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 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 Wemar 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.

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.