Alois Hitler, born Aloys Schicklgruber (7 June 1837 – 3 January 1903) was the father of Adolf Hitler.

Birth

In the tiny, rustic farming village of Strones, in the Waldviertel, a hilly forested area in northwest Lower Austria just north of Vienna, a forty-two year old unwed Roman Catholic peasant woman, Maria Anna Schicklgruber1, whose family had lived in the area for generations, gave birth to an illegitimate boy and named him Alois. His father's identity remains a mystery. For many web sites (such as [[1]]) the father was a baron of the Rothschild family, and Alois' mother was a servant to that family. Maria Schicklgruber refused to reveal who it was or simply did not know. The day he was born, after Alois was baptized at the nearby village of Döllersheim, the space for his father's name on the baptismal certificate was left blank and the priest wrote "illegitimate." Baby Alois was cared for by Maria in a house she shared at Strones with her elderly father, Johannes Schicklgruber.

Youth

Sometime later, Johann Georg Hiedler moved in with the Schicklgrubers and married Maria when Alois was five. By the age of ten Alois had been sent to live with Georg's brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who owned a farm in the nearby village of Spital. But he wrote his last name not like Hiedler, but as Hitler.

Alois attended elementary school and took lessons in shoe-making from a local cobbler. When he was 13 he left the farm in Spital and went to Vienna as an apprentice cobbler which he worked at for about five years. In response to a recruitment drive by the Austrian government offering employment in the civil service to people from rural areas, Alois joined the frontier guards (customs service) of the Austrian Finance Ministry in 1855 at the age of 18.

Early career

Alois made steady progress in the semi-military profession of a customs guard. The work involved frequent re-assignments and he served in a variety of places all across Austria. By 1860, after five years service, he reached the rank of Finanzwach Oberaufseher (a non-commissioned officer), while serving in the town of Wels, Austria. By 1864, after special training and examinations, he had advanced further and was serving in Linz, Austria. In 1875 he was an inspector of customs posted at Braunau.

While his professional duties involved strict attention to (and application of) set rules, his private life seems to have been a serial flaunting of society's norms with regards to women and offspring. In the late 1860s he fathered an illegitimate child with a woman named Thelka (or perhaps Thekla) whom he did not marry and whose family name is lost to history. Alois was 36 when he married for the first time in 1873 and it may have been for money. Anna Glassl was a well-to-do, fifty-year-old daughter of an official. Anna was sick when Alois married her and was either an invalid or became one shortly afterwards.

Name changed to Alois Hitler

Historian Ian Kershaw remarks: "The first of many strokes of good fortune for Adolf Hitler took place thirteen years before he was born. In 1876, the man who was to become his father changed his name from Alois Schicklgruber to Alois Hitler. Adolf can be believed when he said that nothing his father had done had pleased him so much as to drop the coarsely rustic name of Schicklgruber. Certainly, 'Heil Schicklgruber' would have sounded an unlikely salutation to a national hero" (Kershaw, p.3).

As a rising young junior customs official Alois used his birth name but in the summer of 1876, forty years old and well established in his career, he asked permission to use his dead step-father's family name. He appeared before the parish priest in Döllersheim and asserted that his father was Johann Georg Hiedler who had married his mother (Alois deliberately gave the priest the impression Georg was still alive and now had the desire to legitimize him). Three relatives appeared with Alois as witnesses, one of whom was Johann Nepomuk Hiedler's son-in-law. The priest agreed to amend the records, the civil authorities automatically processed the church's decision and Alois had a new name. The official change, registered at the government office in Mistelbach on January 6, 1877 transformed "Aloys Schicklgruber" into "Alois Hitler." It is not known who decided on the spelling of Hitler instead of Hiedler. It may have been the clerk in Mistelbach. Spellings were still being standardized at the time.

Who was Alois' real father

Historians have discussed three candidates:

Johann Georg Hiedler, who in his lifetime was the step-father and legally declared as the birth father long after he died.
Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, Georg's brother and Alois' step-uncle, who raised Alois through adolescence and later willed him a considerable portion of his life savings but who (if he was the real father) never found it expedient to admit it publicly.
Leopold Frankenberger's son, claimed by Hans Frank to have fathered Alois when his mother Maria worked in the Frankenberger house as a maid in Graz, Austria.

Johann Georg Hiedler

The official version is that Alois' father really was Johann Georg Hiedler. An explanation for Alois being sent to live on his uncle's farm as a child is that Georg and Maria were simply too poor to raise Alois, or could not raise him as well as his uncle, or perhaps Maria's health was in decline (she died when he was ten). Unexplained is why Georg and Maria did not declare Alois their legitimate son once they were legally married, or why Georg died without legitimizing his son and perpetuating his line of the family. Did Alois lie to the priest, or did he simply stretch the truth a bit by saying what his father perhaps intended, but never got around to doing?

Johann Nepomuk Hiedler

Historian Werner Maser suggests that Alois's father was Georg's brother, Johann Nepomuk, a married farmer who had an affair and then arranged to have his single brother Georg marry Alois's mother Maria to provide a cover for Nepomuk's desire to assist and care for Alois without upsetting his wife. This assumes Georg was willing to marry Maria and Hitler biographer J. Fest thinks this is too contrived and unlikely to be true.

Frankenberger's son

Soon after Adolf Hitler became politically active in the 1920s rumours spread that his ancestry was Jewish. His opponents found out his father had not originally been named Hitler and nobody seemed to know who his paternal grandfather had been. What Hitler really thought about these rumours (as opposed to his public statements) is unknown.

Heinrich Himmler had the Gestapo investigate in 1942 and they are said to have turned up nothing. In Mein Kampf Hitler states his paternal grandfather was "a poor cottager" and writes implicitly as a German (Hitler considered his family German and the fact they were Austrians was politics, not nationality).

For historians the matter of Jewish ancestry centered around claims made after the war by Hans Frank, who in a confession to a priest while awaiting execution said that after having been asked by Hitler to investigate, he discovered Hitler's grandmother Maria had worked as a servant in Graz for a wealthy Jew named Leopold Frankenberger. Frank asserted that Maria got pregnant and returned to her native village of Strones to have the baby. Frank's testimony was widely believed in the 1950s but by the 1990s was generally doubted by historians. Ian Kershaw dismisses the Frankenberger story as a "smear" by Hitler's enemies, noting that all Jews had been expelled from Graz in the 15th century and were not allowed to return until the 1860s. There is also no evidence Maria Schicklgruber ever lived in Graz.

While no conclusive proof has arisen to prove whether Hitler had a Jewish ancestor, psychohistorians such as Robert Waite have claimed that the main question is not whether or not Hitler had such an ancestor in reality, but whether Hitler believed this. From this viewpoint, Hans Frank's claims are valid, since he was asked to investigate after Hitler requested it.

Was it for money?

Whether Alois' father was either of two brothers has little historical interest except for making Adolf Hitler's ancestry more incestuous since his mother Klara Pölzl's grandfather was Nepomuk.

Historians speculate Alois may have changed his name for money. Johann Nepomuk Hiedler might have promised to leave him a legacy if he changed his name to Hiedler and continued the family name. Six months after Nepomuk died Alois made a major real estate purchase inconsistent with the salary of a customs official with a pregnant wife.

Maser reports that in 1876 Franz Schicklgruber, the administrator of Alois' mother's estate, transferred a large sum of money (230 gulden) to Alois. Maser asserts this transfer was connected to a family decision involving changing Alois' last name from Schicklgruber to Hitler in accordance with his mother's wishes when she died in 1847.

Shame seems to have played no part. Smith states that Alois openly admitted having been born out of wedlock before and after the name change. He had done well by local standards and was not hampered by his name. The limiting factor was education. Alois eventually rose to full inspector of customs and could go no higher because he lacked the necessary school degrees.

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