Adolf Hitler - did he visit Liverpool during 1912-13? There is a story that surfaces from time to time which meets with a flurry of activity between believers and disbelievers, which then disappears until enough time has lapsed for the story to gather credibility again and thus cause interest.
And it is this: Adolf Hitler lived in Liverpool before World War One with his half brother Alois. It conjures up many images - the young artist studying the architecture, improving his mind and learning the language. In fact, what has been published is even more ludicrous - idling away the time learning about his future with an astrological mystic neighbour, followed by a quick shufftie down to the docks to make a note of the shipping using the port for future reference should Germany ever go to war with, say, Britain for exaple.So aside from the elaborations, is there any truth at all in this story? According to the unfinished manuscript "I Married Hitler's Brother", which was discovered in the main branch of New York Public Library in the late 1970s, Adolf Hitler once lodged at a house in the Toxteth district of Liverpool, England, from November 1912 to April 1913. Historians quickly presumed the manuscript was a hoax, but as they read through the work, many of them realised the claims it contained were not as bizarre as they had initially thought. The author of the controversial manuscript was one Bridget Hitler, the wife of Adolf's half-brother Alois. Irish-born Bridget's maiden name had been Dowling, and she had met Alois Hitler at the annual Dublin Horse Show of 1909. Dressed in a brown suit and a homburg hat, the debonair Austrian introduced himself to 17-year-old Bridget in broken English, and it was one of those supposedly rare cases of love at first sight. Bridget began to date the foreigner, who claimed to be in the hotel business, but the Irish girl's parents didn't approve of Alois, and they were shocked to discover that Alois's claim to be in the hotel business meant in fact that he was merely a waiter at the nearby Shelbourne Hotel. This was the final straw, and Bridget's parents demanded an end to the relationship. But Bridget was in love. She eloped and married her sweetheart in London. A year after the marriage, Bridget bore Alois a son, and he was named William Patrick. Bridget later addressed her son as Pat, while Alois called him Willie. In the second year of married life, the couple decided to move to Liverpool, where they opened a small restaurant in the bustling thoroughfare of Dale Street, but it was only a modest success. Alois was a changeable person, and he decided to sell the restaurant in order to buy a boarding house in another part of the city. The boarding house venture was an utter disaster, and Alois became bankrupt. However, his economic outlook improved shortly afterwards when he gained a fortune after the horse he backed won the Grand National Steeplechase. Alois used the money to set himself up in the safety-razor business. He decided he needed a partner, so he wrote to his brother-in-law Anton Raubal in Vienna, asking him and his wife to come to Liverpool straight away, and enclosed the travelling expenses. On a cold November morning in 1912, Alois and Bridget went to Liverpool's Lime Street Station and waited for the 11.30 train to steam in. When the train arrived, the couple waited with baited breath for Anton and his wife to disembark, but they were disappointed. The outline of a solitary figure descending from the train was barely visible through the cloud of steam drifting across the platform. A pale-faced young man in a worn-out suit approached and offered his hand to Alois. It was Adolf, the younger half-brother of Alois. Adolf explained that he had come in the place of Anton Raubal, who had not been able to make the journey for various reasons. A heated discussion in German broke out between the brothers, and Bridget was so embarrassed, she left them and went home. In the evening, Alois brought Adolf to his three-bedroomed flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, and seeing that the brothers were now on friendlier terms, Bridget cooked dinner for them. After the meal, Adolf retired to the drawing room, while Bridget scolded her husband for giving his brother such a rough reception. Alois said that Adolf - who he referred to as "my artist brother" - had deserted from the Austrian army and had been on the run for eighteen months. "That's why he came here to me," Alois explained, "When he confessed this at the station he wondered why I didn't welcome him with open arms". At that time in Vienna, there was a rigid system of registration of domicile, and this system made it easy to locate anyone failing to report for military service. Alois said that Adolf had gotten round this by using the identity papers of his dead brother Edmund. But when the Viennese police were finally on to him, Adolf fled to Liverpool after begging Anton Raubal's wife for the travelling expenses that Alois had sent to her husband.
Now that Alois had explained the facts, she understood why her husband had made such a scene at the station. According to Bridget, her 23-year-old brother-in-law spent most of his time lounging around the house and playing with two-year-old William Patrick. At first, he hardly spoke to her, but gradually, as the weeks went by, Adolf became more friendlier, and began talking about his interest in painting and his future plans. He told Bridget how disappointed he became when his application to become an artist at the Academy of Art in Vienna was turned down by a Jewish professor who said that he couldn't paint, but had a minor talent for architecture. Another subject young Adolf discussed - or rather, argued with his sister-in-law, was Germany's future. It was Adolf's unshakeable belief that Germany would one day take its rightful position in the world, and whenever he talked about the "Fatherland." he would unfold a map of the world that belonged to Alois, spread it across the floor, and explain how Germany would first conquer France, and then England. Sometimes Adolf would disrupt Bridget's housework to discuss his political predictions, and on one occasion when Bridget became thoroughly irritated by Adolf's ranting, she carried on cleaning, and Adolf began to scream and shout at her for ignoring him. Bridget retaliated by telling Adolf that he would never live to see England destroyed by Germany, and added that he wasn't even German; just a low-living Austrian deserter. Hitler was so taken aback by Bridget's riposte that he became speechless, and began to shake as he swelled with anger. One day, Alois took Adolf on a daytrip to London, where the latter became captivated by the various architectural styles of the city's buildings and landmarks. Adolf was beguiled by the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, and the workings of Tower Bridge. On the train back to Liverpool, the future dictator made several sketches of an enormous version of St Paul's, but Alois said such a proposed construction would be just a pointless folly. Adolf rambled on about his magnificent dream to build a domed temple to outlive the Pyramid of Cheops, but Alois fell asleep. In her controversial manuscript, Bridget mentions a Mrs Prentice; a neighbour who was into astrology and the occult. Adolf allegedly spent hours in her home having his cards and horoscopes read. He was enthralled by her prediction that a tremendous future lay ahead of him. Mrs Prentice looked at the Austrian's palm and told him he had a prominent line of destiny, which indicated that he would have a phenomenal career. However, Mrs Prentice noted that Adolf's 'heart line' crossed his destiny line, which meant that his life's goal could be thwarted by his own emotions if they got the better of him. Adolf eventually outstayed his welcome, and Alois told him to go home. In May 1913, Adolf left England and returned to Germany. Bridget says in her manuscript that she blamed herself for turning loose a man who plunged the world into its costliest war, and regretted not teaching him English. Many historians who have analysed the manuscript believe that Adolf's trip to Liverpool is entirely credible, and furthermore, November 1912 to May 1913 is something of a lost period in the Führer's life. Hitler never mentioned his stay in Liverpool in "Mein Kampf", but then that could be because he didn't want to publicize his shameful days as a draft dodging drop-out. Ironically, the last bombs to fall on Liverpool demolished the very house in Upper Stanhope Street, where Hitler once lived. It sounds more Monty Python than Making History ..... Many people have recounted the story that just before the first world war Adolf Hitler did spend a few months in Toxteth. Local Historian Mike Royden knows the story well: "As I was growing up, every time Adolf was mentioned, my father would say he was once in Liverpool, and the street was pointed out to me later when we would be driving home from Town and he would say 'This is Upper Stanhope Street where Hitler once lived'.
Stanhope Street has changed a fair bit since 1912, not least because of the damage Hitler's bombs did during the war.
The story is that Adolf came to stay at 102 Upper Stanhope Street in Toxteth, the home of his half-brother Alois and his Irish wife Bridget.
According to the highly respected biographer of Hitler, Sir Ian Kershaw, of Sheffield University:
"Adolf Hitler was the fourth son of his father's third marriage. His father was also called Alois. The second marriage produced a boy and a girl and the son was Alois jnr., Hitler's elder half brother, who was a bit of a ne'er do well and a wastrel and who had already been in prison twice for theft, before he went to Ireland via Paris around 1909. There he met a young Irish woman called Bridget Dowling and the following year they were married in London, then set up house in Liverpool".
"According to her so-called memoirs, in 1912 he was visited by his younger half-brother Adolf who got off a train at Lime Street Station before spending the best part of five months spending his time wandering around the docks and so on, not learning any English and eventually going back to Vienna in April 1913.
"Remember, this is Bridget's story as written in the 1930's. It's a text with few references and therein lies the problem. I went in search of hard facts to the Liverpool Record Office. Research officer Roger Hull had dug out some paperwork including a document that confirms that Alois Hitler was living in Toxteth at the time in question. His wife gave birth to William Patrick Hitler, 102 Upper Stanhope Street and we have the birth certificate for that. This says that on 12th of March 1911 that in 102 Upper Stanhope Street Toxteth Park, which is just to the south of Liverpool, William Patrick, a boy, was born to Alois Hitler and Bridget Elizabeth Hitler, formerly Dowling. Alois was a hotel waiter and the informant was the mother, B.E. Hitler. Very promising - Roger and I searched for more evidence but with little reward.
"If we look at the Liverpool directories between 1911 and 1914, there is a Thomas William John living at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, he's listed on the electoral roll for 1911-12, but not for 1910-11. This man is obviously on the electoral register and is quite well off at the time and he is probably letting rooms out in his house to those who want to stay there including "aliens" which Alois would have been at the time. Of course we have to remember that at this time there wasn't universal male suffrage until 1918, and, of course, no women could vote in national elections. So the electoral roll isn't quite as useful as it is today".
But we didn't come up with anything else, not even a census return. Mike Royden, who has known this tale for most of his life, isn't surprised: "Well apart from Bridget's manuscript I cannot find any other document that specifically places Adolf Hitler in Liverpool in 1912/13."
So where next? According to Roger Hull, "what we have to ask is, what was the relationship like between Adolf and his half brother - if it is proved to be bad then that casts doubt on whether he came here or not and why would he come to Liverpool?"
Professor Ian Kershaw can answer one of those questions:
"Adolf Hitler never really had a great deal of time for him. During the Third Reich when Adolf Hitler had reached the pinnacle of power, Alois had very little to do with him. Afterwards he changed his name and lived in obscurity and died, I think Hamburg, in 1956. So, no evidence of a close relationship between the two men".
We cannot prove that Adolf Hitler was in Liverpool, but we've nothing to disprove it either. According to Mike Royden, "Maybe the evidence doesn't specifically exist in Liverpool - if you're trying to find the movements of Hitler 1912/13, you probably need to look elsewhere".
Which is exactly what Professor Sir Ian Kershaw has spent much of his time doing:
"There is actually an eye witness to Adolf Hitler's presence in the men's home in Vienna in February 1913 at a time when he is supposed to be in Liverpool. Beyond that, the records kept by the men's home were very careful records and they recorded when people were residents and when they left. Adolf Hitler did actually leave the men's home just for a few days and they recorded his departure and his return in May 1913 when he left to go to Munich. They again registered his departure. Since the records are so carefully kept, they would unquestionably have recorded a departure of his in 1912 had he been going to Liverpool. What a wonderful surreal image to think of Hitler standing on the terraces at Anfield, but there isn't a grain of truth in the story". Hitler 'spent months living in Liverpool flat' that was later destroyed by the Luftwaffe
By Jaya Narain
26 November 2011
Adolf Hitler spent five months in Liverpool, wandering around the city and relaxing in the Poste House pub, pint in hand.
He also enjoyed a sightseeing tour of London and was so fascinated by Tower Bridge that he bribed his way into the engine room so he could see the machinery at work.The claims come from an author exploring a long-held theory that the 23-year-old Hitler shared a flat in the city before World War I. In his book, "The Hitlers of Liverpool", Mike Unger claims the future Führer fled to Merseyside from Vienna, to avoid national service. He says Hitler stayed in a flat in Toxteth with his married half-brother Alois from November 1912 to April 1913. The flat was destroyed by Luftwaffe bombers during World War II. Unger’s claims come under scrutiny in a BBC documentary which aims to uncover the truth or fiction behind the tale. The suggestion that Hitler lived in the city first appeared in the little-known memoirs of his sister-in-law Bridget Dowling. Written in the 1930s as Hitler’s notoriety began to grow, "My Brother-in-Law Adolf" failed to find a publisher and many historians dismiss the manuscript as a ploy by her to make money from the infamous family name. In the documentary, Unger tells actor Paul McGann that he believes there is strong evidence to support the story. Adolf Hitler Liverpool links discussed again in new TV documentary
28 November 2011
By Liverpool Echo
The Debate over whether or not Adolf Hitler spent nearly six months in Liverpool as a young man will be re-ignited tonight in a new television documentary.
Actor Paul McGann is shown returning to his native city and visiting the sites associated with Hitler’s supposed time here. He will also be seen interviewing former "Liverpool Echo" editor Mike Unger – who is convinced that Hitler did live in the city – and historian Professor Frank McDonough, who is equally sure the story is a myth. Supporters believe 23-year-old Adolf Hitler was in Liverpool from November 1912 to May 1913 in a bid to beat being conscripted into the Austrian army. He stayed with his older half-brother Alois, and sister-in-law Bridget, who lived in a rented flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth, It is claimed Adolf enjoyed a pint at his local pub, Peter Kavanagh’s, and even took a job at the Adelphi hotel. The discovery that Hitler may have lived in the city was first made by Mr Unger in 1973, who found it in a wartime memoir written by Hitler’s sister-in-law Bridget Dowling. In the documentary, Mr Unger, who recently published a book on the Hitlers of Liverpool, says of Adolf’s supposed stay: “It was a great story, and still is a great story. “Research done over the past few years convinced me it was true. There is no public record to say that Hitler lived here, but all the circumstantial evidence would indicate that it’s absolutely true he lived in Liverpool.” But Prof McDonough, who has written several books on the Third Reich, remains sceptical. He said the story was invented by Hitler’s sister-in-law to make some money when Hitler was famous throughout the world as the German dictator who plunged Europe into World War II. There were no records of him leaving his native Austria, or travelling to England. He also made no known reference to ever being in Liverpool. “The fiction is much more interesting,” said Prof McDonough. Mr McGann seems persuaded by Mr Unger’s argument, saying: “It’s a tall tale, but it’s a Liverpool tale. Until somebody provides irrefutable proof that he wasn’t here, I think we’re having it.”
'Inside Out North West' is on BBC1 at 7.30pm tonight."The Hitlers of Liverpool", by Michael Unger, is published by Bluecoat Press. Adolf Hitler: the unwanted Liverpool house guest?
Michael Unger's new book examines the story of the Hitlers of Liverpool
8 June 2011
By Liverpool Echo
In June 1910 Bridget Dowling, a naïve Irish girl, married Alois Hitler Jnr in London before the couple settled in Liverpool. On 12 March 1911 their only child, William Patrick, was born in the couple’s pleasant three-bedroomed flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth. Life in the Hitler family was hardly idyllic, according to the new Mrs Hitler. Alois had a ‘volatile, bohemian nature’ and was an irresponsible, chronic gambler who was ‘always about to make his fortune’. When Alois hit it big with his gambling he was generous and often sent money to his sisters in Vienna – his full sister Angela and his half sister Paula. It was after a big win at the gambling tables in 1912 that Alois began dreaming of building his safety-razor salesman’s business into an international sales organisation, with Angela’s husband, Anton Raubal, at the head of the Central European division. He sent some travel money for Angela and Anton to come to Liverpool from Vienna to discuss the project more fully. Bridget and Alois went to Lime Street station to meet the 11.30 train from London; but instead of Anton and Angela, a shabby young man approached and offered Alois his hand. It was Alois’s younger brother, Adolf, who came in their place. Alois was furious. He and Adolf did not get on. “He’s just a good for nothing,” Alois told Bridget. Bridget recalls the meeting: “Looking back now, it would be very satisfying to say that my Irish second sight, or even my woman’s intuition, had helped me recognise unusual qualities which might explain why the young man we met would one day become one of the most notorious figures in history, but there was certainly nothing about the pale, unsteady youth who began agitatedly whispering to Alois, that distinguished him from thousands of others. “One would have expected that for such a long journey he would have come fairly well-dressed. Certainly wearing such a worn-out suit could only mean he had nothing else. Even so, I would have welcomed him as I would any member of my husband’s family, had not Alois’ angry voice startled me. He was furious. Forgetting his surroundings, he spoke so sharply and loudly that heads turned towards us in astonishment. "At first, Adolf, obviously exhausted from the long journey, mutely listened while Alois berated him, but then he replied even more heatedly. At the height of the discussion Adolf moved closer and grabbed Alois’ topcoat by the lapels. For a second the tension was so great that I decided I’d better go; they had forgotten I was there anyway. I left them. “It was late in the evening when the brothers came home. I settled Adolf in the room that had been made ready for the expected visitors. “Alone with my husband, I reproached him for his unbrotherly behaviour, and for the scene he had made at the station. “When Alois spoke he smiled sarcastically, 'You don’t understand. If you knew everything, you’d feel as I do'. “From the complicated family history my husband related, I managed to make out that his father, also named Alois, had married three times. The first marriage was childless. My husband and his sister Angela were born of the second. Adolf, now sleeping, and his sister Paula were the children of the third marriage". Alois was still very angry at his brother’s arrival: “A man in his early twenties so shiftless that he lives in a lodging for old men at the city’s expense! Isn’t that shameful! And he’s my brother.” "And a man", said Alois, "who the Austrian authorities wanted to jail for avoiding being called up in the Austrian army". “Adolf has been hiding from the military authorities, consequently from the police, for the last 18 months,” Alois told Bridget. “That’s why he came here to me. He had no choice. When he confessed this at the station, he wondered I didn’t welcome him with open arms". “A less interesting or prepossessing house guest I cannot imagine,” wrote Bridget. “At first he remained in his room, sleeping or lying on the sofa he used as a bed most of the time. I had an idea that he was ill, his colour was so bad and his eyes looked so peculiar. I felt rather sorry for him, in spite of what Alois had told me. “Adolf took everything we did for granted and I’m sure would have remained indefinitely if he had had the slightest encouragement. After the first few weeks he would often come and sit in my cosy little kitchen playing with my two-year-old baby, while I was preparing our meals. Adolf was extremely moody and “in this respect he resembled my husband, but then they were always as much alike as two peas in a pod". When Alois had time, he took off to London. Adolf, says Bridget, “was enchanted by Tower Bridge, and they bribed their way into the engine room to see the immense machinery in motion". Alois showed Adolf power plants, dynamos, river cranes and the inside of ships and as soon as Adolf knew his way around Liverpool he began disappearing by himself, not returning until late in the evening. Bridget adds: “He said he was looking for a job, but since he knew only a few words of English and never left early in the morning, it was always my opinion that he just wandered about Liverpool or went to stare at the River Mersey, or perhaps he spent his days in the taverns frequented by Germans.” According to his American family Adolf even paid a visit to Ireland. Bridget believes that it was in her house that Adolf first came into contact with astrology. She had met a Mrs Prentice, who cast horoscopes. “My husband despised the idea,” she writes, “but from the moment Adolf first heard about it he kept after me for more details, though never in Alois’ presence. He asked to have Mrs Prentice do his horoscope again and again". In her memoirs, "My Brother Adolf", Bridget said the future Führer stayed with the family between November 1912 and April 1913. Back in Vienna, Hitler had been on the brink of destitution. By day he worked as a labourer, shovelling snow and beating carpets. At night he flopped down in a men's hostel. Worse was the threat of the draft and, claimed Bridget, he fled his native Austria for Britain to avoid it. Most contemporary historians have come to regard "My Brother Adolf" as a work of fiction and reject its depictions of cosy conversations around the kitchen stove with the future architect of European genocide. Among the claims made by Bridget is that she introduced Hitler to astrology - something which influenced many of the Reich's military strategies. She also claimed to have persuaded him to clip and restyle his handlebar moustache. Hitler originally wore the Kaiser moustache, as evidenced by photographs of him as a soldier during World War I. Experts disagree on the exact year Hitler began wearing the Toothbrush. Ron Rosenbaum, perhaps the only historian to give the mustache its proper due, fixes its appearance with confidence. "It was Chaplin's first, before Hitler's," he writes in an essay from "The Secret Parts of Fortune":
"Chaplin adopted a little black crepe blot beneath the nose for his Mack Sennett silent comedies after 1915, Hitler didn't adopt his until late 1919, and there's no evidence (though some speculation) that Hitler modeled his moustache on that of the actor's". But some suggest Hitler began wearing it earlier. According to a recently re-discovered essay by Alexander Moritz Frey, who served with Hitler in the First World War, Hitler wore the toothbrush moustache in the trenches, after he was ordered to trim his moustache to facilitate the wearing of a gas mask.
In other words, the mustache that defines Hitler was cut in a shape to fit a gas mask. Which is perfect. Because Hitler was the bastard son of the Great War, conceived in the trenches, born in defeat.
Despite the photographic evidence of his much larger moustache during the First World War, Hitler's sister-in-law, Bridget Hitler, said she was responsible for Hitler's toothbrush. Bridget claimed that Adolf spent a "lost winter" at her home in Liverpool in 1912–13. The two quarreled a lot, mostly, she said, because she could not stand his unruly Kaiser moustache. He cut it, as she says in her memoirs, in one of the great inadvertent summaries of historical character, that in doing so, as in most things, he went "too far". Bridget Hitler's story is considered by most scholars to be fiction designed to cash in on her brother-in-law's notoriety.
Apparently he was advised to lose his trademark moustache by Ernst Hanfstängl, in 1923, but is reported to have said: "If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it!"  | This photo was taken by Munich photographer Heinrich Hoffmann at a rally in support of war against Russia in Munich’s Odeonsplatz on 2 August 1914. On 12 March 1932, the day before the election of the Reich president, the "Illustrierter Beobachter" published the picture for the first time, with a magnifying-glass-like enlargement of Hitler's face. The caption read: “In the midst of the crowd stood with shining eyes – Adolf Hitler”. The photo went on to become a favorite Nazi propaganda picture, appearing with captions such as “Adolf Hitler: A man of the People”. It was used countless times in newspapers, propaganda papers, biographies and school books. Hoffmann, who was one of the founders and the main supplier of pictures for the Nazi paper, always claimed he had discovered Hitler in the photo by chance after the future Führer visited his studio in 1929, and told him that he was there during the Declaration of War in 1914. However, many researchers claim Hitler’s photographer Hoffmann manipulated the image in order to feature the soon-to-be-dictator. Research has failed to turn up the original negative of the picture. And intense scrutiny of newsreel footage has failed to spot Hitler among the crowd. Photographs of Hitler taken during the war show him with a large mustache, of the sort that was in fashion at the time. If the photograph is correct, then Hitler, almost alone in Europe, wore a toothbrush mustache in 1914, grew a big mustache during the war, and then went back to a toothbrush style after the war, none of which seems very likely. Since he was in Munich in 1914, and his presence in the crowd is entirely in character, while it is possible he was inserted into the photograph by Nazi propagandists, the most likely explanation is that the picture was retouched to make him more immediately recognizable to Germans in the Thirties. Hitler’s autobiography "Mein Kampf," published in 1925, makes no mention of being in the Odeonsplatz on 2 August but does make reference to the following day, when he petitions the King of Bavaria to allow him, an Austrian, to fight for Germany. Pending definite confirmation, therefore, the photograph is probably best regarded as allegedly, rather than definitely, showing Hitler’s presence in the crowd. |
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The story caused a fuss in the press when Bridget’s memoirs were published in 1979. It caught the attention of many Liverpudlians, including the Beatles. After reading the news in New York, John Lennon stuck a newspaper headline, "Adolf Hitler Arrived in Liverpool in November of 1912 for a five-month visit," on the front of a postcard and sent it to Ringo Starr, who was living in Monte Carlo with his then girlfriend, Nancy Lee Andrews. “Dear Ringo & Nancy,” wrote Lennon, "Thought you’d like to know". Unfortunately, the future Führer’s Scouse sojourn is uncorroborated by any other sources, and historians believe he was safely tucked up in a men’s hostel in Vienna at the time. We can no longer interrogate Bridget about why she made up the story, as she died 10 years before her memoirs were published. But if she was telling the truth, there’s a neat historical irony: the Luftwaffe finished off 102 Upper Stanhope Street in its final bombing raid over Liverpool in January 1942. |
“Years later, when my brother-in-law had become famous, there was much comment on his dealing with an astrologist; it was said he never did anything without first ascertaining the astrological aspects.” As the visit lengthened, relations between the two brothers became more and more strained. Bridget says: “He knew we wanted him to leave – my husband even offered to pay for his room in an hotel – yet he managed to stay on.” In April 1913, Alois bought Adolf a ticket to Germany. There was no alternative. During his Liverpool stay Adolf hadn’t even picked up enough English to ask directions at the station. “As I think back to his departure,” says Bridget, “I see again the pale thin face and haggard eyes of my young brother-in-law, as he hastily kissed me and Alois before he boarded the train. Leaning far out of the window as the train began to pull slowly past the station, he shouted something. I looked at my husband in amazement, for I couldn’t understand why he suddenly turned red in the face and started forward as if he wanted to run after the moving train. “What’s wrong?” I asked. "He meant to threaten me, saying I’d get what was coming to me. But what do I care for the threats of a loafer like him?" “Who could have predicted that this ‘loafer’ would one day hold my husband’s, my own, my son’s life – indeed the life of all Europe – in his hands?” |
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Irish-born Bridget, who reverted to her maiden name, explains in her memoirs how she met Alois in her native Dublin where he was a waiter. She eloped with him to London where they married before settling in Liverpool. On 12 March 1911 their only child, William Patrick, was born in the couple’s three-bedroom flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth. According to the new Mrs Hitler, Alois was ‘volatile’ and a chronic gambler who was ‘always about to make his fortune’. After a big win in 1912 he dreamed of building up his safety-razor business with his sister Angela’s husband so he sent travel money for them both to visit from Vienna. But Adolf took the money and travelled over instead – to his half-brother’s fury as Alois and Adolf never got on. At the time Adolf was practically destitute and working as a part-time labourer in Vienna. His arrival in Liverpool prompted Alois to suspect his half-brother was trying to dodge conscription into the Austrian army. "He’s just a good for nothing," he allegedly told Bridget. According to her, Alois confessed: "Adolf has been hiding from the military authorities, consequently from the police, for the last 18 months. That’s why he came here to me. He had no choice." Adolf Hitler was considered to be little more than an idle loafer by family and friends in the run-up to the First World War, when it is claimed the artist attempted to avoid national service. But he eventually joined the Army in 1914, serving on the Western Front and gaining an Iron Cross for bravery despite not being considered as having leadership potential. |
Bridget wrote that in his five months at their Toxteth home, Hitler was an unprepossessing and lazy guest. "Adolf took everything we did for granted and I’m sure would have remained indefinitely if he had had the slightest encouragement. After the first few weeks he would often come and sit in my cosy little kitchen playing with my two-year-old baby, while I was preparing our meals.’
She said her husband showed Adolf power plants, river cranes and the inside of ships and as soon as her brother-in-law knew his way around Liverpool he began disappearing by himself, not returning until late in the evening. "He said he was looking for a job, but since he knew only a few words of English and never left early in the morning, it was always my opinion that he just wandered about Liverpool".
As the visit lengthened, relations between the two brothers became more and more strained to the point when, in April 1913, Alois allegedly bought his half-brother a ticket to Germany and put him on a train. Adolf set up home in Munich, fought in the First World War and then began his climb up the political ladder by joining the German Workers’ Party, precursor of the Nazis. The documentary, to be shown on BBC North West on Monday, interviews historian Professor Frank McDonough and Unger as they argue over the evidence. Professor McDonough says that rather than idling around Liverpool, there is evidence that Hitler was actually in Vienna during those five month One story that remains to be significant and also challenged is revolved around the idea that Hitler visited Liverpool during 1912 and 1913. There have been numerous claims in relation to this story, with some people suggesting that Hitler lived in Liverpool during this period. Whilst there is significant evidence to suggest that Hitler was present in Liverpool in this period, numerous people have challenged this story with some of the critics stating that the story has been totally fabricated. The suggestion that Hitler was in Liverpool between 1912 and 1913 surfaced after numerous people suggested he lived in Toxteth for several months. It is believed that Hitler lived on Upper Stanhope Street in Toxteth and this has become a popular story for many residents of Liverpool to tell. The street that Hitler did apparently live on has changed considerably since 1912, ironically due to it being bombed by the Germans. The reason for Hitler being in Liverpool is believed to be due to him visiting his half brother Alois and also his Irish wife Bridget. The couple were residents in Liverpool and lived at 102 Stanhope Street. Hitler was the fourth son within a family and his father, Alois, had been married three times. In the second marriage two children were produced, one boy and one girl. The son who is Hitler's elder half brother, was named Alois Junior. The half brother had been imprisoned on two occasions for theft, and after his release he moved to Ireland in 1909. In this area he met Bridget Dowling. The relationship blossomed and they married the following year in London. After the marriage the couple chose to move from Ireland to England and set up home in Liverpool. It is believed that the couple were visited by Hitler in 1912 after he arrived by train, his arrival station was Lime Street Station. After his arrival the individual then spent five months touring the Liverpool docks area, although it was noted that he did not learn any English during this time. It is stated that Hitler then moved to Viennna in 1913. Numerous people have challenged the authenticity of this story, with many people questioning if Hitler even had the brother that some people have suggested. |
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Hitler in Liverpool Much of the interest has stemmed from the publication of a memoir in the 1970's written by Bridget Hitler, the wife of Alois. This was met with the inevitable reporting in England, especially in the Liverpool press. It also influenced local writer Beryl Bainbridge to produce "Young Adolf", a fictionalised story about his visit to Liverpool as told in the Memoir. She followed this in 1981 with a drama commissioned by the BBC called "The Journal of Bridget Hitler", and starring Maurice Roeves, Siobhan McKenna and Julian Glover. Dramatised with Philip Saville, it portrayed the 'pre-war visit' to his half brother's Liverpool home as featured by his Irish sister-in-law in her memoir.
Since then, there have been many corruptions of the story, including a version by a local writer who also featured a fake photograph on his web site of a young Hitler standing in front of the William Brown Street Galleries and Library buildings, just to muddy the waters still further.
The story came to the fore again in 2002, when David Gardner, a former crime writer and senior foreign correspondent on the "Daily Mail" published a book entitled "The Last of the Hitlers". Although it deals primarily with his story of how he traced the last remaining relatives of the Nazi Dictator, he discusses the Liverpool connection, and this was followed by a Channel 5 documentary which consequently reawakened interested in the story. The story itself begins in pre-war Liverpool when young Adolf, still hoping for a career as an artist came to stay at the house of his half brother and his wife in Upper Stanhope Street, in Toxteth, Liverpool. There he stayed for around six months before returning to the men's hostel in Vienna. As the only source for this is Bridget's own memoir, it has inevitably undergone thorough analysis. According to an interview given to the "Daily Express" in the ‘30s, Bridget may have met Alois at a staff dance at the Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dublin. This contrasts with the version she gave in her memoirs where she states she met Alois for the first time at the Dublin Horse Show in 1909. There she said her father and neighbour began talking to a stranger. The young man cut a dashing figure in his smart suit and waxed, turned up handle bar moustache. He introduced himself as Alois Hitler from Austria, and with his “fine foreign manners and his debonair Viennese ways'” he made a great impression on the teenage Bridget. "He fairly won my heart with his sugary talk and foreign ways", she declared.
They agreed to meet and a close friendship soon developed between them. However, Alois had already created suspicion in the family with his fancy talk about being in the “hotel business” and being there on a fact finding trip covering France, Belgium, and the British Isles to study the trade. It wasn't long before they discovered he was actually a waiter at the Shelbourne Hotel, sent there by a London employment agency. Despite this, Bridget was “head over heels in love” and they began to see more of each other.
The Dowlings clearly did not approve of the relationship, especially once they became aware of his true station. Having decided to marry, the couple then eloped to London where they were married at Marylebone Registry Office on 3 June 1910. William Dowling, Bridget's father and a farm labourer from Kilnamanagh, was so incensed he even wanted the police to arrest Alois for kidnapping.
"My father - rest his soul - was a real Irishman", said Bridget. "He would not hear tell of a wedding to a foreigner. Alois and I used to meet every afternoon in the museum and make plans to elope. Four months later when Alois had saved enough money we went to England on the night boat and came to London. I wrote to my mother and said I would not return until we got permission to marry. She talked my father around and he gave his consent".
Bridget was reunited with her father the following year when she presented him with a new grandson. By now the Hitlers had relocated to Upper Stanhope Street in Toxteth, Liverpool, where their baby was born on 12 March 1911. He was christened William Patrick.
Alois found it difficult to settle in Liverpool and changed his source of income four times in their first two years of married life. He ran a restaurant on Dale Street, a boarding house on Upper Parliament Street, and then a hotel in Mount Pleasant. When he became a salesman for a disposable razor firm, he began to have grand ideas about developing his own business in the same field. This, he hoped, would involve his sister Angela and brother-in-law Leo Raubal back in Austria. He then sent them money to cover their travelling expenses in the hope they would come to Liverpool for a visit where he could discuss his ideas further. According to Bridget, "...we were looking forward with pleasure to their visit. When we went to Lime Street Station to meet them I eagerly scanned the couples descending from the 11.30 train, wondering if I would recognise our relatives. Instead of Angela and Leo Raubal, however, a shabby young man approached and offered Alois his hand. It was my husband's younger brother, Adolf, who came in their place".
A row then broke out between the brothers and Bridget left them to it. When they returned to the flat later that evening the tension was gone, and once Adolf had retired to bed Bridget berated her husband for the way he had treated him. What then followed was a diatribe against Adolf and how Alois portrayed himself as the classic mistreated step-child, while all favouritism went to the true off spring of the mother. He described to his young wife his unhappy childhood and the way he was constantly beaten by his father, especially when he came home the worse for wear after yet another night at the local tavern. Despite his uncomfortable memories, Alois was not going to turn his half-brother away and this was to be the beginning of a stay that would keep Adolf in Upper Stanhope Street for almost 6 months, from November 1912 until April 1913. The only source for Adolf's “visit” to Liverpool is contained in Bridget's Memoir. According to Michael Unger, "The existence of Bridget's memoirs has been generally known since the early 1970's when the historian Robert Payne, gathering material for his book 'The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler', read them in the manuscript division of the New York Public Library”.
Payne's discovery, led to a series of articles in the "Liverpool Daily Post" in the early 1970's. The unfinished manuscript, which ends in mid sentence, was published for the first time in 1979, with an introduction and discussion of its authenticity by Unger, then editor of the "Daily Post".
Historians have little time for the memoir, and have been highly critical of its contents feeling there are too many discrepancies [not just with the Liverpool episode] to take seriously. Indeed, Kershaw goes as far as calling the memoir a work of fiction without a grain of truth. And here lies the problem. Until something else appears placing Hitler in Liverpool, the controversy will continue.
The memoir was probably written by Bridget and son William, during 1940-41, perhaps with the help of a ghost writer, as there are noticeable differences in style contained within.
The myth surrounding Hitler's visit was not helped by the novel "Young Adolf" by Beryl Bainbridge. This was a work of fiction where Bainbridge took the idea of Adolf visiting Liverpool, as recounted in the memoir, and developing the idea further. Later it was made into a two part television drama, thus reaching an even wider audience. Although she made it clear at the time that it was a product largely of her own imagination, many observers, especially Liverpudlians, accept the visit as historical fact. Talking to the "Washington Post" in 1979 about non-fiction, Bainbridge said, "I haven't really got the education for that sort of thing. The bit of what I laughingly call research that I did on young Adolf I quite enjoyed. I felt rather educated rushing around looking in libraries... the part of them [the memoirs] that seems the most real is the part about Adolf coming to Liverpool. It's the most understated, whether it’s true or not. There's no proof that he came, but there's no proof that he didn't.” Hitler in England 1912
By Victoria Glendinning
The New York Times
11 March 1979
Beryl Bainbridge is in a situation that most novelists don't even have the luck to know about. "Young Adolf" is her seventh novel; the previous six have been a continuous success story in her own country (though she may still be a minority taste in America). Her novels have all been written in the same highly original tone of voice; they are short, quirky, funny and horrifying, and exploit the memories and fantasies of her own girlhood and youth. The best-filled purses become empty in the end; and even if she had more of this sinister gold to concoct from her very ordinary Liverpool past and her early experiences in love and work, there would be critics who would say: Is this the only kind of thing she can do? And yet, when a novelist in this position suddenly changes tune and tone, there will be confusion among the faithful, who miss the anticipated voice, the expected chills and heats.
That is why it is very hard to be objective about "Young Adolf." The theme of the book, nevertheless, is worthy of her eccentric talent. It has recently been discovered that Hitler most probably spent a few most improbable months in Liverpool in 1912, when he was a vagrant drop-out art student of 23. "Young Adolf" is an imaginative account of the embryonic Führer's life in these months, about which almost nothing is known--except that he came to England to escape conscription and stayed with his half-brother, who was working as a waiter and part-time salesman of razor blades. There is no shortage of fantasy material here; and Miss Bainbridge evokes the background--her own home city before World War I--in effective flashes. The dominating half-brother Alois lives in a seedy boardinghouse with his Irish wife, Bridget, and their baby; their friends are the philosophical, fiddle-playing landlord, Mr. Meyer, a sadistic doctor and hairy Mary O'Leary, who is really a Russian. They are all poor, and cold, and are themselves feeding on fantasies of different kinds to keep them going. The arrival of young Adolf is welcomed by no one. So far so good; but it is by the characterization of Adolf that the book must be judged. Even at this early stage in his life, Miss Bainbridge gives him those traits that historians have ascribed to him: inability to establish ordinary friendships, intolerance and hatred of non-Germans, a tendency to live in a fantasy world and to erupt into passionate outbursts. Her young Adolf spends whole days asleep on the sofa, avoiding action. He is psychotically paranoid, convinced that perfect strangers are pursuing him. He is abjectly anxious to be liked, while doing nothing to endear himself to anyone. Mr. Meyer is indulgent, explaining Adolf's state of mind by saying he has "an artist's temperament" and that he is "poisoned--one might say opulently swollen--by creative urges that have no outlet." Adolf confesses that all the "grub years" of his youth have been a dreary waiting for some metamorphosis, glimpsed once in an ecstatic epiphany after hearing Wagner's "Rienzi." Thus the clues are laid to the familiar mythology. Adolf is without a change of clothing; Bridget makes him a shirt from some old material found in the cellar, and he is delighted--it happens to be a brown shirt. He makes one statutory racial outburst to Mr. Meyer--a Jew--about "impure blood" and the rotten core of Europe, an amplification of his personal view that life had been rotten to him, and that his loved mother had "died rotten of a cancer." Even his well-known physical appearance is accounted for: He combs his hair over one side of his forehead to hide a cut on his brow; and he resolves to grow a mustache so as never to be taken for a woman again. (He has to put on a skirt at one point to evade the police--and is horrified to be groped in the half- dark by Mr. Meyer, who mistakes him for Bridget.) As this last incident would indicate, there are happenings in the book of an episodic and cinematic kind, but they seem more like punctuation than plot, and are the occasion for further signposting. For example, after a night raid by the authorities to remove the "excess" children of destitute families, Mr. Meyer explains bitterly to Adolf, "Let the minority act with enough authority, and the majority will walk like lambs to the slaughter". Beryl Bainbridge cannot write badly; and her dialogue--for example, the desultory, depressed chat between Bridget and Mary O'Leary--always shows her faultless ear and talent for understated comedy. In all her books, her women and girls are stronger, funnier, more definite than the men; this, given the scope and subject matter of her earlier novels, has been nothing but an asset. Young Adolf is as elusive and as tiresome as any of her male characters. But the "x" factor--which made his future so different from that of millions of neurotic, destitute, unhappy, frustrated young layabouts with vague and grandiose aspirations--is a mystery that her jeu d'esprit leaves unsolved. Naturally, because it is insoluble, and no part of her brief. For the curtain has not yet risen; it was the Munich to which Adolf returned that was to provide the culture for the bacteria to grow in. Seeing him off at the station, Mr. Meyer says: "Such a strong-willed young man. It is a pity he will never amount to anything". It is on this irony that the novel gallantly hangs.
Victoria Glendinning is a critic of contemporary fiction and author of a biography of Elizabeth Bowen. |
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Years later in the Foreword to Gardner's "Last of the Hitlers", her view of the memoir was undimmed, "...what rings true, by reason of its mundane content, its very naivety of expression, is her account of Adolf's arrival in Liverpool". This encapsulates the view of many of those who feel this section of the memoir has credibility, its very matter of factness, not dressed up for effect, in fact, quite the opposite. The ordinariness of it is quite stark. Young Adolf playing her child in the kitchen, while chatting about the future of Germany - "...he would never hesitate to interrupt my housework to explain how Germany was going to take its rightful position in the world. First would come France, then England. I didn't find this talk very interesting, but whenever I tried to get away he would begin to shout, although I rarely troubled to contradict him. He would whip himself up into a rage and go on until hoarseness or some interruption stopped him. I put it down partly to the pleasure he took in hearing his own voice - another trick he had in common with my husband - and partly to a desire to domineer me".
A few paragraph later, she says "... During his Liverpool stay Adolf hadn't even picked up enough English to ask directions to the station". This topic of conversation seems quite bizarre, given the fact he was an Austrian and there in Liverpool, according to Bridget, to dodge the draft into the Austrian army. Until one remembers that the memoir was written c.1941 with a complete awareness of Hitler's true intention by then. Maybe it was quite simple and appealing to look back to her little flat in Toxteth and recount where Adolf Hitler first had the idea for world domination. That should sell a few books on the lecture circuit. At the time the memoir was written, it was common knowledge that there was a "lost year" in Hitler's life. Hitler had never alluded to it - it wasn't in "Mein Kampf" or any other of his writings. Hitler had conveniently glossed over the period, or rewritten it, to provide a more acceptable version for a public figure he now was. His failure to enter the Academy, living rough, the doss houses, and draft dodging, was a phase he felt was not for public consumption. Bridget and William may have been only too ready to fill the “missing months” with an alternative story. Those close to him say apart from brief trips to Italy and Paris, he had made no visit to any other country, although this is still not conclusive enough.
Kershaw and Waite both point to the fact that there are no records in Germany or Austria that point to a visit abroad, while they do place him in Vienna at the time he was supposed to be in Liverpool. The blue half were not to be left out. While researching his book "The Last of the Hitlers", David Gardner was called by his business partner who had just received a letter from someone he described as a “complete whacko”, "some guy says Hitler lived next door to him in Liverpool and they used to go together to watch Everton at Goodison Park. It goes on and on about how he converted Adolf from liking Liverpool when he first came to Britain". A letter written by the ghost of Shankly no doubt. The rest of the memoir continues about how Alois left the family home for Germany in May 1914, never to return, and subsequent events of the 1920's and 30's. Alois remarried bigamously in 1916, for which he was charged by the German authorities in 1923, while Bridget and William moved to live in London in 1924. William renewed contact with his father when he visited him in Germany in 1929 and 1930, before returning there in 1993 to try to take advantage of his relationship with his uncle, the new Führer. The dream of a high powered, well paid position did not materialize. It would appear that he was more of a thorn in the side to his uncle who was "related to state" only, and who tried to erase his family details and their potential embarrassing revelations from all public knowledge.
By 1938, following a summons to Hitler, William was given an ultimatum to give up his British nationality and commit himself to the Nazi cause. William declined and made a clandestine exit from the country, now fearful of his own safety. Months later in March 1939 he arrived in New York with Bridget, ready to tour the country giving lectures on the subject of "My Uncle Adolf", the visit being organised between a theatrical agents in London and New York. William was now sufficiently at home in his adoptive country that he decide to enlist in American Forces to fight for the allies against Uncle Adolf. Whatever his motives, and the FBI and the OSS were keeping a watchful eye on his every move, he was eventually accepted and signed up to the US Navy. In surreal circumstances, as he gave his name to the recruiting officer, he was met with the reply "Glad to see you Hitler - my name is Hess!" Except in this case it was Gale K Hess of Chicago. After training he was sent to the Medical Corps and saw action before being honourably discharged in 1946.
Nothing further is heard of William or Bridget Hitler again, although John Toland indicated knowledge of them still living in the New York area in the 1970's when carrying out research for his Hitler biography. He has steadfastly refused to divulge anything further aver since. The trail was picked up by British Journalist David Gardner, formerly of the "Daily Mail", who spent most of the 1990's trying to find out what happened to William, especially as there was suggestion that the Hitler name was still alive and well in America. After much research he discovered their final resting place, "He died in 1987, 18 years after his mother, in the anonymity he craved for much of his life. His family even considered leaving the grave unmarked, but decided instead to bury him under the false name that had brought him peace".
In light of the fate of his uncle and everything the Nazi regime stood for, William felt it advisable to melt away into the background, change his name and live in obscurity, in contrast to the very public life he had enjoyed on his lecture tour. Clearly, the worry of retribution towards anyone bearing the name could not be ignored. Nevertheless, Gardner discovered William had made a success of his American life. He married a German girl he had met during his time working in Germany during the 1930's and together they appeared to be the model family, four all American boys, while he worked in the medical field. Later he set up a blood analysis laboratory in the home they moved to in the countryside to avoid prying eyes.
Neighbours spoke about them as a pleasant family, well respected in the community. There were four sons, Alexander [1949], Louis [1951], Howard [1957] and Brian [1965]. Howard was killed in a car crash in 1989, but the three remaining brothers are still living, bearing a double barrel name that gives no hint of their roots. Gardner has refused to disclose their adoptive name and where they live, although it has been uncomfortably easy for this author to discover it through other channels. None of the sons are married and it seems that the Hitler name may now finally die.
It seems strange that there is still this impression of the scouse Hitler being the black sheep of the family given Uncle Adolf's track record. The fact that his family have led a relatively normal life in America in the face of their family history is some achievement.
The family understandably refused to co-operate fully with Gardner nor with the Channel 5 film company. He persisted in trying to shed light on Bridget's memoirs. William's wife Phyllis told Gardner, "it's all made up," while "Alex said, "We read it and it was the funniest thing I ever saw in my life".
However, on a later visit when pressed further, Alex went so far as to say it was all true and not only did Adolf visit Liverpool but he visited Ireland too, furthermore, the remaining manuscript was actually completed and the library only had the first half. These were further contradictions in William Patrick Hitler's life. Not only did he give his first son the middle name of Adolf, but the adopted name he was to use for the rest of his life was the same double barrel name of one of the most notorious anti-semitic historians of the far right. A family of many contradictions, and a branch that has created the myth of Hitler in Liverpool. Consequently, however unlikely the story is, it seems we may never get to the truth. A little known fact about Adolf Hitler "In my book, 'The Ghosts of KG40' I had one of my characters say that Adolf Hitler was thought to have attended the art school in Liverpool sometime around 1912. When I attended the art school, [it was called Liverpool College of Art by then] there were still rumours that Hitler had at one time attended.
According to our sources, the story that Adolf Hitler went to Liverpool to study art is not true, There are no independent confirmation of the story. - "Guardian", UK
15 April 2012 |
"I have in my posession, a copy of the birth certificate of William Patrick Hitler who lived in Upper Stanhope St, Liverpool. showing he was born to Alois and Bridget Hitler. Alois was the half brother of Adolf. "Is it too much to surmise that Adolf came to Liverpool to see his brother, and his new nephew, and Bridget?" -- Les Lunt is the best selling author of "Logan's Touch", "The Ghosts of KG40", "Unintended Consequences" and his latest novel, "A Hurricanes Tale". |
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Was Hitler a "British Agent?
by: Henry Makow Greg Hallett's book "Hitler Was A British Agent" depicts war as a ghoulish illusion conjured by occult magicians in order to degrade and eventually enslave humanity in world government. Hallett's claim that Hitler was a "British" agent is based on the testimony of a shadowy network of retired intelligence agents. While he fails to provide documentary proof, Hallett does offer persuasive circumstantial evidence.
For example, Adolf Hitler was in England in 1912-1913, a fact supported by his sister-in-law's book: "The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler" [1979]. Many historians including Hitler biographer John Toland have ignored this startling information. [If Hallett is right, historians like Toland are guilty of sanitizing Hitler and actually making him more credible than he was].
Adolf Hitler had been accustomed to a comparatively easy life, but when his mother died of cancer in 1907, he took his sister Paula to Vienna, along with his most cherished possession, a photograph of Klara [his mother and second cousin]. “His existence had now become a pitiless struggle against poverty and he swept streets in order to buy food for himself and his sister".
From 1908 to 1921 Adolf never saw his younger sister Paula. He became an art student in Vienna but failed miserably. “At the end of 1910 and the beginning of 1911 Hitler appears to have received a considerable sum of money from his aunt, Johanna Pölzl. He drifted aimlessly [yet] still pretended that he was a student painter, or writer.”
The money ran out, and he slept on park benches and in doorways, ate in soup kitchens, and stayed in the Asyl für Obdachlose shelter for men until 1910, where he developed an appetite for change. Formerly of the snobbish middle class, he was now a tramp.
Two years and four months later, on 24 May 1913, Hitler left Vienna and moved to Munich. The most authoritative book on Hitler has no knowledge of Hitler’s activities during the two years and four months from January 1911 to 24 May 1913. |
Hallett says Hitler spent February to November 1912 being brainwashed and trained at the British Military Psych-Ops War School at Tavistock in Devon and in Ireland. "War machines need war and [that means they need] funded, trained and supported double agents to be their patsies, their puppets and their puppet enemies," Hallett writes . His sister-in-law describes Hitler as completely wasted when he arrived at their home baggageless. "I had an idea he was ill, his colour was so bad and his eyes looked so peculiar," she wrote. "He was always reading, not books, little pamphlets printed in German. I don't know what was in them nor exactly where they came from." Hallett says these were Tavistock training manuals. "Hitler was a British Agent" is useful as an alternative paradigm. [Usually we cannot recognize truth because we have the wrong paradigm, i.e. our "education"]. When Hallett says "British", he means Illuminati, the Masonic cult of super rich bankers who control an interlocking network of megacartels. This cult is based in the City of London but uses England and most nations and ideologies, as sock puppets in a the Punch and Judy show called modern history. Hallett's claim would clarify many improbable events in the Second World War. For example, why did Hitler let 335,000 Allied soldiers escape at Dunkirk? This quixotic gesture was explained as a peace overture, but surely England would have been more attentive if its army were in Nazi POW camps. The Nazi triumph in February 1940 was like a knock-out in the first round. The Illuminati did not intend for the match to end so soon, nor for the Nazis to win. In the summer of 1940, when the Nazis was triumphant and Britain prostrate, Nazi Military Intelligence Chief [Abwehr] Admiral Wilhelm Canaris told Romanian Foreign Minister Prince Michael Sturdza to stay neutral because England would win the war. He also gave this message to Spanish dictator Franco. Hallett's theory also explains why Hitler, supposedly the arch enemy of Jewish bankers, acted like he didn't know the Rothschilds controlled England [and America] when this was practically common knowledge. If Hitler were for real, he wouldn't have tried to accommodate these countries. England would have been invaded and conquered before Russia was attacked. Hallett's hypothesis explains
1) Why Hitler was able to expand into the Rhineland etc. without fear of retaliation.
2) Why the Nazi war machine was financed and built by the Bank of England and a Who's Who of Anglo American corporations controlled by the Illuminati.
3) Why Hitler never sealed the Mediterranean at Gibraltar; and why the Spanish dictator Franco remained neutral, despite the huge debt he owed the Nazis from the Civil War.
4) Why I.G. Farben headquarters in Frankfurt was never bombed. This became CIA headquarters. It would explain why Hitler gave his ridiculous racial policies priority over actually winning the war. He could have enlisted millions of Slavs [and even many Jews] in overcoming Communist Russia. Instead, he made them implacable enemies willing to fight to the death.
We could question why Japan attacked the U.S. instead of Russia; why the Nazis never figured out that their communications were compromised; why Hitler didn't conquer the oil fields of Russia and the Middle East when he had the chance etc. but you get the picture. The fix was in.
History books acknowledge Hitler’s invasion of Russia in the winter and letting 335,000 Allied soldiers escape at Dunkirk were blunders that probably cost him the war, but Léon Poliakov, in his "Breviaire de la haine" emphasized other absurd contradictions. After Stalingrad, the Allies were destroying his war production centres and he was forced into emptying his factories to mobilize new soldiers. How could he have been fatally obsessed with the will to exterminate the Jews, instead of using them, even in inhuman conditions, in his factories? Hannah Arendt calls it insane and Bevin Alexander in "How Hitler Could Have Won World War II: The Fatal Errors That Led To Nazi Defeat" writes: "The Nazis turned straightforwardly useless into the harmful when, right in the middle of the war, despite the penury of building materials and of rolling stock, they erected huge and costly extermination factories and organized the transport of millions of people...the manifest contradiction between this behavior and military imperatives gives the entire undertaking a mad, chimerical air".. With the chance to cut off the Soviet lifeline of oil, and therefore any hope of Allied victory from the east, why did Hitler insist on dividing and weakening his army, which ultimately led to the horrible battle of Stalingrad? With the opportunity to drive the British out of Egypt and occupy all of the Middle East, opening a Nazi door to the vast oil resources of the region, why did Hitler fail to move in just a few Panzer divisions to handle such an easy but crucial maneuver? |
Who was Hitler? The biggest improbability of all is that an Austrian tramp and street cleaner could become the Chancellor of Germany. Hitler joins a long list of obscure blackmailable figures who have been catapulted to world prominence with the aid of an unseen hand. Hallett writes that Hitler's grandfather was Nathan Meyer Rothschild. Maria Schickelgruber, Hitler's grandmother, was a maid in the Rothschild's Vienna mansion when his father, Alois was conceived "in fear" in a satanic ritual rape. The Rothschilds could only marry within their extended family so they had illegitimate children who functioned as anonymous agents. (Apparently this is a pattern with the Illuminati. Bill Clinton is rumored to be a Rockefeller). His grandmother received child support from a Jewish businessman who was probably an intermediary for his grandfather. Bridget Hitler quotes Hitler's sister Paula: "Since [Adolf] started the race laws we have no grandfather, Adolf and I. Certainly anyone who wished could make a good deal out of that". ["Memoirs"] Rothschild's son, Alois Hitler's third marriage was to his niece, Klara, who became Hitler's mother. His father was abusive and his mother over-compensated. Hitler became destitute at age 18 when his mother died, and he lived in a Vienna men's hostel that was a haunt for homosexuals. In 1912, Hitler traveled to England for training as an Illuminati agent which took place in German. This "training" ranged from imbibing a sense of his role in Germany's destiny to learning how to mesmerize audiences. It also included trauma brainwashing. The "alter's" consciousness is shattered by witnessing savage atrocities and suffering sexual abuse, all of which is filmed. Then the various fragments of consciousness are programmed and can be accessed with special code words. [Read Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler for a detailed description of Illuminati mind control techniques] Hitler returned to Germany in May 1913 and enlisted in the German army. During World War One, he served as a runner and was captured twice by the English. On both occasions, he was spared execution by an "angel" in British intelligence. Implications History is unfolding according to the Illuminati's long-term plan. Wars are plotted decades in advance and orchestrated to achieve the destruction of nations and natural elites, depopulation, demoralization, and of course power and profit. The super rich have organized themselves into a satanic cult to prey on mankind and to establish their permanent hegemony. Put yourself in the central bankers' shoes. The nations of the world owe you trillions based on money you printed for the cost of paper and ink. The only way to protect this "investment" is to establish a thinly disguised dictatorship, using sophisticated methods of social and mind control. This is the true meaning of the "War on Terror". It's not directed at "Muslim terrorists". It's directed at you and me. According to Hallett, Josef Stalin was another Illuminati "agent of war" who attended the Tavistock Psyche Ops training school in 1907. Clifford Shack has suggested that Stalin was also an illegitimate offspring of a Rothschild. Hallett says Hitler's death was faked [a double was killed] and Hitler escaped to Barcelona where he lived until 1950, when he died of stomach cancer. Greg Hallett is a maverick and his rambling book is full of repetition and digressions. I wouldn't swear by any of Hallett's claims as yet. But he deserves our thanks for advancing an alternative view of history that while far-fetched is more plausible than what supposedly transpired. We should be able to entertain speculative views without feeling compelled to accept or reject them. World War Two achieved all of the Illuminati's goals. Europe and particularly Germany was turned into a wasteland. So was Japan. Sixty million people were slaughtered. The Jewish holocaust motivated Jews to establish the Rothschild's world government headquarters in Israel. Idealists and natural leaders on both sides were slaughtered. Nations were laden with debt. The United Nations rose like a phoenix from the ashes. Hiroshima cast a pall of terror over the world. The stage was set for the next act...the Cold War. Given the bleak outlook for humanity, there is a tendency to actually idealize Hitler as an opponent of central banker hegemony. I fell into this trap myself. Hallett's book is a useful reminder that like Stalin and Mao, Hitler was a monster; and the Illuminati sponsor "enemies" in order to foment conflict, and keep humanity in its thrall. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Henry Makow, Ph.D. is the inventor of the board game Scruples and author of "A Long Way to go for a Date."
Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.
Hitler, England and the Invasion of Russia
By Nicolas Bonnal
October 15 2012 A few years ago, famous conservative and pacifist American writer Pat Buchanan wrote a book about Churchill and the unnecessary war. For him Britain hadn't to declare twice war to Germany and Hitler, for the latter was merely a friend of England, an admirer and protector of the British Empire and Nordic protectorates around the world. So why slap such a lovely friend? There is a bar in Liverpool, full of unconscious tourists, where Hitler is said to have come before the war. I thought it was a joke but as jokes in our gossip-run world currently become reality shows, then reality... In the present conspiracy agenda, there is too the credo that Hitler was somewhat a British spy or agent during his youth! Anyway one of his most famous and platonic lovers was British beauty and aristocrat Unity Mitford. As we say in French, there is no smoke without fire. And Hitler's attitude towards England remains preposterous seventy years after the most atrocious war in history. I already mentioned the admiration of the tyrant towards England and America; he praises both empires and the Nordic countries of Europe; he despises reasonably Latinity, despite his Italian alliance, he hates France, he wants to destroy Russia [a great nation, though, he writes somewhere!] to rob her land and enslave her people, but he adores England and America, who have conquered so much land and submitted so many inferior people [(he compared once his mission in Russia to the English one in India]. The fact that Hess was from Egypt, Rosenberg from Baltic area, Baldur from USA, must not be underestimated. The Pangermanist Agenda was not even German: it was promoted by Germans of the outer, and we must remind that in 1900 Germans represented 10% of world population [2% today!] with no serious colony at all, no "country" of their own. Also, Hitler's minister of agriculture Walter Darré, born in Argentina, wanted to create a new race of landlords, physically similar to the eighteenth century English gentry, for his inferiority complex towards England was even physical. Then Germany had to conquer land to copy her glorious models.
Writes the future Dictator in jail: "When the territory of the Reich embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come". Freud spoke about Nazism of a "return to a barbaric prehistory". This formula is not even polemical: sometimes one can talk of Nazis without insulting them! Hitler has a prehistoric point of view about food, land, and space. He believed he lives in the times of Pharaoh, Arminius or Tamerlan. He believed Germany is starving, literally, and that she needs land to feed her people; there even is a poetic dream about growing oranges in poor Crimea. The mediocre Nazi goal is to re-create a civilization of ill-equipped peasants! This time it is Eisenstein who understands him very well in his masterwork "Alexander Nevski", in which he shows his understanding of the dictator's madness, exposed in these epic lines: "If new territory were to be acquired in Europe it must have been mainly at Russia's cost, and once again the new German Empire should have set out on its march along the same road as was formerly trodden by the Teutonic Knights, this time to acquire soil for the German plough by means of the German sword and thus provide the nation with its daily bread". Hitler is so fond of England that he even reproaches to the Reich his proud international policy of the beginning of the century. Germany must renounce her Weltpolitik! To seduce England, Germany must abandon trade, industry, fleet, colonial dreams, shipping, everything. "Colonial and naval ambitions should have been abandoned and attempts should not have been made to compete against British industries... Such a policy would have demanded a renunciation of the endeavour to conquer the world's markets, also a renunciation of colonial intentions and naval power. All the means of power at the disposal of the State should have been concentrated in the military forces on land". We can understand then why Hitler is so sweet during the war with England. In his attempt to destroy Eastern Europe, he wants to spare as much as possible his fabulous model turned into his worst enemy. He lets courteously British troops leave at Dunkirk, he never understands the strategic importance of the Mediterranean, he delivers no troops to Rommel, he is unable to devise an air force against England or a conquest of this land, yet he persists in his absurd secret weapons which are the best anecdote of Churchill in his memories: the British PM wonders how much talent, money and time Germany has lost with these fantastic yet inefficient weapons! In every sense he wants to lose the war, since he doesn't want to destroy the hypnotic and mimetic British Empire. Last but not least, Hitler accepts the unthinkable, like our historians today: England did not declare war to the Communist Colossus after his occupation of Poland! He should have known that English main agenda since Disraeli's confession and 1870 [French-Prussian war] is the destruction of Germany.
British Isles are not famous for their philosophers. Yet Hitler took from a British racial thinker the most barbarian theory to justify his cause of enslaving and depopulating Russia and Ukraine. I remind that American racists, even the hardliners [Stoddard or Grant], accepted the three white races, recognizing their merits, and that they didn't share the foolish view of English writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain about the inferiority of Slavic people. The lunatic view of Kaiser Wilhelm's ex-friend comes in these terms in his "Foundations of the Twentieth Century": "Of the genuine Slav there is less to be said, since we are at a loss where to look for him, and are sure of only one thing, that in his case there has been a transformation of the type...In the wide districts of Eastern Europe we must also presuppose a special, probably Mongoloid race, to account for the specific deformation which so rapidly transforms the majority of the Germanic Slavs into inferior "Slavonics". The "great thinker" cannot explain scientifically how Slavs become Slavonic then Mongoloids. Of course this original view justifies genocide. And when Belgian fascist Degrelle gets with his troops to Kiev and Ukraine, he merely discovers "beautiful and fair people", not Tartars or Mongols, while other scientific observers assert that Ukrainian women are more resistant and healthy than the Germans! There was so no need "to extirpate Asiatic influence on European cultural life". But the nihilistic mania of the philosopher, born in a famous family (Neville Chamberlain justified and supported before Munich the German views regarding the Sudetens) was on everybody's mind in Germany. And, as remarked American scholar Stoddard who travelled to gloomy Germany during the beginning of WW2, the national-imperialists presently seized upon race teachings, and prostituted them to their own ends. A notable example of this is the extreme Pan-German propaganda of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his fellows...To any one who understands the scientific realities of race, the monstrous absurdity of these assumptions is instantly apparent. To let Teuton propaganda gull us into thinking of Germany as the Nordic fatherland is both a danger and an absurdity. The danger came later: the second Peloponnesian war [to put it in Stoddard's words] and the destruction of land and people in a good prehistoric way: massacres, starving and slavery. Hitler's anti-Semitism was criminal but common; yet Hitler's racism was both criminal and heretical. The Führer should have read better Madison Grant: As in all wars since Roman times, from a breeding point of view, the little dark man is the final winner. And his racism killed sixty million whites. May we say that the worst racism in history has clearly been applied against the whites? By the end of the war anyway, the pure-bred SS assaulting Russia were a multiracial army of lost rascals from thirty nations! Here we touch on the most important question of the last century: the German-led wars against Russia. Bismarck wanted to be friendly with Russia, like Prussians prior the creation of the Third Reich. After WW1, Weimar and Bolshevists were quite friendly, and of course Stalin preferred a cold alliance to a hot war with Hitler, letting him destroy bourgeois democracies of the west. In Russia, since the Pacific colonial episode launched by Tsarina Katherine, there had been rather good relations between communities, even when Russian and Ukrainian writers mock the slow German (we did the same in France until the Blitzkrieg!). And suddenly, with the demographic and industrial growth of Germany, the feudal and prehistoric complex comes back, served by Hitler's insanity, of course, but also by the greed of landlords and Junkers like infamous yet prestigious General von Manstein who wanted his piece of land in Crimea, where his troops committed innumerable crimes. "Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany..." - Heinrich Himmler Everybody knows Marx's sentence about the comical repetition of history. Hitler repeated basically Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm's mistakes except that with Nazism the repetition was not comical but more tragic. Basically, Hitler's story is that of the guy who chooses the wrong model and tries to murder a good friend. And stupidly, he repeated the Kaiser's mistakes and crimes. A great mind had predicted that burst of madness and the way to prevent it. "But Germans want strangling all the same. Though they are so good at science and learning they must be strangled". - "Brothers Karamazov"
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 | The New Adventures of Hitler was a highly controversial comic book series written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Steve Yeowell which first appeared in "Cut," a Scottish arts magazine in 1989 before being reprinted in "Crisis" in 1990
"The New Adventures of Hitler" was a satirical and surreal strip based upon the idea that Adolf Hitler had relatives in Liverpool and he actually spent time living with them when he was a young man. It first appeared in "Cut", a Scottish arts and culture magazine and became instantly controversial as many interpreted Morrison to be a Nazi due to his use of Hitler in what was essentially a humourous story. The resulting controversy saw Pat Kane, the lead singer of the band 'Hue and Cry', threaten to walk off the magazine (Kane was one of the magazines editors) and indulge in a public war of words with Morrison over his intentions with the strip. The debate widened to cover freedom of speech issues and became a nationwide news story when the tabloid newspaper "The Sun" got hold of the story. "The New Adventures of Hitler" completed its run in "Cut" but the controversy continued when the story was reprinted in "Crisis" in 1990. "Crisis" was a spin off from "2000 AD" which printed more adult oriented work and "The New Adventures of Hitler" fitted in with the themes of the magazine. However the controversy which had surrounded the story in "Cut" continued with the strips reprinting in "Crisis". Morrison and Crisis publishers IPC were criticized for using Hitler and were accused of being Nazis. The story ran from "Crisis" in issues 46-49 and a proposed collected edition by IPC never appeared. Morrison himself had planned to self-publish the story but as of 2006 the strip remains unavailable in a collected edition.
To his relatives and the people Hitler meets on a day to day basis, he's a sullen and rather unpleasant young man who refuses to engage with the outside world, preferring to live in one of his own. That's probably documented fact. What Morrison and Yeowell do, however, is to show you what that world looks like to Adolf, with suitably satiric overstatement.
He doesn’t speak the language, he has delusions, he meets John Bull and gets a lesson in tabloid Britishness, a crash course in the sense of innate superiority that builds an empire. He meets a spiritualist and changes his moustache from Classic Prussian to Toothbrush. The story leads to Morrison's bleak conclusion: that the seeds of Hitler's philosophy were sown during his year in England. John Bull points out to Hitler that he could learn a lot from British history. "Believe me, there's not much you can tell the English about tyrannising. We've got the Empire to prove it." The thesis, then, is that Hitler learnt to be a tyrant from the English. And, like the oft-repeated factoid that concentration camps were developed in the British Empire during the Boer War, there’s probably something in it. But it’s a thesis only glancingly developed; Hitler already seems to have his ambitions and even his methods in place before his revelation, and any other lessons learned come direct from a John Bull invisible to others. |
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| Hitler the Scouser
by Robert Collins in News Reports
1 October 2012 Have you ever wondered what kind of burden being the offspring of a famous individual must be? The British tabloids take great delight in the nefarious exploits of those who find the overbearing weight of parental success too much to handle.
Drug and alcohol abuse, with the odd prison sentence thrown in for good measure, are recurring themes in the lives of the progeny of many ‘A’ list celebrities, but if living in the shadow of a famous relative is enough to derail a normal life, what must it be like to have an infamous one? True Scouser
Spare a thought for William Patrick Stuart-Houston, a true Scouser if ever there was one. His uncle was Adolf Hitler.
The Führer’s links with Liverpool have been the subject of much conjecture over the years with some, including Hitler’s sister-in-law, claiming he spent five months in the city between November 1912 and April 1913 in an attempt to avoid national service with the Austrian army.
What’s not in question, however, is the fact that Hitler’s older half-brother, Alois Hitler, was living in Liverpool at the time with his Irish wife of two years, Bridget Dowling, and had started a family there.
William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool on 12 March 1911. After World War II he had the good sense to change his surname to Stuart-Houston.
It must be stressed, however, that unlike his own half-brother, the German-born Heinz Hitler, William Patrick – or Paddy Hitler as he was known in Liverpudlian circles – was no jack-booted, card-carrying member of the Nazi party. On the contrary, he served in the US Navy in World War II and was wounded in the process. In fact, many believe that a brief visit he made to Germany in 1938 was in the role of British agent. Brother Heinrich ‘Heinz’ Hitler, on the other hand, became a committed Nazi and was eventually tortured to death in Soviet captivity.
Adolf’s visit
Rumours of the pre-World War I visit to Liverpool by Uncle Adolf gained credence in the 1930s when William Hitler’s mother, Bridget, wrote "My Brother-in-Law Adolf". In it she claimed the Nazi leader spent five months living with her, Alois and their baby son at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth, ironically an area of Liverpool which was later to achieve notoriety for its own brand of racial violence. It was also ironic that 102 Upper Stanhope Street was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in the last German air raid of the Liverpool Blitz in 1942.
An erstwhile colleague of mine on the "Liverpool Daily Post", Mike Unger, adds his weight to the argument in his book, "The Hitlers of Liverpool", claiming that Adolf was practically destitute at the time and had been working as a part-time labourer in Vienna.
Unger claims Adolf’s arrival in Liverpool prompted Alois to suspect his half-brother was trying to dodge conscription into the Austrian army. “He’s just a good for nothing," he is said to have told Bridget. “Adolf has been hiding from the military authorities, consequently from the police, for the last 18 months. That’s why he came here to me. He had no choice".
Lazy guest
Bridget claimed Adolf Hitler was an unprepossessing and lazy guest. “Adolf took everything we did for granted and I’m sure would have remained indefinitely if he had had the slightest encouragement. After the first few weeks he would often come and sit in my cosy little kitchen playing with my two-year-old baby, while I was preparing our meals.”
Alois is said to have shown Adolf power plants, river cranes and the inside of ships during his five-month stay. As soon as Adolf knew his way around Liverpool he began disappearing by himself, not returning until late in the evening. Bridget added: “He said he was looking for a job, but since he knew only a few words of English and never left early in the morning, it was always my opinion that he just wandered about Liverpool.”
Adolf clearly outstayed his welcome and relations between the two brothers deteriorated to the point where Alois reportedly bought his half-brother a ticket to Germany and put him on a train. One might think that the war of 1914-18 would effectively sever the already strained links between the Hitler brothers, but nephew William rekindled family ties when he went to Germany in 1929 and again in 1933 in an attempt to benefit from his uncle’s rise to power. Adolf Hitler found him a job in a bank, but after working in an Opel car factory and later as a car salesman, William tried to blackmail the Nazi leader in an attempt to get a better job.
Adolf Hitler eventually asked William to relinquish his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job. Expecting a trap, William again tried to blackmail his uncle by threatening to tell the press that Hitler’s alleged paternal grandfather was actually a Jewish merchant and, returning to London in 1939 with the help of a British agent, he wrote an article for "Look" magazine titled "Why I Hate my Uncle". Lecture tour
Months later, the original Citizen Kane, the publisher William Randolph Hearst, invited William and his mother to undertake a lecture tour of the United States where they were stranded when World War II broke out. After making a special request to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, William was cleared to join the US Navy in 1944, and moved to Sunnyside in the New York borough of Queens.
The rest of William’s life was relatively uneventful up to his death at the age of 76 in 1987. After leaving the Navy, he changed his last name to Stuart-Houston, married, and moved to Patchogue, Long Island, where he and his wife ran a laboratory analysing blood samples for hospitals. They had four sons – Alexander Adolf [1949], Louis [1951], Howard Ronald [1957] and Brian William [1965]. Car crash
Brian William died in 1987 and Howard Ronald Stuart-Houston, a Special Agent with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service, died in a car crash in 1989. None of the brothers had children and in response to mounting speculation, Alexander, now a social worker, has said that he knows of no sort of pact to intentionally end the Hitler bloodline.
Nevertheless, end it probably will with Adolf Hitler’s two last remaining great-nephews. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Although Scouser William Patrick Hitler seems to have borne the weight of family notoriety well, perhaps the burden of carrying the DNA of the 20th Century’s most evil tyrant is just too much for one individual to bear.
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