 1860 in Spital, Klara was twenty-three years his junior. She was the daughter of a small farmer named Johann Baptist Pölzl and his wife Johanna, who was herself the daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler.
¹¹
That means, if the notarised declaration of 1876 was correct, that Alois and Klara were second cousins; and if Johann Nepomuk was actually Alois’s true father, Alois would have been Klara’s half-uncle. In August 1884, Fanni died at the age of 23, and as Klara was already carrying his child, Alois decided to forgo the customary year of mourning and to marry her immediately. That was easier said than done, however: the local pastor refused to marry the two because they were so closely related. Alois Hitler thus had to petition the bishop’s seat in Linz for special dispensation and, after some back and forth, it was granted.
¹²
On 7 January 1885, Alois and Klara were finally allowed to get married.

Klara Hitler gave birth to three children in quick succession—Gustav in 1885, Ida in 1886 and Otto in 1887—but all died young. This was not uncommon at a time of high child mortality. At around 6:30 p.m. on 20 April 1889, she brought her fourth child into the world on the second floor of an inn in Braunau where the Hitlers were living. The child was baptised Adolf on Easter Monday.
¹³
His mother was 28; his father 51 years old.

—

There are few reliable eyewitness accounts of Adolf Hitler’s earliest years. What Hitler himself wrote about his childhood in
Mein Kampf
is a calculated mixture of half-truths and legends which the leader of the 1923 putsch, imprisoned in Landsberg Castle, hoped would put him in a good light and help him become the Führer of a new greater German empire. After 1933, Hitler arranged for the confiscation of all private documents that might have revealed information about his childhood and youth. In April 1945, a few days before his suicide in his Berlin bunker, Hitler had his adjutant Julius Schaub destroy these records.
¹⁴
Most of the information we do have, therefore, is second-hand titbits and contemporaries’ later sketches, which must be taken with a grain of salt since they were informed by knowledge of Hitler’s subsequent life.
¹⁵

“Today I consider it a lucky twist of fate that Providence deemed I would be born in Braunau am Inn,” Hitler wrote in the first lines of
Mein Kampf
. “For this small town is located on the border between those two German states whose reunification must be, at least for those of us who are young, a lifelong goal to be achieved with any and all means.”
¹⁶
But Braunau did not actually play much of a role in Hitler’s childhood. In 1892 his father, who had been promoted to senior customs official, was transferred to Passau on the German side of the border. It was here that Hitler acquired the Bavarian accent which he would retain throughout his life and which would help make him such an effective rabble-rouser in the Munich beer halls of the early 1920s.
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