Such visits were revealing to me, for Adolf was by nature very reserved. There was always a certain element in his personality into which he would allow nobody to penetrate. He had his inscrutable secrets, and in many respects always remained a riddle to me. But there was one key that opened the door to much that would have remained hidden: his enthusiasm for beauty. All that separated us when we stood in front of such a magnificent work of art as the monastery of St Florian. Then, fired by enthusiasm, Adolf would lower all his defences and I felt to the full the joy of our friendship.
I have often been asked, and even by Rudolf Hess, who once invited me to visit him in Linz, whether Adolf, when I knew him, had any sense of humour. One feels the lack of it, people of his entourage said. After all, he was an Austrian and should have had his share of the famous Austrian sense of humour. Certainly one’s impression of Hitler, especially after a short and superficial acquaintance, was that of a deeply serious man. This enormous seriousness seemed to overshadow everything else. It was the same when he was young. He approached any problem with which he was concerned with a deadly earnestness which ill suited his sixteen or seventeen years. He was capable of loving and admiring, hating and despising, all with the greatest seriousness. But one thing he could not do was pass over something with a smile. Even with a subject in which he did not take a personal interest, such as sport, this was nevertheless, as a phenomenon of modern times, just as important to him as any other. He never came to the end of his problems. His profound earnestness never ceased to attack new problems, and if he did not find any in the present, he would brood at home for hours over his books and burrow into the problems of the past. This extraordinary earnestness was his most striking quality. Many other qualities which are characteristic of youth were lacking in him: a carefree letting go of himself, living only for the day, the happy attitude of ‘what is to be, will be’. Even ‘going off the rails’, in the coarse exuberance of youth, was alien to him. His idea, strange to say, was that these were things that did not become a young man. And because of this, humour was confined to the most intimate sphere as if it were something taboo. His humour was usually aimed at people in his immediate circle, in other words a sphere in which problems no longer existed for him. For this reason his grim and sour humour was often mixed with irony, but always an irony with friendly intent. Thus, he saw me once at a concert where I was playing the trumpet. He got enormous amusement out of imitating me and insisted that with my blown-out cheeks I looked like one of Rubens’s angels.
I cannot conclude this chapter without mentioning one of Hitler’s qualities which, I freely admit, seems paradoxical to talk about now. Hitler was full of deep understanding and sympathy. He took a most touching interest in me. Without my telling him, he knew exactly how I felt. How often this helped me in difficult times. He always knew what I needed and what I wanted. However intensely he was occupied with himself he would always have time for the affairs of those people in whom he was interested. It was not by chance that he was the one who persuaded my father to let me study music and thereby influenced my life in a decisive way. Rather, this was the outcome of his general attitude of sharing in all the things that were of concern to me. Sometimes I had a feeling that he was living my life as well as his own.
Thus I have drawn the portrait of the young Hitler as well as I can from memory. But for the question, then unknown and unexpressed which hung above our friendship, I have not to this day found any answer: ‘What did God want from this person?’
* * *
Chapter 4
Portrait of His Mother
When I first met her, Klara Hitler was already forty-five years old and a widow of two years’ standing. She looked then much as she did in the only known photograph of her, although the suffering was more clearly etched in her face and her hair had started to go grey. But Klara Hitler remained a beautiful woman to the day of her death. Whenever I saw her I had – I do not know why – a feeling of sympathy for her, and felt that I wanted to do something for her. She was glad that Adolf had found a friend whom he liked and trusted, and for this reason Frau Hitler liked me too. How often did she unburden to me the worries which Adolf caused her. And how fervently did she hope to enlist my help in persuading her son to follow his father’s wishes in the choice of a career. I had to disappoint her, yet she did not blame me, for she must have felt that the reasons for Adolf’s behaviour were much too deep, far beyond the reach of my influence.
Just as Adolf frequently enjoyed the hospitality of my parents’ home, I went often to see his mother and, on taking leave, was unfailingly asked by Frau Hitler to come again. I considered myself as part of the family – there was hardly anybody else who visited them.
Often when I finished work early, I would have a quick wash, change and make my way to Humboldtstrasse. No. 31 was a three-storeyed, not unpleasant tenement building. The Hitlers lived on the third floor. I would run up the steps and ring the bell, Frau Hitler would open the door and give me a warm welcome. This heartfelt friendliness seemed to lighten a little the suffering one could read in her features. Every smile which crossed that serious face gave me joy.
I can still visualise the humble apartment. The small kitchen, with green painted furniture, had only one window which looked out on to the courtyard. The living room, with the two beds of his mother and little Paula, overlooked the street. On the side wall hung a portrait of his father, with a typical civil servant’s face, impressive and dignified, whose rather grim expression was mitigated by the carefully groomed whiskers in the style of the Emperor Franz Josef. Adolf lived and studied in the box room, off the bedroom.
Paula, Adolf’s little sister, was nine when I first met the family. She was a rather pretty girl, quiet and reserved, but unlike either her mother or Adolf facially. I never saw her giggly. We got on rather well with each other but Adolf was not particularly close to her. This was due perhaps to the difference in age – he always referred to her affectionately as ‘the kid’.
Another acquaintance I made in the Hitler family was a striking-looking woman of just over twenty, called Angela, whose place in the family puzzled me at first, although she addressed Klara Hitler as ‘mother’ just as Paula did. Later, I learned the solution of the mystery. Angela, born on 28 July 1883, that is to say six years before Adolf, was a child of their father’s previous marriage. Her mother, Franziska Matzelsberger, died the year after her birth. Five months later her father married Klara Pölzl. Angela, who naturally had no recollection of her own mother, looked upon Klara as her mother. In September 1903, a year before I became acquainted with Adolf, Angela had married a Revenue official called Raubal. She lived with her husband in the Zum Waldhorn Inn in the Bürgerstrasse nearby and often came to visit her stepmother, but never brought Herr Raubal with her; at any rate I never met him. Angela was quite unlike Frau Hitler, a jolly person who enjoyed life and loved to laugh. She brought some life into the family. She was very handsome with her regular features and wore her beautiful hair, which was as dark as Adolf’s, in pigtails.
From Adolf’s description, but also from some hints of his mother’s, I gathered that Raubal was a drunkard. Adolf hated him. He saw in him a personification of everything he despised in a man. He spent his time in bars, drank and smoked, gambled his money away, and – on top of that – he was a civil servant. And as though that were not enough, Raubal thought it was his duty to support his father-in-law’s views by urging Adolf to become a civil servant himself. This was enough to antagonise Adolf completely. When Adolf talked of Raubal his face assumed a truly threatening aspect. Perhaps it was Adolf’s pronounced hatred of his half-sister’s husband that kept Raubal away from the Humboldtstrasse. At the time of Raubal’s death, only a few years after his marriage to Angela, the break between him and Adolf was already complete. Angela remarried later, an architect in Dresden, and died in Munich in 1949.
I learned from Adolf that from his father’s second marriage there was also a son, Alois, who spent hi
s childhood with the Hitler family but left them while they were living in Lambach. This half-brother of Adolf’s – born on 13 December 1881 in Braunau – was seven years older than Adolf. While his father was still alive he came to Leonding a couple of times, but as far as I know he never appeared in the Humboldtstrasse. He never played any important part in Hitler’s life, nor did he take any interest in Adolf’s political career. He turned up once in Paris, then in Vienna, later in Berlin. His first marriage was to a Dutchwoman and they had a son, William Patrick Hitler, who in August 1939 published a pamphlet My Uncle Adolf, a son from his second marriage, Heinz Hitler, fell as an officer on the Eastern Front.
Frau Hitler did not like to talk about herself and her worries, yet she found relief in telling me of her doubts about Adolf. Naturally she did not get much satisfaction from the vague and, for her, meaningless utterances of Adolf about his future as an artist. Her preoccupation with the well-being of her only surviving son depressed her increasingly. Often I sat together with Frau Hitler and Adolf in the tiny kitchen. ‘Your poor father cannot rest in his grave’, she used to say to Adolf, ‘because you do absolutely nothing that he wanted for you. Obedience is what distinguishes a good son, but you do not know the meaning of the word. That’s why you did so badly at school and why you’re not getting anywhere now’
Gradually I learned to understand the suffering this woman endured. She never complained, but she told me about the hard time she had in her youth.
So I came to know, partly by experience, partly by what I was told, the circumstances of the Hitler family. Occasionally mention was made of some relations in the Waldviertel, but it was difficult for me to understand whether these were his father’s relations or his mother’s. In any case, the Hitler family had relations only in the Waldviertel, quite unlike other Austrian civil servants who had relatives scattered all over the country. Only later did I come to realise that Hitler’s paternal and maternal lineage merged in the second generation, so that from the grandfather upwards Adolf had only one set of forbears. I remember that Adolf did visit some relatives in the Waldviertel. Once he sent me a picture postcard from Weitra, which is in the part of the Waldviertel nearest to Bohemia. I do not know what had taken him there. He never spoke very willingly about his relations in that part of the country, but preferred to describe the landscape, poor, barren country, a striking contrast to the rich and fertile Danube valley of the Wachau. This raw, hard, peasant country was the homeland of both his maternal and paternal ancestors.
Frau Klara Hitler, née Pölzl, was born on 12 August 1860 in Spital, a poor village in the Waldviertel. Her father, Johann Baptist Pölzl, was a simple peasant. Her mother’s maiden name was Johanna Hüttler. The name Hitler is spelt differently in the various documents. There is the spelling of Hiedler and Hüttler, whilst Hitler is used for the first time by Adolf’s father.
This Johanna Hüttler, Adolf’s maternal grandmother, was, according to the documents, a daughter of Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. Thus Klara Pölzl was directly related to the Hiedler-Hüttler family, for Johann Nepomuk Hiedler was the brother of that Johann Georg Hiedler who appears in the baptismal register of Döllersheim as Adolf’s father’s father. Klara Pölzl was, therefore, a second cousin of her husband. Alois Hitler always referred to her before their marriage simply as his niece.
Klara Pölzl had a miserable childhood in the poor and wretched home where she was amongst the youngest of the family’s twelve children. I often heard talk of her sister Johanna. This aunt looked after Adolf quite often after he was orphaned. Later I also got to know another of her sisters, Amalia. In 1875, when she was fifteen years old, Klara’s relative, the customs official Alois Schicklgruber, at Braunau, invited her to come and help his wife in the house. Alois Schicklgruber, who only in the following year assumed the name Hiedler, which he changed into Hitler, was then married to Anna Glasl-Hörer. This first marriage of Alois Hitler with a woman fourteen years older than himself remained without issue and they finally separated.
When his wife died in 1883, Alois Hitler married Franziska Matzelsberger, who was twenty-four years his junior. The children of this marriage were Adolf’s half-brother Alois and half-sister Angela. Klara, who had worked in the house during the time he was separated from his first wife, left on the second marriage and went to Vienna. When Franziska, the second wife, fell gravely ill after the birth of her second child, Alois Hitler called his niece back to Braunau. Franziska died on 10 August 1884, barely two years after her marriage. (Alois, the first child of this union, had been born out of wedlock and adopted by his father.)
On 7 January 1885, six months after the death of his second wife, Alois Hitler married his niece Klara, who was already expecting a child by him, the first son, Gustav, who was born on 17 May 1885, that is to say five months after the marriage, and who died on 9 December 1887.
Although Klara Pölzl was only a second cousin, the couple needed an ecclesiastical dispensation to marry. The application for this, in the clean, copper-plate handwriting of an Austro-Hungarian civil servant, still exists in the archives of the episcopate in Linz under the reference 6. 911/II/2 1884. The document reads as follows:
Application of Alois Hitler and his fiancée, Klara Pölzl, for permission to marry.
Most reverend episcopate,
Those, in humblest devotion undersigned, have decided to marry. According to the enclosed family tree they are prevented by the canonical impediment of collateral affinity in the third degree touching the second. They therefore humbly request the reverend episcopate graciously to procure them dispensation on the following grounds: According to the enclosed death certificate the bridegroom has been a widower since 10 August of this year and is father of two infant children, a boy of two-and-a-half (Alois) and a girl of one year and two months (Angela) for whose care he needs a woman’s help as he, being a customs official, is away from his home the whole day and also often at night, and therefore hardly able to supervise the education and upbringing of the children. The bride has looked after the children ever since the death of the mother and they are very fond of her, so that it may be justifiably assumed that the upbringing would be successful and the marriage a happy one. Moreover the bride is without means and it is therefore unlikely that she will ever have another opportunity of a good marriage.
For these reasons the undersigned repeat their humble petition for the gracious procurement of dispensation from the impediment of affinity.
Braunau, 27 October 1884
Alois Hitler, Bridegroom Klara Pölzl, Bride
The family tree that accompanied the application was as follows:
Johann Georg Hiedler Johann Nepomuk Hiedler
/ /
Alois Hitler Johanna Hiedler (married Pölzl)
/
Klara Pölzl
The Linz episcopate declared itself not competent to issue the dispensation and forwarded the application to Rome where it was granted by papal decree.
Alois Hitler’s marriage with Klara was described by various acquaintances as very happy, which was presumably due to the submissive and accommodating nature of the wife. Once she said to me in this respect, ‘What I hoped and dreamed of as a young girl has not been fulfilled in my marriage,’ and added resignedly, ‘but does such a thing ever happen?’
The birth of the children in quick succession was a heavy psychological and physical burden for this frail woman: in 1885 the son Gustav was born, in 1886 a daughter, Ida, who died after two years, in 1887 another son, Otto, who only lived three days, and on 20 April 1889 again a son, Adolf. How much suffering is hidden behind these bare figures! When Adolf was born the three other children were already dead. With what care the sorely tried mother must have looked after this fourth child. She told me once that Adolf was a very weak child and that she always lived in fear of losing him, too.
Perhaps the early death of the three children was due to the fact that the parents were blood relations. I leave it to the experts to give the final verdict
. But in this connection I would like to draw attention to one point to which, in my opinion, greatest importance should be attached.
The most outstanding trait in my friend’s character was, as I had experienced myself, the unparallelled consistency in everything that he said and did. There was in his nature something firm, inflexible, immovable, obstinately rigid, which manifested itself in his profound seriousness and was at the bottom of all his other characteristics. Adolf simply could not change his mind or his nature. Everything that lay in these rigid precincts of his being remained unaltered for ever. How often did I experience this. I remember what he said to me when we met again in 1938 after an interval of thirty years. ‘You haven’t changed, Kubizek, you have only grown older.’ If this was true of me, how much more was it of him. He never changed.
I have tried to find an explanation for this fundamental trait in his character. Influence of surroundings and education can hardly account for it, but I could imagine – although a complete layman in the field of genetics – that the biological effect of the intermarriage in the family was to fix certain spheres and that those ‘arrested complexes’ might have produced that particular type of character. It was just that inflexibility that was responsible for Adolf Hitler causing such innumerable sorrows to his mother.
Once more the mother’s heart was sorely tried by destiny. Five years after Adolf’s birth, on 24 March 1894, she gave birth to a fifth child, a son, Edmund, who also died young on 29 June 1900, in Leonding. Whilst, naturally, Adolf had no recollection of the first three children born in Braunau and never spoke of them, he could clearly remember his brother Edmund, at the time of whose death he was already eleven years old. He told me once that Edmund had died of diphtheria. The youngest child, a girl called Paula, born on 21 January 1896, survived.
The Young Hitler I Knew Page 5
