I learned this today. Adolf Hitler had three brothers, two sisters, one half-brother, and one half-sister.
Because of the things he did, it is difficult to see Hitler as a real person, but of course he was, and he has a family.
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, to Alois Hitler and Klara Polzi. Alois was born Schicklgruber, but he changed his surname to Hitler, which was his stepfather’s name, in 1876.
Alois was married twice before he married Klara Polzi and he had two children from a previous marriage. They were Alois Hitler Jr. and Angela Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s half-brother and half-sister.
Alois Hitler married Klara Polzi on 7 January 1885 and their first child was born on 17 May 1885. This child was Gustav Hitler. On 25 September 1886 they had their second child, Ida Hitler. In 1887, their third child, Otto, was born.
Otto Hitler died days after he was born and Gustav and Ida both died of diphtheria in the winter of 1888. Losing three children so quickly must have been hard.
Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 and he was the oldest because his three older siblings had died.
On 24 March 1894, they had their fifth child, Edmund Hitler and on 21 January 1896 they had their last child, Paula Hitler.
Adolf’s brother Edmund died of the measles in 1900, leaving an older half-brother and sister, and a younger sister.
What happened to them?
His older half-brother, Alois Hitler Jr. married an Irishwoman in 1909 and moved to Liverpool. He ran a small restaurant, which was not successful. In 1914, he left his family in England and came back to the German Empire and started a safety-razor business. Alois married again in Germany, while still married in England. He started to manage a restaurant, which he continued to run through the duration of World War 2. He was captured by the Americans after the war and interrogated, but it turned out he had had nothing to do with his brother Adolf through the war and he was released. He died in Hamburg in 1950. He had changed his name to Alois Hiller.
Angela Hitler married Leo Raubal in 1903. She has a son and two daughters. She appears to have been close to her half-brother Adolf. When he was arrested in Landsberg in 1924, she went to visit him. She became Adolf’s housekeeper in 1925. Angela began to disapprove of Adolf’s relationship with Eva Braun and he stopped talking to her in the early 1940s, but they made up during the war. As the end of the war was looming, he had Adolf had Angela moved to the Berchtesgaden to avoid being captured by the Soviets. After the war she spoke very highly of her brother Adolf and claimed that he never knew about the Holocaust. She died in Hanover in 1949.
Paula Hitler lost contact with her brother Adolf when he moved to Vienna and Munich to try to become a painter and during World War 1. He found her again in the early 1930s. She claimed that she only saw her brother about once a year during the 1930s and 40s and she worked as a secretary in a military field hospital throughout the war. At the end of the war, she was driven to the Berchtesgaden, with her half-sister Angela to protect her from the Soviets. After the war, she changed her name to Paula Wolff. She was arrested by the Americans and questioned, but then released. The Americans said that she looked a lot like her brother. She moved back to Vienna and worked in an arts and crafts shop. In 1952, she returned to Berchtesgaden and was looked after by former members of the SS and survivors of her brother’s inner circle. She died in 1960.
Paula Wolff was the last of Adolf Hitler’s direct family. His half-brother’s grandchildren are still alive in America, but they are not really direct relations.
So, Adolf Hitler had a half-brother, a half-sister, and a younger sister. He doesn’t appear to have been very close to any of them and they certainly didn’t try to use his name in Germany. After the war, they all changed their names and by 1960, the last of them had died. And that is what I learned today.
Image By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1990-048-29A / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5783006
Sources
http://www.hitlerschildren.com/article/1603-the-siblings-of-adolf-hitler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Hitler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Hitler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_Hitler