[ad_1]
contents
Alois Hitler’s biography offers an intimate insight into family history and shows how his son, Adolf Hitler, became a dictator.
Alois Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s father, was anything but a sympathizer. Years after Alois Hitler’s death in 1903, co-workers recalled strict, pedantic, and highly inaccessible impressions that historian Roman Sandgruber reveals in Alois Hitler’s biography. Adolf Hitler also paints a picture of an angry father: “I did not love him, but I feared him even more. He became irascible and hit him immediately. “
Smoke a pipe, raise bees, hit the kids
Linz historian Roman Sandgruber, a profound expert on Hitler’s family history, strives in his biography to provide a differentiated view of Alois Hitler. As the illegitimate son of a Lower Austrian maid, he comes from a poor background. However, he achieved a remarkable career in Austrian public administration.
Legend:
An exchange of letters from Alois Hitler reveals intimate family insights.
Getty Images / Gamma-Keystone
Most of the statements about “old Hitler” are pretty cliché, Sandgruber sums up: pipe smoking, sitting in a tavern, raising bees, beating children. But these clichés alone don’t do the dictator’s father justice.
Intimate glimpses of the Hitler family
What is spectacular about the book: the historian can draw on several new sources. Including a packet of more than 30 original letters old Hitler wrote to Upper Austrian highway foreman Josef Radlegger in 1895 when he was buying a house.
The intimate glimpses are made public through the pack of letters that have survived the times in an attic in the Upper Austrian market town of Wallern. For example, the economic circumstances of the Hitler family.
Superior to other people
Especially since before 1914, Hitler’s letters fill gaps in his knowledge: “A person who writes correctly and who is extremely skilled at writing,” Sandgruber analyzes. Alois Hitler was someone who was proud of his education, but also displayed a certain arrogance, Sandgruber said. Hitler felt superior to other people. A quality that Alois Hitler shared with his son. Politically, the former customs official is a curious mix: Alois Hitler viewed himself as a strictly German citizen, while also being completely loyal to the Habsburgs. A fan of Bismarck and a fan of Emperor Franz Joseph at the same time – a remarkable self-contradiction.
Legend:
Leonding Primary School fourth grade class photo (1899/1900), Adolf Hitler in the top row in the middle.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRIA
Childhood and youth of Adolf Hitler
In Roman Sandgruber’s biography of “old Hitler”, which is also a biography of Adolf during childhood and adolescence, one thing becomes particularly clear: Adolf acquired Nazi ideology as a child and adolescent in Upper Austria. This includes ethno-imperialist ideas as well as anti-democratic, anti-socialist and anti-clerical radical ideas. Sandgruber’s study shows: National Socialism did not come out of nowhere. This applies to both the career of Adolf Hitler and the biographies of two other notorious Nazi criminals. Like Hitler, they too spent their youth in Linz: Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Adolf Eichmann.
Nationalism turns into anti-Semitism
By 1900, German nationalism, which had a firm bastion in the Upper Austrian bourgeoisie, underwent a momentous transformation: liberal tendencies were increasingly displaced by anti-Semitic, racist and militaristic ideas.
A development that was already becoming evident in Alois Hitler and a generation later it became criminal.
