Alois Hitler, Jr.
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Alois Hitler, Jr. |
Alois Hitler, Jr., born
Alois Matzelberger (
January 13,
1882 –
May 20,
1956), was the son of
Alois Hitler and Franziska Matzelsberger and the half-brother of
Adolf Hitler.
He was born while his father was still married to his first wife, Anna. After Anna died and his parents were married, Alois was legitimised and his name was changed to Alois Hitler, Jr. He was soon joined by a sister,
Angela Hitler. When he was two years old his mother died and his father married
Klara Pölzl, a niece with whom he had a long-standing affair while also cheating on his first wife with Franziska.
Alois left home at the age of fourteen due to increasingly violent arguments with his father and apparently strained relations with his step-mother Klara. After working as an apprentice waiter he was arrested for theft and served a five-month sentence in
1900, followed by an eight-month sentence in
1902. He moved to
Dublin where he got a job as a waiter at the Shelbourne Hotel. In
1909 he met
Bridget Dowling at the Dublin Horse Show and led her to believe he was a wealthy hotelier on a European tour. They eloped to
London and married on
June 3,
1910. William Dowling, Bridget's father, threatened to have Alois arrested for kidnapping but Bridget dissuaded him.
The couple settled in
Liverpool where their son
William Patrick Hitler was born in
1911. The family lived in a flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street. Ironically, the house was destroyed in the last German air-raid on Liverpool on
January 10,
1942, and has remained a bomb site ever since.
Bridget Dowling's memoirs claim Adolf Hitler lived with them in Liverpool from
1912 to
1913 while he was on the run for dodging the
draft in his native
Austria-Hungary but most historians dismiss this story as a fiction invented to make Bridget's book more appealing to publishers.
Alois attempted to make money by running a small restaurant in Dale Street, a boarding house on Parliament Street and a hotel on Mount Pleasant, all of which failed.
Finally, he left his family behind in May
1914 and he returned alone to the
German Empire to establish himself in the safety-razor business.
World War I broke out soon after, stranding Alois in Germany and making it impossible for his wife and son to join him. He married another woman named
Hedwig Heidemann in
1916 and after the war had a third party inform Bridget he was dead.
His ruse was discovered by the German authorities and Alois was prosecuted for
bigamy in
1924 but acquitted due to Bridget's intervention on his behalf.
William Patrick stayed with Alois and his new family during his early trips to
Weimar Republic Germany in the late
1920s and early
1930s. In
1934 Alois established a restaurant in
Berlin which became a popular drinking hole for
Stormtroopers. He managed to keep the restaurant open through the duration of
World War II. At the end of the war he was arrested by the
British but released when it became clear he had played no role in his brother's regime.
His son from his second wife,
Heinz Hitler, died in prison in 1942 after being captured on the
eastern front during World War II.
Following the war Alois was briefly involved with a right-wing political party. In the
1950s he made money signing photographs of his brother and selling them to tourists.
Alois and Adolf were never close, apparently due to Alois' resentment of Adolf stemming from childhood. He is not mentioned in Hitler's
Mein Kampf and they rarely (if ever) met after Adolf's rise to power.
*
Hitler: His Irish Relatives from
Irish Roots magazine.
