Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl: the couple who bore the dictator. (Nazi Germany 1/25)
A brief overview of Adolf Hitler’s descendants and the stories of his parents Alois and Klara Hitler.
He was a notorious womanizer, a cold, short-tempered, unsympathetic father, and husband. Earlier in his life, he worked as an apprentice cobbler in Vienna; later serving as a civil servant in the Austrian Customs for many years of his life. He was infamous for marrying three women in his life and treating his last with cruelty. An illegitimate son to Maria Schicklgruber and an anonymous biological father, his name is Alois Hitler.
His biological father was not with him during his life; luckily, a man named Johann Georg Hiedler would meet with Maria Schicklgruber and her family occupying the role of a father to Alois. Georg Hiedler and Maria would then proceed to marry by the time Alois reached 5. After the death of his mother, he would be sent to Georg’s younger brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler who owned a farm in the nearby village of Spital and settled there. Alois would study in elementary and learn shoemaking from a cobbler (a person who repairs shoes) during his stay.
At the age of 13, Alois left Johann Nepomuk Hiedler’s farm in Spital and landed in Vienna as an inexperienced cobbler, working there for about five years. Hearing of the 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. This chapter of his life would begin his long-lived career as a civil servant in the customs. He would steadily rise in position as a civil servant reaching: Corporal, Second lieutenant, First lieutenant, and Army captain.
During his early years as a relatively new customs official, he used his birth name of Schicklgruber, but in mid-1876, 39 years old and well established in his career, he asked permission to use his stepfather’s family name. He stood before the parish priest in Austria and argued that his father was Johann Georg Hiedler, who had married his mother when he was 5 and now wished to legitimize him. The priest agreed to amend the birth certificate, and the civil authorities automatically processed the church’s decision, and Alois’s name was now legally changed to “Hitler”. It was known that the local authorities or the priest had misspelled the surname as “Hitler.” Alois may have been influenced to change his name for the sake of legal expediency. Supposedly, Johann Georg Hiedler, who died in 1857, relented on his deathbed and left an inheritance to his illegitimate stepson (Alois.)
Relationship between Alois Hitler with Klara and Adolf.
Klara Hitler (born Klara Pölzl) was born in the Austrian village of Spital. She came from a peasant stock and was reportedly hard-working, energetic, pious, and conscientious. According to Dr. Eduard Bloch, the Hitlers’ family doctor, she was a very quiet, sweet, and affectionate woman. She endured the deaths of four total children namely: Gustav, Ida, Otto, and Edmund; with this, she understandably worried about Adolf Hitler undesiring his untimely death.
Klara Hitler was hired as the family housemaid to Alois Hitler’s family and later the secret lover to Alois. When Franziska, the second wife of Alois died and Klara became pregnant, Alois married her. The wedding was held in Hitler’s rented rooms on the top floor of the Pommer Inn. A few guests and witnesses attended the wedding and feasted. Hitler then went to work for the rest of the day as if the wedding was only a short ceremony of something trivial.
Adolf Hitler was a child product of the all-familiar subservient woman and a machismo, deadbeat father.
She was to receive violent lashes from his short-tempered husband Alois and has been the sole functioning parent of the two children: Adolf and Paula. A hardworking, conscientious mother, endured the all-too-familiar machismo husband. She gave birth to Gustav and Ida who both died of diphtheria and Otto who died days after being born. Klara Hitler was a pious wife, a devout Catholic who attended church with her children regularly. While busy with parental duties, her husband would abandon his duties as a father; rather spend his time in the taverns drinking or with his beekeeping hobby.
The Hitler family was to move to Passau where Alois was restationed. Klara would then give birth to Edmund, and then to Paula, Adolf’s younger sister. Edmund would die of measles leaving Adolf and Paula the only children of the Hitler family.
Alois has been described as “an authoritarian, overbearing, domineering husband and a stern, masterful, and often irritable father” and as a “strict, short-tempered patriarch who demanded unquestioning respect and obedience from his children and used the switch whenever his expectations were not met.”
