Hitler: A Short Biography. A. Wilson N.

when they failed to see the point of them. May is not a popular author in the English-speaking world but he still has his following in Germany. He modelled himself on Fenimore Cooper and his best-known stories are set among the American Indians. The American Indian Winnetou and the cowboy Surehand are the best known of his heroes. As a devoted pacifist, May was in many ways a surprising choice of literary hero for a future war leader. His stories, both those set in the American West and those which deal with the Near East, such as In the Land of the Mahdi and From Baghdad to Istambul, are stories set in exotic landscapes in which heroes battle against impossible odds and triumph through an exercise of the will.

      Hitler’s childhood and family background have been endlessly studied for clues which would explain his later development. At the beginning of My Struggle, he himself emphasized the geographical importance of having been born in Braunau am Inn, a town in a provincial part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in 1923–4, he saw the unification of the two great German states as desirable. ‘German-Austria must once more be reunited with the great German Motherland: and not just for economic reasons. No, no! Even if reunification had no economic advantages one way or another, even if it were positively disadvantageous, it must still take place. One Blood belongs together in One Reich.’² It was one of the fundamental planks of his foreign policy, and it could clearly be seen with hindsight that the expansionism which lay behind this idea would lead inevitably to the European war which followed in the year after the Anschluss (literally, the ‘Connexion’; it is the word used for the annexation of Austria by Germany).

      We see, from the very first page of My Struggle, how Hitler made his own childhood part of the whole political German story. It was Fate (Schicksal) which determined where he was born. And the fact that he was the son of a customs officer, an official who by definition stood at the border, was made to have mystic significance.

      His father had been born Alois Schicklgruber in 1837. He had risen from the peasantry. Much has been made of Alois’s violence. Most fathers in history have beaten their children, not a few have had fiery tempers. None has had a son like Adolf Hitler. Alois Schicklgruber was the illegitimate son of a woman named Maria Anna Schicklgruber. All sorts of fantasies have been spun about the possible father, including the untenable view that he might have been Jewish. Five years after Alois was born, his mother married a fifty-year-old miller’s journeyman named Johann Georg Hiedler. His mother died when he was five, and Alois was then taken to live on Johann Georg’s brother’s farm. The brother was Johann Nepomuk, the grandfather of Hitler’s mother, Klara. (Hence her calling Alois ‘uncle’ when she married him.) Alois worked hard and rose in status. By 1876, he had managed to persuade a notary in Weitra that he should be legitimized. The overwhelming likelihood is that his father was in fact Johann Georg Hiedler and in the legitimization papers, this name is spelt Hitler. Thus the name entered history. Hiedler/Hüttler/Hitler all are variations of the same name, which means a smallholder or one who lives in a hut. Either way, Fate/Schicksal was kind to the future Adolf in giving him a snappy two-syllabled name. Somehow the great Nuremberg rallies would not have seemed so impressive if the serried ranks of tens of thousands of enthusiastic Germans had all been chanting ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’

      Alois’s first marriage was childless. His second produced a son, also called Alois, who married an Irish girl called Bridget Dowling, who lived for a while in Liverpool, England, and whose child, William Patrick Hitler, was born in 1911 and later lived in New York. The other child was Angela, who for a while kept house for Adolf Hitler, and whose daughter by Leo Raubal – also called Angela (Geli) – was Hitler’s beloved niece.

      It was as his third wife that Alois Hitler took Klara Pölzl. There were five children – Gustav, who died aged two in 1887; Ida who also died in infancy; Otto who died as a baby; Edmund who died aged sixteen in 1900, Paula who lived until 1960 and Adolf, who was born on 20 April 1889.

      Given the high mortality rate of his siblings, and the fact that both parents were dead by the time he was eighteen, it was not surprising that Hitler was a hypochondriac who always feared illness and imagined his own life would be a short one.

      By the time he was living with his widowed mother, the family had settled in the somewhat dingy provincial town of Linz. There was real tension in the town between the German nationalist population – numbering about 60,000 – and the Czechs. Alois Hitler was a passionate German nationalist. Adolf absorbed and inherited these feelings: they may be said to have determined his entire foreign policy, and all the expansionism of 1936–9 which brought the world to the war. What he did not inherit, as has already been said, was any of his father’s desire to work hard and better himself.

      He was a moody, idle, and not especially talented child. When Alois died in 1903, he left the family reasonably comfortable. The three women of the family – mother Klara, aunt Johanna and little sister Paula – did all the work of running the apartment. His mother bought Adolf a grand piano and for four months he took lessons. He was a competent pianist, and had a good ear. He was a lonely, withdrawn boy. His only known emotional excitement was having a painful crush on a girl called Stefanie, a beautiful young lady he saw in the streets of Linz. There is no evidence that they even so much as spoke to one another. His best friend was a musician named August Kubizek – Gustl. It was he who told us, in his largely adulatory memoir of his friendship with Hitler, of his friend’s life in those days. It was with Gustl that Hitler first sampled the opera – Hitler clad on these occasions in a black coat and opera hat, and carrying a cane with an ivory handle. It was with Gustl that Hitler, aged twelve, first attended Lohengrin. On one evening the two friends saw a production of Wagner’s Rienzi, an early opera (more like Weber musically than it is like the later, developed Wagner). The opera tells the story of a young demagogue in fourteenth-century Rome who led his people to rebellion, and was finally rejected by them. Doubts have been cast by historians upon Kubizek’s recollection of this evening in which, after the performance, Hitler is supposed to have climbed the Freinberg, the mountain outside Linz, and been in a sort of prophetic trance. As Kubizek reconstructed the scene in 1939 for Winifred Wagner at the Bayreuth Opera House, Hitler is supposed to have added, mysteriously, ‘In that hour it began.’

      In jener Stunde begann es.

      In fact what happened to Hitler in the next few years was about as far from any Rienzi-like political awakening as it is possible to imagine. He and Kubizek went to Vienna and shared a flat together. Kubizek studied music at the Conservatoire. Hitler was supposed to be at the Academy of Fine Arts, but had in fact failed the entry exams twice.

      It has been plausibly conjectured that Hitler broke with his friend because he could not stand the shame of this failure.

      Hitler’s mother died of breast cancer in 1907. The doctor attending her said that he had never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as was Hitler when his mother died. Eduard Bloch, the doctor, was Jewish, and neither Hitler nor his sister seem to have felt, or demonstrated, any anti-Semitic feeling towards him, still less blamed him for Klara’s death. The anti-Semitic mania appears to have developed later, perhaps during Hitler’s mysterious years as a drop-out student in Vienna.

      For he soon got through the money his mother had left him, and he never appears to have taken employment. Some more money was due to him from his father’s will when he reached – on 20 April 1913 – the age of twenty-four. Much of his time was spent simply waiting in idleness for this date to arrive. In May 1913, wanted by the Austrian police because he had failed to register for military service, he escaped over the German border and went to live in Munich.

      There then occurred the event which, as Ian Kershaw, the great British Hitler scholar, has said ‘made Hitler possible’:³ the outbreak of the First World War. Having persuaded the Austrian authorities that he was medically unfit for service, he had returned to Munich. But, like so very many young men in 1914, Hitler was caught up in war fever when the great European powers – Russia, Austro-Hungary, Germany and Britain, together with France – found themselves edging towards war after the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a young Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo. Although serious politicians and diplomats saw the outbreak of war as a calamity, and the more far-sighted