Hitler’s ideological goals, his actions, and his personal input into the shaping of events need, then, to be accorded the most serious attention. But they explain far from everything. We need to examine the dictatorship as well as the Dictator;33 and beyond the structures of rule, the social impulses which underpinned the dictatorship, gave it its dynamic, provided it with its underlying consensus. What Hitler did not do, did not instigate, but which was nevertheless set in train by the initiatives of others is as vital as the actions of the Dictator himself in understanding the fateful ‘cumulative radicalisation’ of the regime.34
A new biography of Hitler requires, then, a new approach: one which attempts to integrate the actions of the Dictator into the political structures and social forces which conditioned his acquisition and exercise of power, and its extraordinary impact. An approach which looks to the expectations and motivations of German society (in all its complexity) more than to Hitler’s personality in explaining the Dictator’s immense impact offers the potential to explore the expansion of his power through the internal dynamics of the regime he headed and the forces he unleashed. The approach is encapsulated in the maxim enunciated by a Nazi functionary in 1934 – providing in a sense a leitmotiv for the work as a whole and the title for Chapter 13 – that it was the duty of each person in the Third Reich ‘to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish’ without awaiting instruction from above.35 This maxim, put into practice, was one of the driving-forces of the Third Reich, translating Hitler’s loosely-framed ideological goals into reality through initiatives focused on working towards the fulfilment of the Dictator’s visionary aims. Hitler’s authority was, of course, decisive. But the initiatives which he sanctioned derived more often than not from others.
Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. Though he never attained majority support in free elections, he was legally appointed to power as Reich Chancellor just like his predecessors had been, and became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world. Understanding this demands reconciling the apparently irreconcilable: the personalized method of biography and the contrasting approaches to the history of society (including the structures of political domination).36 Hitler’s impact can only be grasped through the era which created him (and was destroyed by him). A convincing study of Hitler must be, therefore, at the same time in a certain sense a history of the Nazi era.37 Though biography is, of course, not the only approach which could be taken to attain such an end – if attainable at all, that is – there is something to be said for directly focusing on the figure of Hitler – the person who indisputably played the central, often decisive role in the ‘running amok’ of the Third Reich.38
No attempt to produce a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of Nazism without doing justice to ‘the Hitler factor’ can hope to succeed.39 But such an interpretation must not only take full account of Hitler’s ideological goals, his actions, and his personal input into the shaping of events; it must at the same time locate these within the social forces and political structures which permitted, shaped, and promoted the growth of a system that came increasingly to hinge on personalized, absolute power – with the disastrous effects that flowed from it.
The Nazi assault on the roots of civilization has been a defining feature of the twentieth century. Hitler was the epicentre of that assault. But he was its chief exponent, not its prime cause.
1
FANTASY AND FAILURE
‘When the postmaster asked him one day what he wanted to do for a living and whether he wouldn’t like to join the post-office, he replied that it was his intention to become a great artist.’
A neighbour of the Hitler family in Urfahr
‘I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue.’
Hitler, on failing his entry examination to study
at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
I
The first of many strokes of good fortune for Adolf Hitler took place thirteen years before he was born. In 1876, the man who was to become his father changed his name from Alois Schicklgruber to Alois Hitler. Adolf can be believed when he said that nothing his father had done had pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely rustic name of Schicklgruber.1 Certainly, ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ would have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero.
The Schicklgrubers had for generations been a peasant family, smallholders in the Waldviertel, a picturesque but poor, hilly and (as the name suggests) woody area in the most north-westerly part of Lower Austria, bordering on Bohemia, whose inhabitants had something of a reputation for being dour, hard-nosed, and unwelcoming.2 Hitler’s father, Alois, had been born there on 7 June 1837, in the village of Strones, as the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber, then forty-two years old and daughter of a poor smallholder, Johann Schicklgruber, and baptized (as Aloys Schicklgruber) in nearby Döllersheim the same day. The baptismal register left a blank in the space allocated to the baby’s father.3 The name of Hitler’s paternal grandfather was not disclosed and, despite much speculation, has remained unknown ever since.
Five years later, Maria Anna married Johann Georg Hiedler, a fifty-year-old miller’s journeyman from Spital, some fifteen miles away. Hiedler’s aimless and meandering lifestyle had brought him to Strones, where he had for some time dwelt in the same house as Maria Anna and her father.4 The marriage lasted five years. Maria Anna died in 1847, and Hiedler’s hand-to-mouth existence was ended by a stroke a decade later.
No later than the time of his mother’s death, and perhaps earlier, the
youngster Alois was taken by Johann Georg’s brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, fifteen years his junior, to live on Nepomuk’s middling-sized farm in Spital.5 The reasons for Nepomuk’s effective adoption of young Alois are unclear. But to all appearances the boy was provided with a modest but good home. After going to elementary school, Alois took up an apprenticeship with a local cobbler, and already at the age of thirteen, like many country lads, made his way to Vienna to continue his training in leatherwork.
Hitler’s father was the first social climber in his family. In 1855, by the time he was eighteen, Alois had gained employment at a modest grade with the Austrian ministry of finance.6 For a young man of his background and limited education, his advancement in the years to come was impressive. After training, and passing the necessary examination, he attained low-ranking supervisory status in 1861 and a position in the customs service in 1864, becoming a customs officer in 1870 before moving the following year to Braunau am Inn, and attaining the post of customs inspector there in 1875.7
A year later came the change of name. This had nothing to do with any social stigma attached to Alois’s illegitimacy. Though castigated by the Catholic Church, illegitimacy was scarcely an unusual feature of Austrian country life.8 Alois did not attempt to conceal his illegitimacy, even after 1876. It is unclear whether the impulse for the change of name came from Alois himself, or from his uncle (and effective stepfather) Nepomuk, who, deprived of male heirs, seems to have made a legacy to Alois dependent upon the adoption of his own name.9 The legalization protocol of a notary in Weitra on 6 June 1876, signed by three witnesses, recorded Alois as the son of Georg Hitler– the name is already entered here in this form, not as ‘Hiedler’.10 Then the following day the legitimation of Alois, thirty-nine years after he had been born, was completed when the parish priest of Döllersheim altered the birth register to strike out the name ‘Schicklgruber’, replacing ‘out of wedlock’ by ‘within wedlock’, and entering in the hitherto empty box for the father’s name ‘Georg Hitler’.11 This was the Johann Georg Hiedler who had married Alois’s mother as long ago as 1842, had been dead for nineteen years, but had, according to the three witnesses of the legitimizing ceremony (all of whom had family connections) and according to Alois himself, acknowledged his paternity.12 The priest’s entry notes also the testimony of the witnesses that Alois??
?s father had requested the entry of his name in the baptismal register.13
The change of name – an event at the time of significance only for the history of a peasant family in provincial Austria – has attracted unceasing speculation purely because it is inextricably bound up with the identity of the grandfather of Adolf Hitler. Only three possibilities need consideration. And of these, the first two amount to little more than whether there was an undisclosed minor scandal within the Hiedler family, while the third possibility, which would historically have been of some importance, can, in the light of the evidence, be discounted.
The first possibility is that the father of Alois was indeed the person named in the amended baptismal register, and officially accepted in the Third Reich as Hitler’s grandfather: Johann Georg Hiedler. But if he was indeed the father, why did Hiedler make no attempt during his lifetime – even at the time of his marriage – to legitimize the birth of his son? Poverty is unlikely to have been the reason. Though it was rumoured that after their marriage, Johann Georg and Maria Anna were so poor that they had to sleep in a cattle-trough for a bed, it has been established that Maria Anna was less impoverished than once thought.14 And if this was the case, then the normal reason given for the ‘adoption’ by Nepomuk – an act of humanity, rescuing Alois from the dire poverty in which his parents lived – disappears. Why, then, was Maria Anna, who clearly did not disclose the father’s name at the baptism, prepared to be separated from her only son? Why was Alois not brought up by his apparent father, but instead in the home of his father’s brother? And why was the legitimation – accompanied by some minor irregularities (no legal acknowledgement of paternity in the absence of the father), possibly amounting to a little charade by Alois, Nepomuk and the three witnesses, all closely connected with or related to Nepomuk, to deceive the notary and parish priest – delayed until 1876?15 That a legacy from Nepomuk to Alois was involved seems likely. But why would this have necessitated the change of name? That Nepomuk, with only female offspring, was preoccupied with the continuation of the family name through Alois, who at the time had a fifty-year-old wife, seems an unlikely, or at least insufficient, motive.
The answers to these questions are lost in the mists of time, and would in any case scarcely be of historical importance. But if there are question marks over Johann Georg’s paternity, who else might the father have been? The other obvious candidate is Nepomuk himself. He ‘adopted’, cared for, and brought up Alois. And he was perhaps the moving spirit beyond the name change – three years after his wife, Eva Maria, had died. The name change seems to have been connected with making Alois a legatee of his will. At Nepomuk’s death in 1888, his expectant heirs were told, to their surprise, that there was nothing to inherit. But only six months later Alois Hitler, up to then without any notable amounts of money to play with, purchased a substantial house and adjoining property not far from Spital, costing between 4,000 and 5,000 Gulden.16 It seems conceivable, then, that Nepomuk, not Johann Georg, was the actual father of Alois, that Johann Georg had rejected Alois, the son of his brother, at the time of his marriage to Maria Anna, but that the family scandal had been kept quiet, and that a change of name had not been possible as long as Nepomuk’s wife had lived.17
However, there is no proof and, even after his wife’s death, Nepomuk, if he was himself the actual father, was keen to avoid public admission of the fact. Some significance has been read into Adolf Hitler’s comment at the beginning of Mein Kampf that his father had been the son of a ‘poor, small cottager’ (which was not a description of Johann Georg, a miller’s journeyman).18 But Hitler was frequently inaccurate or careless with detail in the autobiographical parts of Mein Kampf, and it would be a mistake to read too much into his brief and vague reference to his grandfather (who, if it referred to Nepomuk, was in any case rather more than a ‘poor cottager’). It has also been claimed that the form of name chosen by Alois in 1876 – ‘Hitler’ – was a deliberate reflection of ‘Hüttler’ (Nepomuk’s name) rather than Hiedler (that of Johann Georg). But this would be to interpret too much from the adoption of one form of a name which remained fluid and fluctuating before the late nineteenth century. The names ‘Hiedler’, ‘Hietler’, ‘Hüttler’, ‘Hütler’, and ‘Hitler’ – the name meant ‘smallholder’ – occur interchangeably in documents of the early and mid-nineteenth century and were phonetically scarcely distinguishable.19 Nepomuk himself was baptized ‘Hiedler’ and married as ‘Hüttler’.20 Alois, the social climber, may have preferred the less rustic form of ‘Hitler’. But ‘Hitler’ may have been no more than the particular form chosen by the notary in Weitra at the legalization, and copied by the parish priest of Döllersheim the next day.21 Whatever the reason for the selection of the form of name, Alois seemed well satisfied with it. He thereafter never deviated in his usage of the name, and from the final authorization in January 1877 always signed himself ‘Alois Hitler’. His son was equally pleased with the more distinctive form ‘Hitler’.22
The third possibility is that Adolf Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish. Rumours to that effect circulated in Munich cafés in the early 1920s, and were fostered by sensationalist journalism of the foreign press during the 1930s. It was suggested that the name ‘Hüttler’ was Jewish, ‘revealed’ that he could be traced to a Jewish family called Hitler in Bucharest, and even claimed that his father had been sired by Baron Rothschild, in whose house in Vienna his grandmother had allegedly spent some time as a servant.23 But the most serious speculation about Hitler’s supposed Jewish background has occurred since the Second World War, and is directly traceable to the memoirs of the leading Nazi lawyer and Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank, dictated in his Nuremberg cell while awaiting the hangman.
Frank claimed that he had been called in by Hitler towards the end of 1930 and shown a letter from his nephew William Patrick Hitler (the son of his half-brother Alois, who had been briefly married to an Irish woman) threatening, in connection with the press stories circulating about Hitler’s background, to expose the fact that Hitler had Jewish blood flowing in his veins. Allegedly commissioned by Hitler to look into his family history, Frank reportedly discovered that Maria Anna Schicklgruber had given birth to her child while serving as a cook in the home of a Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz. Not only that: Frankenberger senior had reputedly paid regular instalments to support the child on behalf of his son, around nineteen years old at the birth, until the child’s fourteenth birthday. Letters were allegedly exchanged for years between Maria Anna Schicklgruber and the Frankenbergers. According to Frank, Hitler declared that he knew, from what his father and grandmother had said, that his grandfather was not the Jew from Graz, but because his grandmother and her subsequent husband were so poor they had conned the Jew into believing he was the father and into paying for the boy’s support.24
Frank’s story gained wide circulation in the 1950s.25 But it simply does not stand up. There was no Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz during the 1830s. In fact, there were no Jews at all in the whole of Styria at the time, since Jews were not permitted in that part of Austria until the 1860s. A family named Frankenreiter did live there, but was not Jewish. There is no evidence that Maria Anna was ever in Graz, let alone was employed by the butcher Leopold Frankenreiter. No correspondence between Maria Anna and a family called Frankenberg or Frankenreiter has ever turned up. The son of Leopold Frankenreiter and alleged father of the baby (according to Frank’s story and accepting that he had merely confused names) for whom Frankenreiter was seemingly prepared to pay child support for thirteen years was ten years old at the time of Alois’s birth. The Frankenreiter family had moreover hit upon such hard times that payment of any support to Maria Anna Schicklgruber would have been inconceivable.26 Equally lacking in credibility is Frank’s comment that Hitler had learnt from his grandmother that there was no truth in the Graz story: his grandmother had been dead for over forty years at the time of Hitler’s birth. And whether in fact Hitler received a blackmail lett
er from his nephew in 1930 is also doubtful. If such was the case, then Patrick – who repeatedly made a nuisance of himself by scrounging from his famous uncle – was lucky to survive the next few years which he spent for the most part in Germany, and to be able to leave the country for good in December 1938.27 His ‘revelations’, when they came in a Paris journal in August 1939, contained nothing about the Graz story.28 Nor did a number of different Gestapo inquiries into Hitler’s family background in the 1930s and 1940s contain any reference to the alleged Graz background.29 Indeed they discovered no new skeletons in the cupboard. Hans Frank’s memoirs, dictated at a time when he was waiting for the hangman and plainly undergoing a psychological crisis,30 are full of inaccuracies and have to be used with caution. With regard to the story of Hitler’s alleged Jewish grandfather, they are valueless. Hitler’s grandfather, whoever he was, was not a Jew from Graz.31
The only serious contenders for the paternity of Hitler’s father remain, therefore, Johann Georg Hiedler and Johann Nepomuk Hiedler (or Hüttler). The official version always declared Johann Georg to be Adolf’s grandfather. The evidence is insufficient to know. And perhaps Adolf did not know, though there is no firm reason to believe that he doubted that it was Johann Georg Hiedler.32 In any case, as regards Adolf the only significance is that, were Nepomuk his grandfather, the family descent would have been even more incestuous than if his grandfather had been Johann Georg: for Nepomuk was also the grandfather of Adolf’s mother.33