Adolf Hitler
Childhood Of Celebrities : Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was born 20 April 1889, at Braunau am Inn, Austria, the third son and fourth child of six. His father, Alois Hitler, (1837–1903), was a customs official. His mother, Klara Pölzl, (1860–1907), Alois’s second cousin, was his father’s third wife. Because of the kinship of the two, a papal dispensation had to be obtained for the marriage, both being Roman Catholic. Of Alois and Klara’s six children, only Adolf and his sister Paula reached adulthood. Hitler’s father also had a son, Alois Jr, and a daughter, Angela, by his second wife. There were no children by his first wife.
Alois Hitler was born illegitimate. For the first 39 years of his life he bore his mother’s surname, Schicklgruber. In 1876, he began using the surname of his stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler, after visiting a priest who was responsible for birth registries who had Johann Hiedler declared to be his father. The name was variously spelled Hiedler, Huetler, Huettler and Hitler and probably changed to “Hitler” by a clerk. The origin of the name is either from the German word Hittler and similar, “one who lives in a hut”, “shepherd”, or from the Slavic word Hidlar and Hidlarcek.
Allied propaganda exploited the Schicklgruber in Hitler’s past during World War II. Pamphlets bearing the phrase “Heil Schicklgruber” were airdropped over German cities. But Adolf was legally born a Hitler and was also related to Hiedler via his maternal grandmother, Johanna Hiedler.
The name, “Adolf”, comes from Old High German for “noble wolf” (Adel=nobility + wolf). Hence, one of Hitler’s self-given nicknames was Wolf or Herr Wolf — he began using this nickname in the early 1920s and was addressed by it only by intimates (as “Uncle Wolf” by the Wagners) up until the fall of the Third Reich. The names of his various headquarters scattered throughout continental Europe (Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Wolfsschlucht in France, Werwolf in Ukraine, etc.) reflect this. By his closest family and relatives, Hitler was known as “Adi”.
As a boy, Hitler said he was often whipped by his father. Years later he told his secretary, “I then resolved never again to cry when my father whipped me. A few days later I had the opportunity of putting my will to the test. My mother, frightened, took refuge in the front of the door. As for me, I counted silently the blows of the stick which lashed my rear end.”
Hitler’s paternal grandfather was one of the brothers Johann Georg Hiedler or Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. There were rumours that Hitler was one-quarter Jewish and that his grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, became pregnant while working as a servant in a Jewish household. In the 1920s, the implications of these rumours were politically explosive for the proponent of a racist ideology. Opponents tried to prove that Hitler had Jewish or Czech ancestors. Although these rumours were never confirmed, for Hitler they were reason enough to conceal his origins. According to Robert G. L. Waite in The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, Hitler made it illegal for German women to work in Jewish households, and after the “Anschluss” (annexation) of Austria, Hitler had his father’s hometown obliterated by turning it into an artillery practice area. Waite says that Hitler’s insecurities in this regard may have been more important than whether Judaic ancestry could have been proven by his peers.
Alois’ family moved often, from Braunau am Inn to Passau, Lambach, Leonding, and Linz. Adolf was a good student in elementary school. But in the sixth grade, his first year of high school(Realschule) in Linz, he failed and had to repeat the grade. His teachers said that he had “no desire to work.” One of Hitler’s classmates in the Realschule was Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. There is scant evidence that they knew each other. But a recent book by Kimberley Cornish suggests that conflict between Hitler and some Jewish students including Wittgenstein was a critical moment in Hitler’s formation as an antisemite, See The Jew of Linz: Hitler, Wittgenstein and their secret battle for the mind (1999).
Hitler claimed his educational slump was a rebellion against his father, who wanted the boy to follow him in a career as a customs official, though Adolf wanted to become a painter. This explanation is further supported by Hitler’s later description of himself as a misunderstood artist. However, after Alois died on 3 January 1903, when Adolf was 13, Hitler’s schoolwork did not improve. At age 16, Hitler dropped out of high school without a degree.
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Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in a family of Spanish and Irish descent; both his father and mother were of Basque ancestry. One of Guevara’s forebears, Patrick Lynch, was born in Galway, Ireland, in 1715. He left for Bilbao, Spain, and traveled from there to Argentina. Francisco Lynch (Guevara’s great-grandfather) was born in 1817, and Ana Lynch (his grandmother) in 1868. Her son, Ernesto Guevara Lynch (Guevara’s father) was born in 1900. Guevara Lynch married Celia de la Serna y Llosa in 1927 (one of her non-lineal ancestors was José de la Serna e Hinojosa, Spanish viceroy of Peru), and they had three sons and two daughters.
