A few years ago I interviewed historian Dr Timothy Ryback who is the head of Germany's Obersalzberg Institute of Contemporary History, which is dedicated to research into Hitler. He has written many history based books on the Hitler family. It was a fascinating interview and yet some people found it hard to believe that Hitler had a nephew called Willy Paddy Hitler! Well folks it’s true.
Let me give a little of the back ground:
Bridget Dowling Hitler is one of the most intriguing tales of the Second World War and the Irish connection.,
She was just 17 in the summer of 1909 at the Dublin Horse show when her father fell into conversation with a handsome foreigner Alois Hitler, who told them he was a businessman on a trip to Ireland.
He wasn’t, he was actually a penniless waiter in a Dublin hotel but Bridget fell in love with the exotic foreigner anyway.
They eloped to London and were wed. He was the future Fuehrer’s eldest brother. Their common father Alois Senior went through three marriages and eight children, including Adolf and Alois.
Alois Hitler Snr had retired from ill health at the age of 58 He farmed nine acres and beat his children. Alois and Adolf were the main target of his brutality. In 1898, at the age of 14, Alois left home never to return and pitched up in Dublin working in the Shelbourne Hotel (see picture).
William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, the son of Alois Hitler Jr. and his Irish-born wife Bridget Dowling. They met in Dublin when Alois was living there in 1909; they married in Marylebone and moved back north to Liverpool, where William was born in 1911.
The family lived in a flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, which was destroyed in the last German air raid of the Liverpool Blitz on 10 January 1942. Dowling wrote a manuscript calledMy Brother-in-Law Adolf, in which she says Hitler moved to Liverpool with her and Alois, remaining from November 1912 to April 1913, in order to dodge conscription in Austria.
In 1914, Alois left Bridget and their son for a gambling tour of Europe. Alois later returned to Germany. Unable to reconnect due to the outbreak of World War I, Alois abandoned the family, leaving William to be brought up by his mother. He remarried bigamously, but re-established contact in the mid-1920s when he wrote to Bridget asking her to send William to Germany's Weimar Republic for a visit. She finally agreed in 1929, when William was 18. Alois had since had another son by his German wife, Heinz Hitler, who, in contrast to William, became a committed Nazi and in 1942 died in Soviet captivity.
In 1933, William Patrick Hitler returned to Germany in an attempt to benefit from his uncle's rise to power. His uncle found him a job at the Reich Credit Bank in Berlin. Later, William worked at an Opel automobile factory, and later still as a car salesman. Dissatisfied with these jobs, William persisted in asking his uncle for a better job, writing to him with blackmail threats that he would sell embarrassing stories about the family to the newspapers unless his "personal circumstances" improved.
According to Ryback he told me ‘Willy’ became a big time playboy in Germany, drinking the best champagnes and generally living the highlife using his Hitler name to gain favours. This annoyed his Uncle Adolf intensely and In 1938, Hitler asked William to relinquish his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job. Expecting a trap, William fled Nazi Germany; he again tried to blackmail his uncle with threats. This time, William threatened to tell the press that Hitler's alleged paternal grandfather was actually a Jewish merchant. Returning to London he wrote an article for Look magazine titled "Why I Hate my Uncle."
Alois left the family and ‘Willy’ and his mother fled to live in America thinking the family name ‘Hitler’ wasn't a good idea at the time they changed it to Stuart-Houston . After making a special request to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, William was cleared to join the U.S. Navy in 1944, and moved to Sunnyside, Queens in New York.
In and incredible twist of faith he ended up helping America defeat Germany which led to his Uncle Adolf Hitler committing suicide!
The Hitler family still live in America and continue to use the family name Stuart-Houston.
Adolf Hitler also had a sister Paul. Ryback wrote: "Adolf was the older brother and father figure. He was very strict with Paula and slapped her around. But she justified it in a starry-eyed way, because she believed it was for the good of her education."
Paul told how, Adolf's mother tried to protect her son from regular beatings.
Fearing that the father could no longer control himself in his unbridled rage, she [Adolf's mother] decides to put an end to the beating.
"She goes up to the attic, covers Adolf who is lying on the floor, but cannot deflect the father's final blow. Without a sound she absorbs it."
This is a picture of a completely dysfunctional family that the public has never seen before.
The terror of the Third Reich was cultivated in Hitler's own home.
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