GERMANY: Hitler v. Hitler

With some angry talk, Adolf Hitler last week launched a boat at Wilhelmshaven. On the previous day, another Hitler got off another boat in Manhattan, and also delivered some angry talk—against his Uncle Adolf. William Patrick Hitler, 28, arriving in the U. S. for an anti-Hitler lecture tour, explained that he hates his uncle because of 1) his policies, 2) his attitude toward his own family.

In 1909, Adolf Hitler's half-brother Alois went to Dublin, got a job as a waiter, married an Irish girl named Bridget Elizabeth Dowling, had a son, two years later deserted wife and child to go back to Germany. Willie grew up to be a good-looking lad with a slight brogue and not much luck. His worst luck, he said last week, was his name.

Because of his name, no one would give him a job in Britain. In 1933, he went to Berlin and applied for work there. Because of his name, the application was forwarded to Uncle Adolf, who received him coldly and told him that an adjutant would find him a job. The adjutant found him a poor one, which he declined. During the 1934 blood purge, he was arrested but soon released. This year he received hints that he had better leave Germany. The Führer, says Willie Hitler, "is singularly vulnerable on the question of his family relations."

Besides Half-Brother Alois, who now runs a prosperous Berlin café (discreetly under his first name), Adolf Hitler has a full sister and a half-sister. For a time his half-sister, Angela, served as his housekeeper at Berchtesgaden. His father, also named Alois, was a source of great shame to the Führer: he had three wives* and died a drunkard. Furthermore, Father Alois was the illegitimate son of an Austrian peasant girl, Maria Schicklgruber, and a miller named Johann Hiedler, who refused to recognize the child. The boy therefore grew up under his mother's name, and not until he was 40 years old did he get permission from the authorities to use his patronymic (which he transmuted to Hitler). Had that permission not been granted, Nazis would last week have raised their arms to the speaker at Wilhelmshaven and cried not "Heil Hitler!'' but "Heil Schicklgruber!"