Author: Ian Kershaw
Category: Nonfiction
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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. 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.
A year later came the change of name. Alois, the social climber, may have preferred the less rustic form of ‘Hitler’ (a variant spelling of ‘Hiedler’, otherwise given as ‘Hietler’, Hüttler’, ‘Hütler’, meaning ‘smallholder’, the surname of Johann Georg Hiedler, who had later married Alois’s mother, apparently acknowledging paternity). At any rate, Alois seemed well satisfied with his new 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’.
Klara Pölzl, who was to become Adolf Hitler’s mother, was the eldest of only three surviving children out of eleven – the other two were Johanna and Theresia – from the marriage of Johanna Hüttler, eldest daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, with Johann Baptist Pölzl, also a smallholder in Spital. Klara herself grew up on the adjacent farm to that of her grandfather Nepomuk. At the death of his brother, Johann Georg Hiedler, Nepomuk had effectively adopted Alois Schicklgruber. Klara’s mother, Johanna, and her aunt Walburga had in fact been brought up with Alois in Nepomuk’s house. Officially, after the change of name and legitimation in 1876, Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl were second cousins. In that year, 1876, aged sixteen, Klara Pölzl left the family farm in Spital and moved to Braunau am Inn to join the household of Alois Hitler as a maid.
By this time, Alois was a well-respected customs official in Braunau. His personal affairs were, however, less well regulated than his career. He would eventually marry three times, at first to a woman much older than himself, Anna Glasserl, from whom he separated in 1880, then to women young enough to be his daughters. A premarital liaison and his last two marriages would give him nine children, four of whom were to die in infancy. It was a private life of above average turbulence – at least for a provincial customs officer. When his second wife, Franziska (Fanni) Matzelberger, died of tuberculosis in August 1884 aged only twenty-three, their two children, Alois and Angela, were still tiny. During her illness, Fanni had been moved to the fresh air of the countryside outside Braunau. For someone to look after his two young children, Alois turned straight away to Klara Pölzl, and brought her back to Braunau. With Fanni scarcely in her grave, Klara became pregnant. Since they were officially second cousins, a marriage between Alois and Klara needed the dispensation of the Church. After a wait of four months, in which Klara’s condition became all the more evident, the dispensation finally arrived from Rome in late 1884, and the couple were married on 7 January 1885. The wedding ceremony took place at six o’clock in the morning. Soon after a perfunctory celebration, Alois was back at his work at the customs post.
The first of the children of Alois’s third marriage, Gustav, was born in May 1885, to be followed in September the following year by a second child, Ida, and, with scarcely a respite, by another son, Otto, who died only days after his birth. Further tragedy for Klara came soon afterwards, as both Gustav and Ida contracted diphtheria and died within weeks of each other in December 1887 and January 1888. By the summer of 1888 Klara was pregnant again. At half-past six in the evening on 20 April 1889, an overcast and chilly Easter Saturday, she gave birth in her home in the ‘Gasthof zum Pommer’, Vorstadt Nr.219, to her fourth child, the first to survive infancy: this was Adolf.
The historical record of Adolf ’s early years is very sparse. His own account in Mein Kampf is inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation. Post-war recollections of family and acquaintances have to be treated with care, and are at times as dubious as the attempts during the Third Reich itself to glorify the childhood of the future Führer. For the formative period so important to psychologists and ‘psycho-historians’, the fact has to be faced that there is little to go on which is not retrospective guesswork.
By the time of Adolf ’s birth, Alois was a man of moderate means. His income was a solid one – rather more than that of an elementary school headmaster. In addition to Alois, Klara, the two children of Alois’s second marriage, Alois Jr (before he left home in 1896) and Angela, Adolf, and his younger brother Edmund (born in 1894, but died in 1900) and sister Paula (born in 1896), the household also ran to a cook and maid, Rosalia Schichtl. In addition, there was Adolf ’s aunt Johanna, one of his mother’s younger sisters, a bad-tempered, hunchbacked woman who was, however, fond of Adolf and a good help for Klara around the house. In material terms, then, the Hitler family led a comfortable middle-class existence.
Family life was, however, less than harmonious and happy. Alois was an archetypal provincial civil servant – pompous, status-proud, strict, humourless, frugal, pedantically punctual, and devoted to duty. He was regarded with respect by the local community. But he had a bad temper which could flare up quite unpredictably. At home, Alois was an authoritarian, overbearing, domineering husband and a stern, distant, masterful, and often irritable father. For long after their marriage, Klara could not get out of the habit of calling him ‘Uncle’. And even after his death, she kept a rack of his pipes in the kitchen and would point to them on occasion when he was referred to, as if to invoke his authority.
What affection the young children missed in their father was more than recompensed by their mother. According to the description given much later by her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, after his own forced emigration from Nazi Germany, Klara Hitler was ‘a simple, modest, kindly woman. She was tall, had brownish hair which she kept neatly plaited, and a long, oval face with beautifully expressive grey-blue eyes.’ In personality, she was submissive, retiring, quiet, a pious churchgoer, taken up in the running of the household, and above all absorbed in the care of her children and stepchildren. The deaths within weeks of each other of her first three children in infancy in 1887–8, and the subsequent death of her fifth child, Edmund, under the age of six in 1900, must have been hammer blows for her. Her sorrows can only have been compounded by living with an irascible, unfeeling, overbearing husband. It is scarcely surprising that she made an impression of a saddened, careworn woman. Nor is it any wonder that she bestowed a smothering, protective love and devotion on her two surviving children, Adolf and Paula. Klara was in turn held in love and affection by her children and stepchildren, by Adolf quite especially. ‘Outwardly, his love for his mother was his most striking feature,’ Dr Bloch later wrote. ‘While he was not a “mother’s boy” in the usual sense,’ he added, ‘I have never witnessed a closer attachment.’ In one of the few signs of human affection recorded in Mein Kampf, Adolf wrote, ‘I had honoured my father, but loved my mother.’ He carried her picture with him down to the last days in the bunker. Her portrait stood in his rooms in Munich, Berlin, and at the Obersalzberg (his alpine residence near Berchtesgaden). His mother may well, in fact, have been the only person he genuinely loved in his entire life.
Adolf ’s early years were spent, then, under the suffocating shield of an over-anxious mother in a household dominated by the threatening presence of a disciplinarian father, against whose wrath the submissive Klara was helpless to protect her offspring. Adolf ’s younger sister, Paula, spoke after the war of her mother as ‘a very soft and tender person, the compensatory element between the almost too harsh father and the very lively children who were perhaps somewhat difficult to train. If there were ever quarrel[s] or differences of opinion between my parents,’ she continued, ‘it was always on account of the children. It was especially my brother Adolf who challenged my father to extreme harshness and who got his sound thrashing every day … How often on the oth
er hand did my mother caress him and try to obtain with her kindness what the father could not succeed [in obtaining] with harshness!’ Hitler himself, during his late-night fireside monologues in the 1940s, often recounted that his father had sudden bursts of temper and would then immediately hit out. He did not love his father, he said, but instead feared him all the more. His poor beloved mother, he used to remark, to whom he was so attached, lived in constant concern about the beatings he had to take, sometimes waiting outside the door as he was thrashed.
Quite possibly, Alois’s violence was also turned against his wife. A passage in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler ostensibly describes the conditions in a workers’ family where the children have to witness drunken beatings of their mother by their father, may well have drawn in part on his own childhood experiences. What the legacy of all this was for the way Adolf’s character developed must remain a matter for speculation. That its impact was profound is hard to doubt.
Beneath the surface, the later Hitler was unquestionably being formed. Speculation though it must remain, it takes little to imagine that his later patronizing contempt for the submissiveness of women, the thirst for dominance (and imagery of the Leader as stern, authoritarian father-figure), the inability to form deep personal relationships, the corresponding cold brutality towards humankind, and – not least – the capacity for hatred so profound that it must have reflected an immeasurable undercurrent of self-hatred concealed in the extreme narcissism that was its counterpoint must surely have had roots in the subliminal influences of the young Adolf ’s family circumstances. But assumptions have to remain guesswork. The outer traces of Adolf ’s early life, so far as they can be reconstructed, bear no hint of what would emerge. Attempts to find in the youngster ‘the warped person within the murderous dictator’ have proved unpersuasive. If we exclude our knowledge of what was to come, his family circumstances invoke for the most part sympathy for the child exposed to them.
II
Alois Hitler had always been a restless soul. The Hitlers had moved house several times within Braunau, and had subsequently been uprooted on a number of occasions. In November 1898, a final move for Alois took place when he bought a house with a small plot of attached land in Leonding, a village on the outskirts of Linz. From now on, the family settled in the Linz area, and Adolf – down to his days in the bunker in 1945 – looked upon Linz as his home town. Linz reminded him of the happy, carefree days of his youth. It held associations with his mother. And it was the most ‘German’ town of the Austrian Empire. It evidently symbolized for him the provincial small-town Germanic idyll – the image he would throughout his life set against the city he would soon come to know, and detest: Vienna.
Adolf was now in his third elementary school. He seems to have established himself rapidly with a new set of schoolmates, and became ‘a little ringleader’ in the games of cops and robbers which the village boys played in the woods and fields around their homes. War games were a particular favourite. Adolf himself was thrilled by an illustrated history of the Franco-Prussian War, which he had come across at home. And once the Boer War broke out, the games revolved around the heroic exploits of the Boers, whom the village boys fervently supported. About this same time, Adolf became gripped by the adventure stories of Karl May, whose popular tales of the Wild West and Indian wars (though May had never been to America) enthralled thousands of youngsters. Most of these youngsters graduated from the Karl May adventures and the childhood fantasies they fostered as they grew up. For Adolf, however, the fascination with Karl May never faded. As Reich Chancellor, he still read the May stories, recommending them, too, to his generals, whom he accused of lacking imagination.
Adolf later referred to ‘this happy time’, when ‘school work was ridiculously easy, leaving me so much free time that the sun saw more of me than my room’, when ‘meadows and woods were then the battleground on which the ever-present “antagonisms” ’ – the growing conflict with his father – ‘came to a head’.
In 1900, however, the carefree days were drawing to a close. And just around the time when important decisions had to be made about Adolf ’s future, and the secondary education path he should follow, the Hitler family was once more plunged into distress with the death, through measles, of Adolf ’s little brother Edmund on 2 February 1900. With Alois’s elder son, Alois Jr, already spiting his father and living away from home, any careerist ambitions for his offspring now rested upon Adolf. They were to lead to tension between father and son in the remaining years of Alois’s life.
Adolf began his secondary schooling on 17 September 1900. His father had opted for the Realschule rather than the Gymnasium, that is, for a school which attached less weight to the traditional classical and humanistic studies but was still seen as a preparation for higher education, with an emphasis upon more ‘modern’ subjects, including science and technical studies. According to Adolf, his father was influenced by the aptitude his son already showed for drawing, together with a disdain for the impracticality of humanistic studies deriving from his own hard way to career advancement. It was not the typical route for a would-be civil servant – the career which Alois had in mind for his son. But, then, Alois himself had made a good career in the service of the Austrian state with hardly any formal education at all to speak of.
The transition to secondary school was a hard one for young Adolf. He had to trek every day from his home in Leonding to school in Linz, a journey of over an hour each way, leaving him little or no time for developing out-of-school friendships. While he was still a big fish in a little pond among the village boys in Leonding, his classmates in his new school took no special notice of him. He had no close friends at school; nor did he seek any. And the attention he had received from his village teacher was now replaced by the more impersonal treatment of a number of teachers responsible for individual subjects. The minimum effort with which Adolf had mastered the demands of the primary school now no longer sufficed. His school work, which had been so good in primary school, suffered from the outset. And his behaviour betrayed clear signs of immaturity. Adolf’s school record, down to the time he left in autumn 1905, hovered between poor and mediocre.
In a letter to Hitler’s defence counsel on 12 December 1923, following the failed putsch attempt in Munich, his former class teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, recalled Adolf as a thin, pale youth commuting between Linz and Leonding, a boy not making full use of his talent, lacking in application, and unable to accommodate himself to school discipline. He characterized him as stubborn, high-handed, dogmatic, and hot-tempered. Strictures from his teachers were received with a scarcely concealed insolence. With his classmates he was domineering, and a leading figure in the sort of immature pranks which Huemer attributed to too great an addiction to Karl May’s Indian stories together with a tendency to waste time furthered by the daily trip from Leonding and back.
There can be little doubting that Hitler’s attitude towards his school and teachers (with one exception) was scathingly negative. He left school ‘with an elemental hatred’ towards it, and later mocked and derided his schooling and teachers. Only his history teacher, Dr Leopold Pötsch, was singled out for praise in Mein Kampf for firing Hitler’s interest through vivid narratives and tales of heroism from the German past, stirring in him the strongly emotional German-nationalist, anti-Habsburg feelings (which were in any case widely prevalent in his school, as in Linz generally).
The problems of adjustment that Adolf encountered in the Realschule in Linz were compounded by the deterioration in relations with his father and the running sore of the disputes over the boy’s future career. For Alois, the virtues of a civil service career could not be gainsaid. But all his attempts to enthuse his son met with adamant rejection. ‘I yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time,’ wrote Adolf in Mein Kampf.
The more Adolf resisted the idea, the more authoritarian and insistent his father became. Equ
ally stubborn, when asked what he envisaged for his future, Adolf claimed he replied that he wanted to be an artist – a vision which for the dour Austrian civil servant Alois was quite unthinkable. ‘Artist, no, never as long as I live!’, Hitler has him saying. Whether the young Adolf, allegedly at the age of twelve, so plainly stipulated he wanted to be an artist may be doubted. But that there was a conflict with his father arising from his unwillingness to follow a career in the civil service, and that his father found fault with his son’s indolent and purposeless existence, in which drawing appeared to be his main interest, seems certain. Alois had worked his way up through industry, diligence, and effort from humble origins to a position of dignity and respect in the state service. His son, from a more privileged background, saw fit to do no more than dawdle away his time drawing and dreaming, would not apply himself in school, had no career path in view, and scorned the type of career which had meant everything to his father. The dispute amounted, therefore, to more than a rejection of a civil service career. It was a rejection of everything his father had stood for; and with that, a rejection of his father himself.
Adolf’s adolescence, as he commented in Mein Kampf, was ‘very painful’. With the move to the school in Linz, and the start of the rumbling conflict with his father, an important formative phase in his character development had begun. The happy, playful youngster of the primary school days had grown into an idle, resentful, rebellious, sullen, stubborn, and purposeless teenager.