The Castle in the Forest

  He stood there, sad and stern. “That is the price. Not only are many reinforced good tendencies likely to be present in an incestuary, but unhappy inclinations can be magnified as well. Instability is, therefore, a common product of incest. Idiocy waits in the wings. And when a vital possibility exists for the development of a great spirit, this rare human must still overcome a host of frustrations profound enough to unhinge the brain or induce early death.” So spoke Heinrich Himmler.

  I think all of us present knew the subtext of these remarks. Back in 1938, we were looking (in greatest secrecy, you may be certain) to determine whether our Führer was a first- or second-degree incestuary. Or neither. If not, if neither, then Himmler’s theory would remain groundless. But if our Führer was a true product of incest, then he was more than a glowing example of the likelihood of the thesis, he might be the proof itself.

  3

  I am ready to speak of the obsession that revolved around Adolf Hitler. Yet what brings more of a dark cloud to one’s mood than living with a question that will not return an answer? Even today, the first obsession remains Hitler. Where is the German who does not try to understand him? Yet where can you find one who is content with the answer?

  I must surprise you. I do not have this particular trial. I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom. To borrow from the Americans, given their rough grasp of vulgarity, I am prepared to say: “Yes. I know him from asshole to appetite.”

  Nonetheless, I am still obsessed. It is, however, by an altogether different problem. When I think of relating how I know so much, an anxiety arises that can be compared to diving at night from a sheer cliff down into black water.

  Let it be understood, therefore, that in the beginning I will proceed with caution and speak of no more than was available then to the SS.

  For now, that may prove enough. There are particulars to offer concerning his family roots. In Special Section IV-2a—as already explained—we surrounded our findings with immaculate secrecy. We had to. We were the ones most ready to look into the most unpalatable questions. We had to live with the fear of unearthing answers poisonous enough to imperil the Third Reich.

  On the other hand, we had a special confidence. Once we obtained our facts, even should they prove disruptive, we would still be able to choose the mistruths that would bolster patriotic feelings in the populace. Of course, it could not be guaranteed in advance that every finding would be manageable. We might uncover an explosive fact. As one example: Had Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather been a Jew?

  4

  That was one possibility. Others were nearly as dire. For a period, we played with an inquiry into a semicomic but delicate rumor. Monorchidism. Did our Führer belong to that group of unhappy and hyperactive men who possess only one testicle? It is true that he invariably covered his groin with a protective hand whenever a photo was about to be taken, a classic gesture, understandably, if you are ready to shield the remaining testicle. But it is one thing to note such a vulnerability, another to verify it. While results could be obtained easily enough by interviewing the few women who had had intimate relations with the Führer and were still alive, how were we to control the repercussions? What if word got back to Hitler that a couple of officers in the SS were, so to speak, fingering his genital(s)? We had to give up the project. That was Himmler’s decision: “If our Esteemed Leader proves to be a first-degree incestuary, then all questions of monorchidism are subsumed. Monorchidism is, after all, a likely by-product of first-degree incest.”

  It was obvious. We were to go back to the best explanation for the legendary Will of the Führer—Blood-Drama!

  Moreover, we all detested the possibility that Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather might have been a Jew. That would not only destroy Himmler’s thesis, but oblige us to bury a major scandal. Our uneasiness derived in part from a rumor that had begun to stir among us eight years before, back in 1930, when a letter reached Hitler’s desk. The young man who penned it was named William Patrick Hitler, and he turned out to be the son of Adolf’s older half brother, Alois Hitler, Jr. The nephew’s letter offered its hint of blackmail. It referred to “shared circumstances in our family history.” (The fellow had gone so far as to underline those words.) That would have been a dangerous letter to send if the nephew lived in Germany, but at the time he was dwelling in England.

  What, then, were these “shared circumstances”? William Patrick Hitler was speaking of the Führer’s grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Back in 1837, she had given birth to a son whom she named Alois. Living then and thereafter in a miserable place called Strones, a wretched hamlet in the Austrian province of Waldviertel, Maria Anna used to receive small but regular sums of money. Those near to her assumed it came from the unnamed father of her boy.

  Yet that same boy would grow up to be Hitler’s father. While Adolf would not be born until 1889, and would not come to power until 1933, one story did manage to stay alive among the peasants in Strones. It was that the stipend had come from a well-to-do Jew who lived in the provincial city of Graz. According to the legend, Maria Anna Schicklgruber worked as a maid in this Jew’s house, became pregnant, and had to return to her hamlet. When she brought the infant to be baptized, the parish priest listed the birth as “Illegitimate,” a common declaration in those parts. The Waldviertel was known, after all, as the poorhouse of Austria. One hundred years later, following the Anschluss in 1938, I was sent down to the region, and my findings proved, in fact, fascinating. While it would still be premature to explain how I learned what I did, I can, however, offer my conclusions. For now, that must suffice. In time, I hope to have the courage to say more.

  5

  The Waldviertel, situated north of the Danube, is a land of tall beautiful pines. Indeed Waldviertel can be translated directly as the “wooded quarter,” and the silences of the forests are dark in contrast to the green of an occasional field. The soil, however, does not welcome agriculture. An Austrian hamlet in these backwoods delineated the meaning of dirt-poor. In those years, the Hiedlers (who later became Hitlers) lived in Spital, a village of sorts, and the Schicklgrubers, their cousins, lived nearby in the aforesaid Strones, which was deep in the mud along its one lane, no more than a few dozen huts with roofs of thatch. If Strones was profuse in pig wallows around each dwelling, cow flop was more prominent in the town meadows, and the redolence of horse manure was valued. This was, after all, an area where many a peasant had to pull his own plow through various grades of mud. There was gumbo thick as lava, rivulets of silt, gravel washes, muck and slops, clods, rocks, common clay. For that matter, Strones did not even have a church. The locals had to walk to another hamlet, Döllersheim. There in the parish registry, the name of Maria Anna’s son was inscribed as “Alois Schicklgruber, Catholic, Male,”—and, as we know—“Illegitimate.”

  Maria Anna, born in 1795, was forty-two when Alois was born in 1837. Coming from a family of eleven children of whom five were already dead, she certainly could have cohabited with any one of her several brothers. (Himmler had, of course, no objection to that, since her bastard Alois was, I repeat, Adolf’s father.) In any event, despite the abysmal poverty of Maria Anna’s parents, she dwelt with her son for the next five years in one of her father’s two small rooms. The mysterious money that came in small but dependable installments helped to support these Schicklgrubers.

  While we were obviously eager to find a trove of intrafamily copulations, such a desire did not allow us to dismiss the Jew from Graz. Indeed, eight years earlier, in 1930, inquiries had already been made. As Himmler related it, Hitler, on reading his nephew’s letter, had sent it on immediately to a Nazi lawyer, Hans Frank. The Führer, as some may no longer recall, did not become Chancellor until 1933, but Hans Frank was already looking in 1930 to worm his way into the inside circle around the Leader.

  Frank had unhappy news to deliver, therefore, concerning Maria A
nna’s pregnancy. The likelihood, he declared, was that the father had been a nineteen-year-old, the son of a prosperous merchant named Frankenberger who was, yes, a Jew. It made sense. In those years, the scion of many a well-to-do family had his first carnal outings with a housemaid. Nor did she have to be anywhere near his age. Such an initiation was accepted by the bourgeois mores of a provincial city like Graz as a reasonable if undiscussed practice. It was seen as a good deal better than allowing a well-to-do lad to consort with whores or settle too early on a sweetheart from a less prosperous family.

  Frank claimed to have seen some conclusive evidence. He told Hitler that he had been shown a letter written by Herr Frankenberger, the father of the young man who had bedded down with Maria Anna. This letter promised regular payments to take care of Alois until he was fourteen years old.

  Our Adolf, however, disagreed with these findings. He told Hans Frank that the true story, imparted to him by his own father, Alois, was that the real grandfather had been Maria Anna’s cousin Johann Georg Hiedler, who had finally come around to marry her five years after Alois’ birth. “All the same,” said Hitler to Hans Frank, “I would like to examine this letter from the Jew to my grandmother.”

  Frank told Hitler that he did not as yet possess it. The man who held it was asking too high a price. Besides, the letter must certainly have been photographed.

  “You have seen the original?” Hitler asked.

  “I was able to look at it while in his office. He had two big fellows standing beside him. He also had a pistol on the table. What must he have been expecting?”

  Hitler nodded. “One cannot even expect a sudden end for a man like that. The letter, after all, will be in one place and the photographic copy in another.”

  One more concern for Hitler to carry.

  By 1938, however, our search had delivered alternatives. It no longer seemed certain that Maria Anna was still receiving steady money five years after Alois was born. Following her marriage in 1842, she and her husband, Johann Georg Hiedler, had been much too poor to have a home of their own. For a time they had had to sleep in a battered old trough once used to feed cattle in a neighbor’s barn. Of course, that did not prove that no money had been sent. Johann Georg could certainly have drunk up the funds. In Strones, he remained a legend due to the extent of his tippling. Indeed, his large intake of liquor had to be at odds with the assumption that they were that poor: For why would a drunk like fifty-year-old Johann Georg marry a woman of forty-seven with a five-year-old brat unless she had enough income to allow him to drink? Moreover, the extent of his boozing would hardly suggest that he had been Alois’ father. Indeed, this Johann Georg Hiedler made no objection when Maria Anna asked Johann’s younger brother, also named Johann (but, in this case, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler), to take the boy in and raise him. This younger brother, Johann Nepomuk, was, by contrast, a sober, hardworking farmer with a wife and three daughters, but he did not have a son.

  So Johann Nepomuk now stood out as a likely possibility. Might he not be the father? That was certainly possible. Yet we still had to find enough evidence to discount the Jew.

  Himmler sent me to Graz and I went to some pains examining the century-old records. No man named Frankenberger was to be found in the city ledgers. I pored over the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde of the Jewish Registry of Graz, and this finding was confirmed. Back in 1496, the Jews had been expelled from the region. Even three hundred and forty-one years later, in 1837, at the time Alois was born, the Jews had still not been permitted to come back. Had Hans Frank been lying?

  After looking at these results Himmler declared, “Frank is one bold fellow!” As Heini put it together for me, one had to go back from 1938 to 1930. At that time, when the missive from William Patrick Hitler arrived, Hans Frank was just one more lawyer ready to hang around our people in Munich, but it was clear enough now what he had done. He had invented the compromising letter in order to stimulate a closer relationship to his leader. Given the absence of the document, Hitler could not know whether Frank was making it up, telling the truth, or, worst of all, actually in possession of such a paper. It could have been the end of Hans Frank, if Hitler had sent a researcher to Graz, but the lawyer must have been ready to wager that Hitler did not want to know.

  Since Himmler was grooming me to become his close assistant, he also confided that he would not use my 1938 research to tell Hitler that there were no Jews in Graz back in 1837. Rather, he told Hans Frank. We laughed in unison, for I understood immediately. Could there be one official within our ruling group who was not searching for a dependable grip on any and all of the others? Frank was now in Himmler’s grasp. Given this mutual understanding, he did serve Himmler well. In 1942 (by which time Frank was known as “the Butcher of Poland”) Hitler became nervous again about the Jewish grandfather and asked us to send a good man to Graz. Himmler, looking to protect Hans Frank, told the Führer that he had sent an agent and no tangible evidence was found. Given everyone’s preoccupation with the war, the matter could be put more or less to rest. Such was Himmler’s advice to Hitler.

  BOOK II

  ADOLF’S FATHER

  1

  The year 1942 is, however, a century and more away from 1837. For that matter, so is 1938. I mention the latter date once more because of a minor episode that occurred in Austria during the Anschluss. It does provide an insight into Himmler. If, behind his back, he was still ridiculed as Heini—ill gaited, pompous, wide assed and flat assed, as pious a mediocrity as any other man who has risen too high—the detractors were merely describing the shell. Nobody, not even Hitler, believed more profoundly in Nazism’s philosophical principles.

  I remember that on the first morning after the Brown Shirts marched into Vienna, a squad of them—beer-hall types with big bellies—collected a group of old and middle-aged Jews, professional class, pince-nez absolutely in place, and put them to work scrubbing the sidewalk with toothbrushes. The Storm Troopers laughed as they watched. Photographs of the event were featured on the front pages of many a newspaper in Europe and America.

  Next day, Himmler spoke to a few of us. “That was an expensive indulgence and I am pleased that not one of our SS men had anything to do with such a crudity. We all know how this kind of action lowers morale among so many of our best people. It will certainly encourage rowdyism in Vienna. Nonetheless, we do well not to reject out of hand the primitive instinct revealed by the act. After much reflection, I can say it was a successful piece of mockery.” He paused. He did have our attention. “There is a curious, even, I would declare, a hidden sense of inferiority among many of our folk. They feel that the Jews are capable of bringing more concentration to a task than most of us can—the Jews do know how to study—which is why so many of them have been grossly successful. It is very much a notion among these people that in the end they will win everything by working harder than the host race of any country they happen to inhabit.

  “So, I would say this act burst out of the rough but nonetheless instinctive understanding of our German people. It does tell the Jews that work, if it is not attached to a noble purpose, is meaningless. ‘Scrub away with those toothbrushes,’ our street boys are saying, ‘because you Jews, whether you know it or not, do exactly the same thing every day. Your virtuous scholarship goes nowhere but into endless contradictions.’ Therefore, on second thought,” Himmler concluded, “I will not condemn out of hand the deeds of these low-rank Nazis.”

  The story is useful if one is to understand Himmler, but does interrupt my account of how I came to learn the truth as to who, really, was Alois’ father. While I am prepared to give his name and describe the occasion, I recognize that some readers will be annoyed that these disclosures will be presented without accounting for my sources. A fact is not a fact, some are ready to say, if the means by which it was obtained cannot be presented.

  I agree. Nonetheless, my real means are not to be revealed, not yet. Using the assets of Section IV-2a proved insufficient on this occasion
, but I did piece together an answer for Heini—I knew that if my end product could support his case, he would accept it.

  Let us content ourselves for now, then, with the conclusions presented to Himmler in 1938. Once I brought back the information that the Jew from Graz did not exist, I suggested that we shift our inquiry to the actions of the one brother of Maria Anna Schicklgruber who had actually been resourceful enough to leave the mud of Strones and make a little money as a commercial traveler. What was best about this brother is that he did pass regularly through Graz, so, at first, I decided to build our case on him and ignore the actual family Maria Anna had worked for—a widow and two daughters. By study of their old bank accounts, it was clear that no extra money ever came to her from these ladies and, indeed, they discharged Maria Anna when they discovered she had made some petty thefts. Pregnancy in an unmarried maid could be tolerated, but the loss of a few coins, no! I then decided that Maria Anna might have been looking to protect this brother by telling her father and mother that the money was coming from a Jew. That would get them off the scent.

  Before I passed this speculation on to Himmler, however, I concocted—or so I thought—a more promising alternative. Why not choose Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, the hardworking younger brother, as our seminal agent? While the traveling salesman, Maria Anna’s brother, would offer a prima facie case of incest, this was still one step removed from Himmler’s real objective, since it would posit that the father, Alois, was the incestuary, rather than Adolf.

  On the other hand, if Maria Anna conceived Alois with Johann Nepomuk, then Himmler’s thesis was strengthened. Significantly so. For Klara Poelzl, the young woman who would yet be Alois’ third wife and would become Adolf Hitler’s mother, was also the granddaughter of Johann Nepomuk. If Alois was Nepomuk’s son, then Klara could be nothing less than Alois’ niece! An uncle and a niece, Alois and Klara, had conceived our Führer. This would make a solid presentation. Moreover, I knew how to embellish it for Heini. My final scenario offered carnal flavor: I declared that Maria Anna Schicklgruber and Johann Nepomuk Hiedler had conceived Alois on the day she came back from Graz for a visit. Nepomuk, who lived in Spital, happened to be visiting Strones, and went to the straw for his hour with Maria Anna. She became pregnant on the spot. Nepomuk could not question the news, for the act had been out of the ordinary. Indeed, she told him as soon as she regained her breath, “You have given me a baby. I swear it. I felt it!”