March 3, 2021 - Droog Magazine periodical for investigative journalism

Hitler's father - a review

Interesting, but disturbing book

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It has to be said, the biography by the Austrian historian Roman Sandgruber on Alois Hitler: Hitler's Vater: Wie der Sohn zum Diktator wurde (Hitler's father. How the son became a dictator), is a very interesting but also disturbing book. It is interesting because Sandgruber, professor emeritus of social and economic and social history at the University of Linz, is able to give a very good view of the time and environment in which the parents of Adolf Hitler, born in 1889, grew up. Because parents, including the time in which they lived, influence their children, this is knowledge that might be important in gaining a better understanding of the person Adolf Hitler.

Sandgruber was the first historian to use a collection of thirty-one letters from Alois Hitler - only one was known previously - and the long-lost Linz part of the first version of the memoirs of August Kubizek, Hitler's closest friend in the years 1906-1908. This part is said to date from 1943; the memoirs appeared in print in 1953.

But it is precisely these hitherto unknown documents that cause concern. Given the deluge of material falsely attributed to Hitler and those around him - from underpants and poems to mustache brushes, diaries and paintings - you would expect Sandgruber to have the letters and Kubizek manuscript examined forensically, in order to to remove doubts about authenticity in every possible way.

This investigation did not take place - at least, Sandgruber does not mention anything about it. So we just have to take his word for it that the material is authentic. Sandgruber writes that he received the letters from Anneliese Smigielski, the great-great-granddaughter of Josef Radlegger, the addressee of the letters from 1895. She is said to have found the letters in an attic. The Kubizek manuscript is said to originate from a granddaughter of Kubizek, “Frau Auzinger”.

No forensic research conducted

Are those letters real? Probably so - the handwriting resembles Alois Hitler's only known letter so far, also from 1895, of which the earlier Hitler biographer Franz Jetzinger published a photo in 1956. But "resemble" is not scientific evidence. And the find in an attic is very reminiscent of the farce with the Huy-Hitlers, which in 1980 were allegedly found in an attic in Belgium. It is therefore quite incomprehensible that Sandgruber did not consult a handwriting expert, and says nothing about any forensic investigation of the material found.

Be that as it may: the material looks authentic, but it still seems advisable to me that it is examined forensically, in order to remove any doubt.

Spectacular information?

Do those letters contain spectacular information that sheds new light on the person of Adolf Hitler? No - they are business letters from 1895, addressed to the owner of a farmhouse. A farm that Hitler's father wanted to buy and which he eventually bought. The later dictator turned six in 1895 - it cannot be assumed that the then fifty-eight-year-old father shared his business concerns with the young Adolf.

Since they are business letters, written by a man who at the time had difficulty in securing financing, addressed to someone he wanted to appease, it is very questionable what conclusions about the father's personality can be drawn from these letters . It is clear from the letters that the farm in Hafeld (municipality of Fischlham) was not a small farm, as was hitherto assumed (Jetzinger was talking about a house with less than 4 hectares [10 acres] of land), but a farmstead of - for that time - considerable size, with nearly 20 hectares [50 acres] of land.

Fortunately, Sandgruber has not only relied on these letters: he has done extensive research in the Austrian archives - but strangely enough not in the German archives. He has also been able to make extensive use of the research of Franz Jetzinger - the only investigator so far who has written a meaningful book about the young Hitler. In this sense, Hitler's Vater is a welcome addition and partly also a correction to Jetzinger's Hitlers Jugend (Hitler's youth, 1956).

Sandgruber's book once again points out that another study of the young Hitler, Brigitte Hamann's international bestseller Hitler's Vienna (Hitlers Wien) is quite rattling, as it is largely based on the memoirs of notoriously unreliable witnesses. In a sense, Sandgruber is also rehabilitating Hugo Rabitsch's Aus Adolf Hitler's Jugendzeit (From Hitler's youth, 1938). Hamann claimed that it had “no informational value whatsoever” - which is complete nonsense, as Jetzinger, Jaap van den Born and the writer of this article stated before.

Hamann also attached great importance to the testimony of Dr. Eduard Bloch, the Jewish family doctor of the Hitler family in Linz (1903-1907), after the death of the father. Sandgruber argues that Bloch's 1938 statement, in which he was very positive about the young Hitler, is unreliable, because it was made under pressure from the Nazis and Bloch was increasingly suffering from amnesia in later life.

Kubizek

But more important than Bloch's statement or Hamann's déconfiture is what Sandgruber reports about Hitler's childhood friend August Kubizek. Jetzinger already remarked that Kubizek, by no means a gifted writer, who had in the late 1940s only a handful of memories of his mutual time with Hitler (1906-1908), must have been helped by a ghostwriter. Sandgruber, or rather the Austrian historian Christian Rapp, on whose research Sandgruber relies, discovered that in the early 1950s not one but two ghostwriters contributed to the creation of Kubizek's memoirs: Karl Springenschmid and Dr. Franz Mayrhofer, both inveterate Nazis. With Kubizek they did everything they could to portray the young Hitler as favorably as possible.

These aspects, a very plausible and well-founded theory about the name change from Alois Schicklgruber to Alois Hitler, the factual material about Alois Hitler - a self-made man who, through diligent labor and self-study, made it from shoemaker's apprentice to a well paid customs officer - and further details about Adolf's elder half-brother Alois Jr., make Sandgruber's study well worth reading. But…

Unsubstantiated assumptions

The book is also full of unsubstantiated assumptions. Most disturbingly, the political views and possibly anti-Semitic views of the old Hitler would have had a decisive influence on the son. Now the father died on January 3, 1903. The young Hitler was then thirteen years old.

Several contemporary sources reported that Hitler's father hardly interfered with the upbringing of the children. He must have given them “pedagogic pats” as usual in those days, possibly even severely mistreated them - but that he discussed all sorts of things with them… I dare to doubt it.

Sandgruber also states that the son Adolf imitated his father's handwriting and signature. Well - handwriting comparison is really something for specialists - Sandgruber is not and has not consulted a specialist. And those signatures? Even a layman can see that father's and son's signatures are quite different. Sandgruber does not show it, he only claims it.

According to handwriting experts, a human's signature does not take on a relatively solid form until sometime after the age of twenty. Comparisons of the signatures of the adolescent Adolf with those of father Alois in middle age are therefore nonsensical. You should compare the signatures of both when they were both the same age – which – in the case of Alois and Adolf – can't be done.

Click to enlarge

The only surviving signatures of father Alois date - as far as I know - from 1895 and 1896, when he was in his late fifties. Son Adolf committed suicide at the age of fifty-six. A comparison of the signatures of the father (above, left) and those of son (above right, as a teenager and as an adult) shows that the differences are quite large (source: Jetzinger).

Strangely enough, Sandgruber has failed to consult a very important source collection: the material that the Hauptarchiv der NSDAP (NSDAP Main Archive) collected in 1938 about Hitler's Austrian period and which, after many wanderings, ended up in the Bundesarchiv (Federal archive) Berlin and can be consulted there. This collection also contains the official report of the Vienna police of the Reinhold Hanisch case, 1936. Hanisch, a business partner of the young Hitler in 1910, was then arrested on suspicion of manufacturing and trading fake Hitler artworks, a case in which much came to light about Hitler's activities as a painter, in 1910-1913, and also how he dealt with his Jewish clients - completely amicable.

Reinhard Hanisch?

Reinhold Hanisch, who despite his notorious unreliability is of great importance in the historiography of Hitler's Viennese period, which is also dealt with by Sandgruber, comes off very poorly in Hitler's Vater. He is mentioned six times in the running text, three times with a wrong first name, Reinhard. That disturbs.

Also disturbing is Sandgruber's description of Hitler's parents' bedroom, based on a sketch allegedly made by ten-year-old Adolf Hitler.

According to Sandgruber's source apparatus, this sketch stems from Dirk Bavendamm's Hitler biography Der junge Hitler (The young Hitler, 2009)- a book that, like so many Hitler studies, is full of assumptions. But the real source is another book: Die Lösung des Rätsel’s Adolf Hitler (The solution of the Adolf Hitler enigma, 1959) by Dr. Johannes von Müllern-Schönhausen (a.k.a. Hans Müllern). A book that is filled from A to Z with bizarre theories and images of clearly fake Hitler works of art. To top it all off, even fragments of Hitler's alleged diary - almost a quarter of a century before Konrad Kujau and Gerd Heidemann managed to abscond with millions of D-marks with their fake Hitler diary scams.

Hitler-the-poet?

Sandgruber also repeats the fabrication that the young Hitler would have written poems (nonsense). This myth was launched in an Austrian newspaper by an unknown editor in 1938, repeated by Kubizek in 1953, magnified by Dr. Von Müllern-Schönhausen in 1959, further called out by Hitler biographer John Toland in 1976 and finally blown up in 2017 by Jaap van den Born and the writer of this article.

The debunking of the Hitler-the-poet myth was done in Dutch, but since Sandgruber refers to this Dutch work in his literature review: Marc Vermeeren. De jeugd van Adolf Hitler 1889-1907 en zijn familie en voorouders ( The youth of Adolf Hitler 1889–1907 and his family and ancestors), Soesterberg, 2007, we can assume that Sandgruber is proficient in Dutch and that it is therefore all the more incomprehensible that he is breathing new life into the myth.


Adolf Hitler anti-semite before 1914?

Sandgruber, following Hannes Leidinger and Thomas Rapp in 2020, states that Adolf Hitler was already an extreme anti-Semite in Vienna from 1910-1913. Leidinger and Rapp base their findings on remarks by Kubizek and on a watercolor that was probably wrongly attributed to Hitler. Neither are solid sources. Sandgruber's theory is partly based on the assumption that Hitler copied his father in everything, including the father's alleged anti-Semitism.

According to historian Thomas Weber, a statement by Elisabath Grünbauer-Popp, daughter of Hitler's Munich landlord and landlady from 1913-1914, proves that Hitler already had extreme anti-Semitic views when he moved to Munich in 1913. But Elisabeth Popp was only eight years old when Hitler moved in with her parents. Her first statement dates from 1966 - so more than fifty years later. It is obvious how much significance should be attached to her statement.

Now, no one needs to doubt that anti-Semitism was ubiquitous in pre-World War I Europe. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Dreyfuss affair, pogroms in Tsarist Russia, proverbs and sayings depicting Jews negatively - it all existed.

But what motivates these historians to attribute to Hitler an extreme anti-Semitic attitude before World War I is a mystery to me. Contemporary sources do not show such an attitude at all. There is also compelling evidence that Hitler was indoctrinated with extreme anti-Semitic poison in 1919, and that the misery that culminated in the Shoah originated there. Deepening that fact seems to me to be more important than the pursuit of all sorts of wild and unprovable theories about Hitler's thoughts before 1914.

In summary: Roman Sandgruber has written a very interesting book. But it doesn't contain spectacular news.

Herman Sandgruber. Hitlers Vater. Wie der Sohn zum Diktator wurde. Molden Verlag, Wien – Graz, 2021. 304 Pages. €29.00 (paper) / €24.99 (e-book).

© Bart FM Droog, 2021.
© Translation Marty Snow & Bart FM Droog, 2021

This article was previously published in Dutch as: 'Hitlers vader' is een interessant maar verontrustend boek. Conclusies over Hitlers antisemitisme na vondst 31 brieven Alois Hitler kloppen niet. The Post Online, Woerden, 01-03-2021.
https://tpo.nl/2021/03/01/bart-fm-droog-hitlers-vader-is-een-interessant-maar-verontrustend-boek/

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