History of the West

Central European History from Antiquity to the 20th Century

Tag: Paula Hitler

In Austria before the War

… THERE LIVED A WELL RESPECTED FAMILY


The business of the Civil Service is the orderly management of decline.

William Armstrong


In the Year of the Lord 1889, the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday and forty-first anniversary of his reign over the vast Empire of Austria and Hungary; when he died, in 1916, he had ruled the state for sixty-eight years. The realm was huge – covering over 180,000 square miles or about 450,000 square kilometres. The emperor’s domains stretched, in the east-west axis, from Czernowitz on the Prut River in today’s Ukraine to Vorarlberg near the Swiss border, and, in the north-south axis, from the lower Elbe River near Aussig to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in southern Croatia, two-thirds down the eastern Adriatic coast.

Ethnically and thus politically, however, these territories were hopelessly divided. The racial diversity of the Imperial population included Germans in Austria, Hungary and the Sudetenland; Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia; Slovaks to their east; Poles in western Galicia and Ruthenians, Catholic Ukrainians, in the eastern part of it; Magyars in Hungary and Transylvania interspersed with some more Germans and Romanians; Slovenes, Friulians and Italians south of the Julian Alps; and finally Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrinos and Serbs in and around the Balkan mountains.

Ethnolinguistic Map

All these groups fought incessant but mostly inconclusive battles over appointments, representation and influence in the empire and its court, while a laborious civil administration struggled with the actual governance of the multitudes. The exceptionally long reign of Francis Joseph had much aided the ossification of the Imperial structures, which, given the Habsburgs’ reverence for tradition, were conservative, to say the least; pre-modern, and reactionary.

Yet on the outside things appeared fit for eternity. Stefan Zweig, one of Vienna’s famous sons, describes the peculiar atmosphere of town and country:

When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-years-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanence, and the state itself was the chief guarantor of this stability. The rights which it granted to its citizens were duly confirmed by parliament, the freely elected representatives of the people, and every duty was exactly prescribed.

Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in bright gold pieces, as assurance of its immutability. Everyone knew how much he possessed or what he was entitled to, what was permitted and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight. He who had a fortune could accurately compute his annual interest. An official or an officer, for example, could confidently look up in the calendar the year he would be advanced in rank, or when he would be pensioned.

Each family had its fixed budget, and knew how much could be spent for rent and food, for holidays and entertainment; and what is more, invariably a small sum was carefully laid aside for sickness and the doctor’s bills, for the unexpected.

Whoever owned a house looked upon it as a secure domicile for his children and grandchildren; estates and businesses were handed down from generation to generation. When the babe was still in its cradle, its first mite was put in its little bank, or deposited in the savings’ bank, as a “reserve” for the future. In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovable in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed), another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence seemed impossible in an age of reason.

This feeling of security was the most eagerly sought-after possession of millions, the common ideal of life. Only the possession of this security made life seem worthwhile, and constant widening circles desired their share of this costly treasure.

At first, it was only the prosperous who enjoyed this advantage, but gradually the great masses forced their way toward it. The century of security became the golden age of insurance. One’s house was insured against fire or theft, one’s field against hail and storm, one’s person against accident or sickness. Annuities were purchased for one’s old age, and a policy was laid in a girl’s cradle for her future dowry. Finally, even the workers organized, and won standard wages and workman’s compensation. Servants saved for old-age insurance and paid in advance into a burial fund for their own interment. Only the man who could look into the future without worry could thoroughly enjoy the present. (1)

This peaceful state of bliss, however, did not necessarily embrace the whole empire; a new age has brought forth anarchists and socialists. Neither was the status of the rural poor much to write home about. Yet law and order were generally held in high regard for the safety and continuity of society they implied. Into this world of order, a son, whom she named Alois, was born, on the morning of June 7, 1837, out of wedlock, to the peasant maid Maria Anna Schicklgruber in the hamlet of Strones in the Austrian Waldviertel.

The Waldviertel, which literally translates as the “Wooden Quarter” or “Forest Quarter”, was one of the Austrian monarchy’s backwaters, a hilly “country of peasant villages and small farms, and though only some fifty miles from Vienna it has a somewhat remote and impoverished air, as if the main currents of Austrian life had passed it by.” (2) It is located slightly north-east of Linz, respectively north-west of Vienna, between the Danube River and the Czech border in the direction of Brno. It is a borderland and has seen its shares of marauding armies over the centuries. German tribes on the way to the treasures and temptations of the Roman Empire had crossed through the land which the Romans called “Noricum”, followed by the Huns, various tribes of Goths, the Hungarians and finally the Turks. It had seen armies in the Thirty-Years-War and the Napoleonic Wars; only after the Congress of Vienna a century of peace graced its gently rolling hills.

Peasants of the Waldviertel

The name “Hitler”, variably spelled “Hidler”, “Hiedler”, “Hüttler”, “Hietler”, “Hytler” or “Hittler” was one of the more common names in the district. It is documented as early as 1435, when the Abbot of the Herzogenburg Monastery drew up a deed granting to Hannsen Hydler and his wife property near Raabs, on the Thaya River. (3) The etymology of the name indicates a possible derivation from the German word “Heide” [in English “heather”, relating to a meadow], of which the Waldviertel was full. All of Alois’ life occurred within a radius of one hundred miles of Linz, then as now the capital of the province of Oberösterreich, Upper Austria.

Little is known about Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandmother Maria Schicklgruber. The tiny village of Strones where she lived was far too small to be a parish of its own, and thus baby Alois had to be registered in the slightly bigger village of Döllersheim, a couple of miles to the north-west. It was generally known that the baby was born out of wedlock and therefore was, strictly speaking, “illegitimate”. Many theories have been spun and explanations offered in which this circumstance supposedly played the one or other role in Alois Hitler’s life or in that of his son Adolf, and they are all bunkum. The reality of the Waldviertel dictated that “legitimacy” was a concept the peasants simply could not afford to pay heed to, and which occasioned no advantages in their daily lives. “Illegitimacy” might have been a significant problem for the heir of a throne or the prospective owner of land, a shop or business, but not to farmhands and share croppers. It was a common occurrence, and there is not the slightest indication that Alois ever suffered from an imagined stigma attached to it. There were no empires to bestow on Alois, and his son took them regardless of a court’s permission.

The Remains of the Hamlet Strones

Another disparaging theory was circulated in the early 1930s regarding Adolf Hitler’s parental grandfather. Alois, the rumours held, was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Jewish merchant from Graz named Frankenberger or Frankenreither, who had seduced Maria, who was working as a maid in his household – in a variation of the theme, the merchant’s son was the debaucher, and his father paid for the girl’s discretion.

Such a story, if true, would naturally be a feast for Hitler’s political enemies. After a few Austrian newspapers had come up with it during the German general election campaign of 1930, the allegations resurfaced when Hitler ran for German president against Hindenburg in 1932. At length, Hitler dispatched his legal counsellor Hans Frank to investigate. The lawyer was told that the nineteen-year-old son of a Mr. Frankenberger from Graz was the culprit, whose father had allegedly paid alimonies to Fräulein Schicklgruber for fourteen years; a variance of the story had Mr. Frankenberger and his lecherous son in Linz, not Graz. There was, however, not a shred of evidence available in either town, no trace of payments, and hence the story slowly died. Research in the Austrian and Jewish records of Graz and Linz undertaken after 1945 established conclusively that no Jewish families had been allowed to settle in either town before the 1860s, twenty years after Alois’ birth. Neither were there any Frankenbergers or Frankenreiters at all, and thus the bottom fell out of the story for good.

Photograph rumoured to show Alois’ Birthplace
Weitra Today

The first five years of Alois Schicklgruber’s life were spent in Strones with his mother, who married, in 1842, a seldom employed millworker named Johann Georg Hiedler from the nearby hamlet of Spital near Weitra. [FN1] The marriage seems not to have changed much: the couple lived in abject poverty, and after Maria died five years later of tuberculosis and Johann Georg re-entered the vagrant lifestyle, the child passed into the wardship of Johann Georg Hiedler’s brother Johann Nepomuk Hüttler of Spital, House # 36. This wardship gave rise to a fair amount of village gossip: rumour control asserted that Johann Nepomuk was, in fact, the biological father of the boy.

[FN1] The name “Spital” is a common name for Austrian villages and towns, and the village of Spital in Lower Austria, which plays a role here, must not be confused with the town of Spital in Carinthia, whither, for example, historian Marlis Steinert puts Johann Nepomuk Hüttler.

Nobody knows who Alois’ father truly was, and it is possible that Maria did not know herself. In this time and place, sexual relations among farmhands were essentially unregulated, babies born out of wedlock numerous and considered welcome additions to the work force if they survived early childhood.

More interesting than idle speculation about the identity of Adolf Hitler’s grandfather is the question of why Alois’ original birth certificate underwent rewriting, tampering and forgery in the summer of 1876, when he was already thirty- nine years old. What had happened in the meantime that could explain such an act?

In 1850, at the age of thirteen, Alois ran away from home, a fact that allows an inference or two about the circumstances or happiness of his childhood. He fled to Vienna, where he quickly found employment as apprentice to a cobbler. He finished, as far as we know, the four years standard apprenticeship and became a shoemaker, but soon quit this profession and enlisted in the Austrian civil service. He passed the entrance examination, which seems quite an achievement since he had enjoyed little schooling at home, and was accepted to serve in the Customs division of the Austrian financial administration. In “Mein Kampf, son Adolf described his father’s arrival in the Austrian capital as follows:

“As the son of a poor cottager, he [Alois] could not even in those early days bear to stay at home. Before he was thirteen, the youngster laced his tiny knapsack and fled from his homeland, the Waldviertel. Despite all the attempts of “experienced” villagers to dissuade him, he made his own way to Vienna in order to learn a trade.

This was in the fifties of the last century. It was a bitter decision to take the road and plunge into the unknown with only three Gulden for travel money. But by the time the thirteen-year-old had grown to seventeen, he had passed his apprentice’s examination [as a cobbler], but was not yet content with his lot – quite to the contrary. The long period of hardship, the endless poverty and misery he had suffered, strengthened his determination to give up the trade in order to become something “better”.

Once the village priest had seemed to the poor boy the embodiment of all humanly attainable heights, so now, in the great city, which had so powerfully widened his perspective, it was the rank of civil servant. With all the tenacity of a young man, who had grown “old” in suffering and sorrow while still half a child, the seventeen-year-old clung to his new decision – and he became a civil servant.” (4)

These words must be read with the knowledge that Adolf Hitler was on the record to regard his father with feelings closer to hate than love, but here he attempts to draw a picture of success, which was to contrast sharply to the opinions he shared in private, or at his headquarters’ dinner tables in the Second World War. More than from the laundered account of his father in “Mein Kampf” we can infer, regarding the happiness of the family Adolf grew up in, from the fact that Alois’ first son Alois Jr., Adolf’s half-brother, left this home at the same age of thirteen as his father had, never to return.

Meanwhile, the stations of Alois Schicklgruber’s rise to a somewhat respectable position in the Customs department – the highest to which he could aspire, given his limited education – followed the predictable patterns of civil service careers; that is, moving through the ranks and around the country. Originally attached as a most junior servant to the Austrian Ministry of Finance in 1855, he was relatively quickly promoted. In the year 1861 we find him as a supervisor in Saalfelden, Tyrolia, and in 1864 as an assistant in the bigger Customs office in Linz. In 1870, he was moved again, to Mariahilf, a change that was sweetened by a promotion to assistant collector. A year later he arrived in the small border town of Braunau at the Inn River, with the rank of Senior Assistant; he grew to like the little town and stayed for almost two decades. In 1875, he was promoted to Assistant Customs Inspector. His career was not spectacular per se, but it was a decent calling for a man of his origins and, apparently, that was what his family thought when they concocted a scheme to bestow upon him a dollop of enhanced respectability.

Braunau City Centre

On June 6, 1876, Alois and three of his friends – Josef Romeder, who was one of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s sons- in-law, Johann Breiteneder and Engelbert Paukh – paid a visit to the public notary Josef Penkner in the small town of Weitra, not far from Alois’ birthplace Strones. The notary was paid to prepare for Alois a “LEGALISIRUNGS-PROTOCOLL“, a protocol of legitimization for his birth. The three friends attested that Johann Georg Hiedler, he of the vagrant lifestyle (whom they had known well, they said), had attested to them at various times that he was, in fact, the biological father of Alois Schicklgruber, whom he planned to legitimize one day. The document was drawn up, the witnesses signed, but for a reason that remains unexplained, the paper featured Alois’ new family name in the form “Hitler”, not as “Hiedler” or “Hüttler”. Beweaponed with this document, the posse made its way to the little town of Döllersheim on the next morning, where they paid a visit to the local priest, Father Josef Zahnschirm, upon whom they played a “cunning peasant trick”. (5)

Döllersheim, Church and Cemetery

On the power of the notarized document, and perhaps a contribution to the church funds, Father Zahnschirm agreed to make a few changes to Alois Schicklgruber’s baptismal record. The original birth certificate featured blanks in the space for the name of the father and the field for remarks. The blanks were now filled by entering “Georg Hitler. Cat.rel., Living in Spital” as the father, and under “Remarks” that …

“The undersigned witnesses hereby confirm that Georg Hitler, who was well-known to them, acknowledged paternity of the child Alois, son of Anna Schicklgruber, and they requested that his name be entered in the baptismal register. +++ Josef Romeder, Witness, +++ Johann Breiteneder, Witness, +++ Engelbert Paukh, Witness.” (6)

Legalisierungs-Protocoll by Notary Josef Penkner (Joachimsthaler, Anton, “Hitlers Weg begann in München 1913 – 1923”, Herbig-Verlag, ISBN 3-7766-2155-9, p. 15

Speculations about this mission abound. Some private family business may have played a role; rumours tied Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, who had been so conspicuously absent in Weitra and Döllersheim, into the drama; “There was village gossip that Alois was his natural son.” (7)

The net result of the clandestine affair was that Alois Schicklgruber was now Alois Hitler. Father Zahnschirm had clearly been lied to when he was told that Johann Georg Hiedler was still alive [“Living in Spital“], but the churchman may have had his own thoughts about the procedure from the beginning, as had, apparently, the witnesses: the priest “forgot” to date and sign for the changes, and the witnesses had turned illiterate, signing with crosses, which could be explained as errors, should the need arise. The climax of the play came when the improved birth certificate was registered at the nearest Austrian chancery in Mistelbach. [FN2]

[FN2] Marlis Steinert followed up on the Austrian government’s subsequent authentication of the fraud: “A correspondence between the priest, the communal administration and the Financial Office in Braunau confirmed the legal validation of the  document  per matrimonium subsequens [due to Georg’s marriage to Maria Anna five years after Alois’ birth], citing a decree of the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna from September 12, 1868, in which such legitimations should be granted as far as possible.” (9)

The formerly illegitimate Alois Schicklgruber was now Alois Hitler, civil servant and owner of a gold-buttoned uniform; when he, half a year after Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s death, bought a farm for the proud sum of five thousand florins in cash; the village gossip nodding – conclusions confirmed.

Alois had gone through a number of romantic entanglements in his life, and had sampled experience in holy matrimony as well. He had married for the first time on October 1873 at thirty-six years of age, although it seems that at this time he had already fathered a child in a different relation. (8) At any rate, the marriage seems to have been built on reasons superior to love alone: the bride, Anna Glassl-Hoerer, was the daughter of a high-ranking financial officer, an inspector in the Treasury’s Bureau of Tobacco, fourteen years older than her husband and of ill health. Nobody would have been surprised had status and finances played a role in the match.

Due to the frequent changes of assignment, Alois had made it a habit to lodge in Gasthäusern, inns, for the greater part of his life, and these lodgings brought him into daily contact with waitresses, chambermaids, laundresses and tobacco girls, whether he liked it or not. Apparently he did not mind, and he did possess the most important condition to warrant female attention, a steady job and hence a steady income. By the time Anna filed for separation in 1880, perhaps tired of his infidelities, he had quite openly conducted an affair with the waitress of the Gasthaus Streif, a girl named Franziska (Fanny) Matzelsberger, for some time.

Yet the relation to Fanny did not preclude Alois, as it seems, from experiencing an urgent need for another maidservant, and he soon installed another young girl of sixteen years in his mansard under the roof of the inn; a slender, attractive girl named Klara Pölzl. The idea met with the furious opposition from Franziska, who had zero doubt about the nature of the services Klara would be asked to perform for Alois, and she succeeded in having the competition thrown out quickly. In due time Franziska bore a son to Alois Hitler, who was named Alois Junior, on January 13, 1882. When Anna, who had in the meantime obtained a legal decree of separation, died in the following year of consumption, Alois was free to marry Franziska. She soon bore Alois another child, a girl named Angela.

Alois’ Workplace – the Customs Station at the Inn River Bridge …

At this time Alois officially decided to accept the paternity of the children and had Alois Jr. and Angela legitimized. It was an outward sign of his striving for recognition and respectability, which were what counted in this deeply authoritative society. He had a gratifying career and money to spend; he earned more than, for instance, the local school principal. He was in his “best years” and loved to have his photo taken, in uniform. A question remains as far as the sympathies of his colleagues at work are concerned; one source describes him as “rigid and pedantic“, yet these would be qualities his employer might favour and may explain his success. In a letter to a cousin who had inquired about a job for his son, Alois drew the following portrait of himself and his profession:

“Don’t let him think that the ‘Finanzwach’ [Fiscal Service] is a kind of game, because he will quickly be disillusioned. First, he has to show absolute obedience to his superiors at all levels. Second, there is a good deal to learn in this occupation, all the more so if he had little previous education. Topers, debtors, card players, and others who lead immoral lives cannot enlist. Finally, one has to go out on duty in all weathers, day or night.” (10)

Characteristically, Alois’ enumeration of “immoral” lifestyles did not include dubious and perhaps illicit contacts to waitresses and chambermaids, nor illegitimate babies. But a shadow soon appeared on his private horizon; a short time after giving birth to Angela, Franziska developed tuberculosis, as Anna had, and was forced to leave Braunau to seek a cure in mountain air. Alois was suddenly left alone with two small children on the top floor of the inn, and since his career as Customs official had not prepared him for the care of toddlers, he reimported Klara as soon as Franziska had left town. Klara Pölzl was actually Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s granddaughter, and therefore Alois’ niece, in the context of which the closeness of family relations in the Waldviertel may be observed again. One photo of Klara has survived. She was tall and slender, almost as tall as her husband, had very regular and attractive features framed by brown hair; not a beauty but what is called in France a “belle laide”, an interesting girl. The outstanding aspect of her face was certainly her voluminous turquoise eyes. By all accounts she was neat, simple, and loving. Her education was close to nil, but, then again, the sources agree that she behaved correctly in public and had no problems with the role of being the common-law wife of a Customs official. In private, she was known as a most efficient housekeeper, cook, organizer, and nurse to the children.

The community in Braunau accepted her without qualms, which is somewhat surprising: it was one of these little towns in which the neighbours take an interest in everything that is not their business. In the summer of 1884, Franziska died of consumption, as Anna had earlier, and Klara was already pregnant. Alois wanted to marry her, but now the manipulation of the birth certificate backfired: since the former Alois Schicklgruber was now Alois Hitler, he was officially Klara’s uncle and no marriage was possible under the laws of the Austrian Catholic church unless a dispensation was granted. With the aid of the local priest, Alois composed a letter to the Bishop of Linz, which has survived:

“Most Revered Episcopate!

Those who with most humble devotion have appended their signatures below have decided upon marriage. But according to the enclosed family tree, they are prevented by the canonical impediment of collateral affinity in the third degree, touching second. They therefore make the humble request that the Most Revered Episcopate will graciously secure for them a dispensation on the following grounds:

The bridegroom has been a widower since August 10th of this year, as can be observed from the enclosed death certificate, and he is the father of two minors, a boy of two and a half years (Alois) and a girl of  one year and two months (Angela), and they both need the services of a nurse, all the more because he is a Customs official away from home all day and often at night and therefore in no position to supervise the education and upbringing of his children. The bride has been caring for these children ever since their mother’s death, and they are very fond of her.

Thus, it may be justifiably assumed that they will be well brought up and the marriage will be a happy one. Moreover, the bride is without means, and it is unlikely that she will ever have another opportunity to make a good marriage. For these reasons the undersigned repeat their humble petition for a gracious procurement of dispensation from the impediment of affinity.

Braunau am Inn, 27. October 1884                                                  

Alois Hitler, Bridegroom – Klara Pölzl, Bride” (11)

Enclosed was a version of the family tree, which presented Alois Hitler as the son of Johann Georg Hiedler, the vagrant, whose brother Johann Nepomuk Hüttler was the grandfather of Klara Pölzl, the bride. We will have the opportunity to encounter a letter or two written by the young Adolf, Alois’ son, in a later post, and they will sound oddly similar in diction and style to the epistle above. Alois’ petition for a dispensation reeks of the same sort of not very sublime deception that he had employed in the “improvement” of his original birth certificate; what John Toland had called the “cunning peasant trick“. The son was to employ similar tactics in his own time.

The addressee, the Bishop of Linz, hesitated, and decided, following proper bureaucratic procedure, to call upon a higher authority. A short summary of the case, including the original letter, family tree and a “testimonium paupertatis“, an instrument of declaring poverty which waived the payment of the usual fees, was forwarded to the Sacra Rota, the department of the Holy See that deals with matrimonial issues. The Vatican apparently cared as much or little about a wee bit of incest in Braunau as the peasants of the Waldviertel cared about legitimacy, and the release was granted three weeks later.

Braunau, Church

Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl were married on January 7, 1885. The ceremony took place in the morning, in a hurry, it seems: Klara complained that before noon, “my husband was already on duty again.” (12) Later in the evening, a small banquet in the company of Alois’ Customs colleagues followed at the Gasthaus Pommer.

The Gasthaus Pommer in 1934 (with Nazi Flag), in which the couple also took residence

Marriage hardly changed anything in their lives. The pair had known each other for years, and Klara was accustomed to her duties in the household. She was a simple but quiet, modest and polite woman that never put up demands on her husband, the children, or the community. She was deeply religious and attended services regularly. The family lived without any trace of scandal, even Alois’ private investigations into the lives of the local waitresses and chambermaids seemed to abate. Money was not plenty but sufficient to afford the family a proper living standard, and they played their parts in the community without fail.

If we gaze at Klara’s photograph, taken when she was about twenty-six, we look into the face of a simple but pleasant country girl. The most impressive feature of her face are indeed her luminous, expressive eyes. Robert Payne observed:

In the photograph she looks vulnerable, but not too vulnerable. She was a spirited woman, who could, if necessary, stand up to her husband. She was not beautiful in the conventional sense, but her face suggests an uncommon gentleness and tenderness, an essential goodness. She was one of these women who live for their husbands, their children, and their faith. (13)

She was to bear six children to Alois, four sons and two daughters, of which one each survived childhood. The elder children Alois Jr. and Angela were joined by Adolf in April 1889 and Paula in January 1896. Four children died young: Gustav at the age of two; Ida at the same age; Otto died in the cradle, and Edmund in his sixth year. [FN3]

[FN3] It seems that the fate of the Hitler family was no exception. A boyhood friend of Adolf, August Kubizek, described the early trials of his freshly-married parents as follows: “At first the young couple lived in the house of my mother’s parents. My father’s wages were low, the work was hard, and my mother had to give up her job when she was expecting me. Thus, I was born in rather miserable circumstances. One year later my sister Maria was born, but died at a tender age. The following year, Therese appeared; she died at the age of four. My third sister, Karoline, fell desperately ill, lingered on for some years, and died when she was eight. My mother’s grief was boundless. Throughout her life she suffered from the fear of losing me, too; for I was the only one left to her of her four children.” (14)

At this point in time and place, such a mortality rate was considered almost normal. Children were born and died by the thousands, of measles, diphtheria, pneumonia and other common childhood diseases; deadly in a time which knew not yet sulphonamides or penicillin. The family was in the care of Dr. Eduard Bloch, a general practitioner, but the science of microbiology was not yet invented and the invisible agents of death prospered unhindered.

In general, however, it was a respectable and orderly family which welcomed, at six o’clock in the evening of April 20, 1889, its newest member, Adolfus.

Birth Certificate
Baby Adolf
Announcement of Birth in the local newspaper …
At the parental graveside 1938

(1) Zweig, Stefan Die Welt von Gestern, Gutenberg, Kap.3

(2) Shirer, William, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon & Schuster 1960, ISBN 978-1-4516-4259-9 (hc.), S. 7

(3) (6) (10) (11) (13) Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, Praeger Publishers 1973, Lib. Con. 72- 92891 (hc.), S. 5, S. 6-7, S. 10, S. 12, S. 14

(4) Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, 851.–855. Auflage 1943, Alle Rechte vorbehalten Copyright Band I 1925, Band II 1927 by Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H., München, S. 2-3, Online Link

(5) (7) (12) Toland, John, Adolf Hitler, Anchor Books 1992, ISBN 0-385-42053-6 (pbk.), S. 4, S. 4, S. 6

(8) (9) Steinert, Marlis, Hitler, C.H. Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-37640-1 (hc.), S. 17, S. 18

(14) Kubizek, August, The Young Hitler I Knew, Arcade Books 2011, ISBN 978-1-61145-058-3 (pbk.), S. 23

(© John Vincent Palatine 2015/19)

Hits: 539

Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Adolf Hitler down and out in Vienna

Beggars fed at a Vienna Church AD 1900

Preceding Posts: In Austria Before the War [Hitler’s Parents]

Children of the Lesser Men [Adolf Hitler’s Childhood]

The Flights of Fancy [Adolf Hitler in School]

Adolf Hitler’s Boyhood Friend [August Kubizek]

The Love Goddess [Stefanie Rabatsch, née Isak]


New Videos: American Video-Clip about the Putsch 1923 and A Kiss from a Fan at the Olympics 1936


Residency Card from Sechshauserstrasse # 56, Summer 1909

Sometimes a man feels as if the very fortunes of his life are hinged upon a fragile pendulum, which follows wholly foreordained yet enigmatic movements. It is a mystery, the more confusing since we cannot determine, at any given time, our own position on this cosmic scale without invariably changing the oscillation’s period or direction. In other words, we may find out where we presently are, but not whether we are moving up or down on the scales of fortune, for each of our actions or omissions has an impact on our future that we cannot truly calculate. When Adolf Hitler quit on his friend August Kubizek in the fall of 1908 and disappeared in the capital’s anonymous crowds, he challenged Fortuna by personal defiance.

Residency Card from Sechshauserstrasse, Summer 1909

Robert Payne portrays the impact of being on one’s own in a big town:

When a man sinks into poverty and misery in a vast city, many strange things happen to him. If he is without family or friends and has no roots, he very quickly becomes the prey of delusions.

Mysterious voices speak to him, a stranger suddenly glancing at him in the street will fill him with panic, and he believes that a scrap of newspaper blown by the wind to his feet conveys a message from some higher powers.

In his loneliness and terror, he learns that he has entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties, a country in which he is a foreigner possessing no right or privileges, at the mercy of everyone and most of all at the mercy of officials, a hunted creature who feels no security even when he is alone at night in the darkness of his own room.

We know much more about these lonely, alienated people than we did fifty years ago, perhaps because modern society creates more of them. We know the complicated contrivances they invent to maintain a sense of human dignity, and we can trace step by step how the shreds of human dignity are torn from them or salvaged in unpredictable ways.

Panhandling Veterans

Such men are on the mercy of the seasons, for warm days give them spurious courage and winter reduces them to shivering incoherence. They talk interminably to themselves and cling desperately to their fantasies. The blue stain on the wall, the stone picked up long ago, the string tied around the middle finger, all these become fetishes without which life would become unendurable.

We know too, that poverty has its own in-built compensations. In “Down and Out in Paris or London”, George Orwell describes the strange, dull euphoria that comes with extreme poverty.

“You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming future of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent, for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.

The subterranean homeless asylum “Die Gruft”, Mariahilfer Street, Vienna, in the year 2000 – little has changed since Hitler’s days …

You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, “I shall be starving in a day or two -shocking, isn’t it?” And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.

But there are many consolations to poverty, and even apathy becomes exhausting in time. For a nineteen-year-old youth [Hitler] who dreamed of becoming a great artist, the consolation was more likely to be found in fantasies of his own towering eminence in the arts, to the discomfiture of all those who had hindered his progress.” (1)

After having participated in the autumnal manoeuvres of his regiment,  August Kubizek (Adolf´s only friend then) returned to Vienna in late November 1908. He had, of course, informed his friend of his arrival and thus was baffled when Adolf never showed up at the train station. Gustl concluded that only something of utmost importance, without doubt, some sort of emergency, could have compelled his friend’s absence and rushed to Stumpergasse.

Vienna’s Academy of the Fine Arts, which rejected Hitler twice, in 1907 and 1908, possibly a third time in 1910 or 1911

Frau Zakreys, the landlady, had no idea where Adolf was. He had given her notice on November 18, paid up the rent until the end of the month and disappeared without leaving a forwarding address or message. She had already taken in another lodger. Gustl found a new domicile, in a nearby inn, and heard nothing more from his friend for many years to come. When he was in Linz over the Christmas holidays, he visited the Raubals, but Angela (Adolf´s half-sister) almost brusquely informed him that they had no idea where Adolf lived and blamed August for supporting Adolf’s artistic dreams. After this Kubizek had no more contact with the Hitler family until, twenty-five years later, his boyhood pal had become the new chancellor of Germany.

Angela Hitler and her first husband Leo Raubal

At this time, and still today, every change in address had to be brought to the attention of the police [FN1] – essentially as a means to keep track of the men of military age. Adolf registered his new address with the police on November 19, 1908, as Room # 16, Felberstrasse 22, c/o Frau Helene Riedl, in the XVth District, right at the Westbahnhof, where he lived until August 21, 1909, as a “Student”. (2)

[FN1] Franz Jetzinger et al. have argued that Gustl could have easily found out Adolf’s new address via the Meldeamt, the Registration office. This is not entirely accurate, because these files were not public and generally available only to the police, courts and the military. Cf. Jones, J. Sydney, p. 291 [Infra]

Western Railway Station and Felberstraße around 1900

It was obvious that the second Academic rejection had put Hitler in a funk, and it is quite possible that he simply did not have the nerve to tell Gustl of the repeated failure. One thing about the move, however, remains a mystery: the new room was bigger and thus more expensive than the habitat at Frau Zakreys. It has been speculated that the sudden flight from the Stumpergasse was pursued to hide something or someone from Gustl, perhaps a girl. But for a dearth of proof, we can only hypothesize about Hitler’s reasons, as we must when we face the question of whence the money came for the higher rent.

This is the period in Hitler’s life we know least about. Something decisive must have occurred in addition to the second Academy fiasco. We do know that he spent about eight months in the Felberstrasse room, including his twentieth birthday on April 20, 1909. Decades later, a few of his neighbours have come forward with dim memories of a polite young man who appeared somewhat distant, occupied with his own affairs. There was a café nearby he used to visit, the Café Kubata, and from there we have some vague indicators that he may have spent some time in female company. Maria Wohlrab, née Kubata, said that she saw him often in the company of a girl which was, perhaps, named “Wetti” or “Pepi”. Frau Christa Schröder, from the 1920s on Hitler’s long-time secretary, insisted that her chef had mentioned to her, more than once, that he had a “beloved” at that time in Vienna named “Emilie”. The cashier at the Café Kubata later remembered that she liked the young man because “he was very reserved and quiet, and would read books and seemed very serious, unlike the rest of the young men.” (3)

The cost of the Felberstrasse apartment, whether he used it alone or not, may have put too much of a strain on Hitler’s finances, which were by now most probably limited to the twenty-five crowns orphan assistance he still received each month. He moved again, on August 21, 1909, this time as a “Writer”, to Sechshauserstrasse 56, 2nd Floor, Room 21, c/o Frau Antonie Oberlechner, in the XIVth District. It was very close to the Felberstrasse but probably cheaper, for the Sechshauserstrasse was a thoroughfare with lots of street noise and trolley traffic. (4)

On the move – November 1908 until September 1909

Things did not improve, it seems. Less than four weeks later, on September 16, 1909, he left Sechshauserstrasse without registering a forward address. He must have been close to the end of the rope: for about three months his tracks are lost within the multitudes of Vienna’s poor, in the anonymity of the homeless and indigent.

On September 16, 1909, Hitler leaves Sechshauserstraße 56 in the XIVth District, c/o Mrs Antonie Oberlechner, where he had lived, and got lost amid Vienna’s homeless …

The days of his vagrancy forced him, alike the myriads that shared his fate, to seek shelter from the cold of the impending winter in parks, alleys, doorways and ditches. A favourite place was Vienna’s amusement park “Prater“, which was mostly inactive in winter and provided lots of benches, for which the competition was intense. He may well, as many others did, have tried to sleep in coffee houses, bars or flophouses, in the waiting rooms of train stations or the warming rooms of the city’s charities. In Mein Kampf, he admitted that “even now I shudder when I think of these pitiful dens, the shelters and lodging houses, those sinister pictures of dirt and repugnant filth and worse still.” (5) The sheer size of vagrancy in the Austrian capital was beyond belief – the journalist Max Winter bequeathed us more than 1500 articles on the phenomenon:

In the single week between January 10th and 16th, 1901, the six warming rooms of the Vienna Charity Association were visited in daytime by 29,202 men, 17,291 women and 39,801 children – that is, a total of 86,294 people within seven days. During night-time, 4641 men, 259 women and eleven children, together 4911 people, visited the rooms in addition.”

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/undercover-im-wiener-elend-vor-150-jahren-wurde-der.871.de.html?dram:article_id=467195

So arduous was his pecuniary distress that he had to sell his art materials and most of his clothing; an endeavour ill-suited to the falling temperatures. To add insult to injury, the winter of 1909/10 turned out the most frightful in decades and one day Hitler had to admit defeat to Vienna’s weather gods: one cold December evening, he showed up in the workers’ suburb of Meidling; more precisely in the long row of derelict wretches who waited for admission to the Asyl für Obdachlose, the “Asylum for the Homeless”.

The Asylum, Untere Meidlinger Street 3, built 1908

The Asylum, “which in consideration for the decent citizens was built behind the Meidlinger cemetery, far from the residents” (6) but near the southern railway station, had only been opened in 1908. Together with a similar institution in the 3rd District, it was operated by the “Shelter Association for the Homeless“, a charity which financed itself by private donations and received an annual subsidy from the city. (7) Yet the association had to fight windmills in its constant struggle against the three related issues that plagued the poor: poverty resulted in homelessness, homelessness resulted in disease, and disease resulted in a loss of employment. Imperial Vienna, we mentioned it, was at that time a metropolis of over two million inhabitants, the sixth-biggest town on earth, and certainly, more than a quarter-million of its denizens were relegated to perpetual poverty. Many of the losers came from the outer provinces of the Empire, the East or the South, and lacked a suitable command of the German language, which in turn decreased their chances of employment. Worse, they lacked the kind of survival instincts that apply to a city, as opposed to those applicable at their rural places of origin.

The Meidlinger shelter was a sturdy affair, offering refuge for about one thousand souls. Unlike other charities it allowed occupants to stay for one week only (a stipulation that could be circumvented), but it offered an advantage most other places lacked: it would take in whole families and their children, not only single men. It promoted self-help as well: everybody, health permitting, was called upon to aid in the cleaning and maintenance of the building, to keep operating costs at a minimum. The building was not too dreary, thanks to its recent pedigree; there were washing facilities, showers and numerous toilets, all of them kept spotlessly clean. Two meals a day were supplied, soup and sandwich, for breakfast and supper; the dormitories featured the usual military-style cots, lined up with the precision of a battalion on parade. During daylight hours the occupants were expected to leave the shelter, preferably in search of employment; loitering was frowned upon and could easily lead to eviction.

One of Hitler’s better efforts – a scene on a lake

Much as he disliked it, Hitler had to pass through the ritual of admission; establishing membership in the community of misery. The shiverlings began to line up outside of the main gate when darkness fell, around 5 pm, and when the doors of the institution opened, two rows of bodies filed in quietly: men to the right, woman and children to the left. Hitler received, as everybody else did, a ticket that entitled him to the statutory one week of lodging and was assigned a brass cot in one of the dormitories. It must have been exceedingly onerous for a man who was used to his privacy as much as Hitler was, to face one’s first experience with public showers and delousation procedures. His proud sense of individuality must have vanished at the latest when he joined the herd of occupants heading to the mess hall for dinner. As John Toland observed, “it would be difficult for anyone but another recipient of institutionalized charity to understand the shame suffered by a proud young man on his first day within the gates of such an establishment.” (8)

For a man so much accustomed to his freedom, the asylum certainly felt like a prison. One can imagine how he sat, completely lost, on a cot in a large hall with hundreds of strangers, each of whom was more familiar with the situation than he was. It was perhaps his impersonation of a lost kitten that convinced his cot neighbour, an on-and-off servant and waiter named Reinhold Hanisch, to take care of him and to show him the ropes. Although Hanisch by himself is a problem as a witness – when he met Hitler he had already been to jail more than once, lived habitually under false names and doctored birth certificates, and in later years counterfeited Hitler paintings – some parts of his memoir that the American magazine The New Republic printed in 1939 – ­posthumously – under the title “Reinhold Hanisch: I Was Hitler’s Buddy”, ring true, among much that has been proven false or at least misleading. [FN2] Unlike Hitler, Hanisch was a professional utilizer of charity-assisted lifestyles, was familiar with the inner workings of the asylum and every other such house in Vienna and also an expert in the general survival strategies of vagrants. He proved his value instantly: one of the first tricks he taught Hitler was how to circumvent the lodging limitation; all one had to do was buy, for a few pennies, the unused portions of the admittance cards of those occupants who, for a variety of reasons, left without having used up their allotment. Thus, the first danger of having to return into the cold was banned and Hitler began to appreciate his new acquaintance.

[FN2] Brigitte Hamann provides an excellent overview about the sources on Hitler’s years in the Men’s Hostel, and discusses in which instants Hanisch can be trusted and when not (“Hitler’s Vienna“, see quotes below, p. 184 ff.).

Reinhold Hanisch came from the Sudetenland, the northern, German part of Bohemia, being born January 27, 1884, at Grünwald (Mšeno nad Nisou) near Gablenz, but had travelled extensively and thus was able to tell his new friend many stories about Germany, Adolf’s promised land. Hanisch also hedged a few dreams of becoming an artist and immediately recognized a related soul in Hitler. Hanisch had seen and could relate the tales of towns and castles, cathedrals and monasteries, mountains and rivers.

To make things more entertaining for Adolf, it turned out that Hanisch had worked in Braunau for some time, and they began to exchange reminiscences of the town. As it frequently happens, common knowledge and common interests breed trust, and soon they talked incessantly. That is, until Hanisch found a new job and moved, on December 21, 1909, to Hermanngasse 16 in the IInd District, and, on February 11, 1910, on to Herzgasse 3/4, in the Xth District. (9)

After a few days of listening to Hanisch, Hitler had memorized the basic rules of street life, and they developed a kind of daily routine. In the morning they set out on the rather long walk to St. Katherine’s Convent near Adolf’s old haunts at the Westbahnhof to queue up for the soup the nuns passed out at noon, then on to one of the warming rooms operated by the philanthropic societies or into the relative warmth of a railway station. In the afternoon, they would be trying to sneak up a snack at the Salvation Army before heading back to the asylum in time to be among the first in the waiting line. Occasionally men were sought for a day or two of work in ditch digging, snow shovelling or luggage handling at a train station, but Hanisch quickly realized that Hitler was too weak for these incidental jobs. Neither did Adolf have any talent for begging, although he acquired from an asylum comrade the addresses of “soft touches”, prospective donors. He received “specific instructions for each customer; for example, he was to greet an old lady on the Schottenring with a “Praised be Jesus Christ”, and then say he was an unemployed church painter or a woodcutter of holy figures. Usually, she gave two Kronen for such a story, but Hitler only got religious platitudes for his trouble.” (10) The nuns of St. Katherine’s were one of the few reliable addresses in town.

A la longue, Hanisch realized that, while practically all the outcasts of the capital did beg, very few did paint, and derived a plan of profiting from Adolf’s artistic abilities. We do not know exactly when the idea came up; either during the two months Hitler spent at the Asylum in Meidling or later at the Men’s Hostel in the Meldemannstrasse, but, at any rate, Hanisch convinced his friend that the best way to make some direly needed cash was to paint small scenes or postcards and sell them. When Hitler objected that he had no more painting utensils, was too shabbily dressed to sell anything and not a great salesman to boot, the plan was amended and the labour divided: Adolf would do the painting and Hanisch the selling, for a fifty per cent commission. (11)

There was the tricky issue that the two prospective entrepreneurs did not have a licence, but Hanisch assured his friend that such petty regulations could be outflanked by moving their point of sale into the dim and grey, smoke-filled taverns of the city, of which Hanisch, having worked in many, had an encyclopaedic knowledge. In regard to the painting materials, Hanisch proposed to apply to the generosity of Adolf’s family. The Cafe Arthaber, conveniently located near the Meidling train station, was known to provide pen and paper for the vagrants if they paid the universal entry fee – the price of a cup of coffee. Adolf wrote a letter, either to Aunt Johanna or to Angela, and a few days later a fifty crown note arrived poste restante. (12) “The money probably saved his life, for it gave him renewed hope at a time when he had little to hope for.” (13)

All the petty possessions he had accumulated in the preceding years had long since disappeared. It is quite possible that an irate landlady seized some in lieu of rent, but in his pitiful state of existence before the asylum, he may simply have lost most of them – out of sight, out of mind. All the books, manuscripts, paintings, sketches, maps and drawings were lost; gone were the dressy overcoat, top hat and walking stick. Had August met this destitute figure, he might not have recognized him. The young, almost elegant Bohemian had vanished; all that was left was a piece of human flotsam; the debris of the young boy that had urged his playmates to chase the redskins. Only fragments remained of the son Klara had so loved.

The crash of his dream world sent pulses, like ripples, to the outer rims of his consciousness; the remnants of his former self may have caught glimpses of unfamiliar surroundings, seeing but not realizing how he had arrived there. As if arising from hibernation, Adolf found himself in a place of perplexing strangeness and laboured to re-establish the mental cohesion of time and place. In a 1913 letter, he wrote: “The autumn of 1909 was for me an interminably bitter time. I was a young man with no experience, without financial assistance, and too proud to accept it from just anyone, let alone beg for it.” (14) The bitter feeling was real enough, but the last clause was a lie: his true problem with begging was that it did not work for him.

Yet in a sense, the marks of this winter never vanished. In the description of their friendship, August had painted the portrait of a slightly strange, somewhat exotic, a little awkward and sometimes violent young man, who was nonetheless permanently active, if only self-centred; writing, composing an opera, drawing, painting and rebuilding Linz. Now, less than twelve months later, his friend was destitute of mind and body. He had lost weight and his health was doubtful. It has been advocated and indeed seems possible that the innumerable ailments, big and small, that plagued him in later years were rooted in this cold winter, which exacerbated his earlier affliction of the lung and may have weakened his immune system as well.

But not only was he physically exhausted, but his spirit had suffered as well. For long spells he retained the stare common to visionaries and beggars; concentration was sporadic, reason elusive, his passions dull, unless something bothered him. Then he could still erupt in flames, in fierce and biting crescendo arguing, ranting, raging; only to sink back quickly into the comforting anodyne of apathy. He was on the verge of defeat when Hanisch picked him up, but he eventually adapted to the outcast life and gradually things improved.

The Meidlinger asylum, however, while having provided a safety net in the days of calamity and ire, was no place to start Hitler & Hanisch, Postcards Un-Incorporated. A location had to be found which not only allowed long-time tenure but also provided a space where Hitler could paint during the day. Hanisch identified such a place in the Männerheim, the Men’s Hostel, in Brigittenau, Vienna’s newest, the XXth District.

The Männerheim at Meldemannstraße 25 - 29, Vienna
The Männerheim at Meldemannstraße 25 – 29, Vienna

We shall ask Brigitte Hamann (“Hitler’s Vienna”, 1st Ed. Oxford UP 1999, Tauris Parks 2010, ISBN 978-1-84885-277-8) to introduce us to the facility where Adolf Hitler was to live from February 9, 1910, to May 24, 1913. She cites from a report by Viennese journalist Ernst Kläger, who, disguised as a beggar, spent a night at the hostel and wrote an article about it. The area between downtown Vienna and Brigittenau, beyond the Danube Canal, was desolate. Finally, Kläger found the new hostel.

The six-story men’s hostel in Vienna-Brigittenau, 25 – 29 Meldemannstrasse, was among the most modern in Europe. Opened in 1905, it was funded by the private Emperor Francis Joseph Anniversary Foundation for Public Housing and Charitable Institutions, which was financed through donations, receiving significant contributions from Jewish families, particularly from Baron Nathaniel Rothschild and the Gutmann family. The hostel was administered by the City of Vienna. The first blueprints caused a stir during an exhibition in the Künstlerhaus (Artists’ House). The hostel was not to have common sleeping areas but individual compartments for each of its up to 544 guests, excellent hygienic conditions, and many social events to enhance “education and sociability.”

Brigittenau, at the outskirts of the city, had many new industrial plants, a great need for labourers, and the most rapid population growth in all of Vienna’s districts. Its population increased from 37,000 in 1890 to 101,000 in 1910. Most new residents were young single men who worked in the new factories and, because there were no cheap apartments, found places to spend the night as lodgers in overcrowded workers’ apartments.

This new men’s hostel was supposed to decrease the number of lodgers and thus protect the compromised morals of their host families. The foundation’s principal trustee, Prince Carl Auersperg, pointed this out on the occasion of Emperor Franz Joseph’s visit in 1905: “In particular, this men’s hostel seeks to give an actual example of the … chance to effectively fight the pernicious phenomenon of lodging, to offer single labourers a home instead of the dull and overcrowded emergency quarters, providing not only an affordable place to stay but also providing the opportunity to nourish body and mind.”

Rent for one sleeping place was only 2.5 Kronen per week, an amount a single handyman or craftsman with an annual income of 1,000 Kronen [doubtful, see FN1] could afford. In Vienna, the hostel was thus praised as “a miracle of a divine lodging place on earth” and “a marvel of elegance and affordability.”

[FN1] The average monthly wage in 1910 was 54 Kronen (Austrian National Bank). Werner Maser gives the following examples of salaries: “At that time a lawyer’s salary, after one year’s practice in court, was 70 crowns per month, that of a teacher during the first five years of his career, 66 crowns. A post office official earned 60 crowns, while an assistant teacher in a Vienna secondary school before 1914 received a monthly salary of 82 crowns.” (Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler: Legend, Myth and Reality, NY 1971, p.43)

“A large electric arc lamp over the gate guides those who are stumbling up the hill of dug-up soil. Compared to the other, smaller houses around and the bare factory buildings in the back, the shelter looks proud. I open the door and to my surprise find myself in a vestibule which no good hotel would put to shame. I am embraced by comfortable warm air.” The men’s hostel had both electric and gas lights and was heated by a modern, central low-pressure steam heater. At the counter, the reporter had no difficulty in obtaining a ticket for one night for thirty Kreuzers (sixty Hellers; one Krone had 100 Hellers, i.e. cents). Kläger described the dining room in the upper mezzanine: “Again I am pleasantly surprised by the elegance of the room, which is lighted by two arc lamps and whose walls are covered halfway up with pale green tiles.”

Then he tried the dirt-cheap food and found the meals “all very good.” The occupants spent only an average of half a Krone per day for food in the hostel – for breakfast, dinner, and snacks – in other words, only approximately fifteen Kronen per month.

Kläger watched the lodgers: “The door opens constantly, and someone in a bad suit, usually a bag under his arm, enters. One could tell that most occupants were incredibly tired.” Because most of them worked during the day, it was quiet in the afternoon. Yet in the evening “it was lively, gregarious, but by no means boisterous, until around ten-thirty.”

There were kitchenettes with gas rings and kitchen utensils for those who wanted to prepare their own food. Cooking teams were formed: one of the unemployed would remain in the hostel, go shopping, and cook for some of the labourers, and in return could eat for free. Initially, Hitler tried to cook, but with little success, for according to Reinhold Hanisch, the Upper Austrian milk soup he proudly offered had curdled and turned out more like cheese.

Staircase
Staircase

Kläger made his rounds through the shelter and reported: “Right next to the dining room is a large, very nicely furnished reading room with two sections, one for smokers and one for non-smokers. It has dailies and a nice library which is available to the lodgers. Most books are easy-to-digest novels and writings on popular science. There are also desks with the necessary utensils for doing one’s correspondence.” On Sunday afternoons there was entertainment plus the opportunity for continuing education through concerts and lectures. On the lower mezzanine, there were laundry and shoe-shining rooms, luggage and bicycle racks, and a cobbler and tailor room.

Hygienic conditions were exemplary: a house doctor practised for free, offering outpatients services in a “sick room” for minor illnesses. As in all shelters, there was a disinfection room for delousing the newcomers. Apart from lavatories, there were also a shaving room and a shower room with sixteen showers, twenty-five footbaths, and four bathtubs. One bath was twenty-five Heller, about a third of the price in a public bath. All this bore fruit in the cholera year of 1910; the dreaded disease spared the fully occupied men’s hostel.

The sleeping wing, comprising the four top floors, was opened at 8:00 pm and had to be vacated by 9:00 am. It consisted of long rows of tiny, separate sleeping compartments, each measuring 4.6 × 6.9 feet. There was enough room for a bed, a small table, a clothes rack, and a mirror. Permanent guests had their sheets changed every seven days, and one-night guests every day, as in hotels. As an extra convenience, each compartment had a door with a lock and a light bulb. It was probably the first time Hitler had electric light in his room. (15)

A sleeping cubicle, like Hitler’s, at Meldemannstrasse around 1930

Hitler, however, was not prone to sing the praises of the hostel in his later years, for the Führer legend had him sleeping in parks and ditches, which he had done, but only for a few months before moving into the hostel and soon doing comparatively well. For the basic difference between the asylum and the hostel was that the former was the last step, perhaps, before starving or freezing to death, while in the latter, at least in theory, a man could convince himself that he was on the way to a better future. One might be poor but still, harbour a ray of hope.

Here we must return to the problem of Reinhold Hanisch‘s veracity. He claimed that he followed Hitler into the hostel a few days later, and since Hitler had filed his new address at the Männerheim with the police on February 9, Hanisch would have to have arrived soon afterwards. We do know that Hanisch was frequently seen in the hostel, and did indeed pick up Hitler’s paintings to sell them, but he was still registered at that time at Herzgasse 3/4 in the distant Xth District. The records for Adolf are clear: with one small interruption, he stayed at the Männerheim from February 9, 1910, to May 24, 1913, thirty-nine months. He might have left on errands here and there, but for more than three years the building on Meldemannstrasse was his home – for about six Kronen food and lodging per week. Poor as the occupants undoubtedly were, the administration tried hard to keep up their dignity. The men could take correspondence courses, apply for the Social Democratic Party’s job placement program, or read the bibles provided by the Catholic Homeless Association. “Ruhe and Ordnung“, silence and order, were strictly enforced, as was a dress code. All in all, the Männerheim provided a calm, monastic atmosphere in which Hitler nicely fit in, except for some political arguments.

Whether residing in the hostel or not, Hanisch set up their business. The first step was to place Adolf and the art materials recently obtained through Angela‘s or Aunt Johanna’s charity into the reading room, non-smoker section. There was a long oak table close to the window, which provided the natural light Adolf needed. The company now supplied the “market for postcard-sized paintings to be sold in taverns or to art dealers, who acquired them not so much for their artistic value as for filling empty frames.” (16) Soon Hitler had realized which motifs were in demand, mostly local sights and nature, and his postcards and small paintings sold rather quickly.

For a few months, the partnership blossomed. Hanisch was easily able to find buyers in the maze of the backstreets, the lanes that meandered between dark taverns and paltry shops, newsstands and tobacconists, but also in the wine gardens of the Prater, and the art shops in the better quarters of the capital. The sums realized initially hovered between five and ten Kronen, which were split fifty-fifty. A business routine slowly established itself and Hitler’s life stabilized, although he still possessed only a single change of clothing.

The reading rooms were the place where the more educated occupants met, of which there were quite a few former students of the Austrian schools and colleges. They discussed politics and art, money and women, as lonely men do. Some tried to entice neophytes to whatever political cause they believed in, and workers were tolerated in the discussions if they appeared salvageable from the poison of socialism. Sometimes Hitler tried to moderate the debates, as arbiter elegantiarum; this was perhaps a family trait, for we remember his father’s obituary mentioning that Alois was wont to “pronounce authoritatively on any matter that came to his notice.” At other times he just listened, hulked over his work on the long oak table. …

After a couple of months in which the postcard operation worked as planned, something went wrong, but, alas, we do not know what truly happened. Out of the blue, one day Hanisch failed to find his associate at the oak table. Hitler had left the building accompanied by his Jewish friend Josef Neumann: rumour had it that they planned to emigrate to Germany. When they eventually returned, a week later, Hitler vowed that they had only been on a protracted sightseeing trip through the capital. It would seem possible that Hitler and Neumann had tried to open a business sideline: due to the latter’s familiarity with the Jewish side of Vienna’s art trade, Neumann might have been a better business agent than Hanisch. After a week they were back, but Hitler appeared penniless and self-absorbed as if shocked. His personal relations to both Hanisch and Neumann, who left the hostel on July 12, 1910, were to end soon. (29)

Could the incident be explored, it might offer tantalizing insights. Helene Hanfstaengl, society-sage and wife of Hitler’s first foreign-press agent Ernst Hanfstaengl – and a no-nonsense woman in her own right – reported that Hitler told her more than once that his loathing of Jews was “a personal thing“, and that the genesis of this hate occurred in Vienna. Adolf’s sister Paula later testified to her opinion that his “failure in painting was only due to the fact that trade in works of art was in Jewish hands.” (30)

Perhaps this is the proper place to inquire into the reality of Hitler’s anti-Semitism during the Männerheim years. Hanisch reports, not happily, that at least three Jewish hostel occupants were Hitler’s friends, the aforementioned Neumann, Simon Robinson, born 1864 in Galicia, a locksmith’s assistant, and Siegfried Löffner, born 1872 in Moravia, a salesman. (31) Another witness from the men’s hostel, Karl Honisch [with ‘o’, not to be confused with Hanisch] mentions another Jewish man, Rudolf Redlich from Moravia, as an acquaintance of Hitler. (32) Hanisch’s discontent was clearly based upon the fact that they all helped Hitler in selling his paintings. Even worse, Hitler soon began to sell his works directly to art dealers, and thus Hanisch was out of game and money. Many of the traders who bought Hitler’s paintings were Jewish (or of Jewish origin): Jakob Altenberg, who converted to Christianity in Vienna and eventually became a rich frame manufacturer, (33) Samuel Morgenstern, who always dealt directly with Hitler and also introduced him to the lawyer Dr Josef Feingold, who became a steady buyer, and another dealer, named Landsberger. (34) As Brigitte Hamann sums it up, it would appear that Hanisch was the anti-Semite in these years, not Hitler. It is true that from Mein Kampf onwards, Hitler knitted the legend of his early discovery of the damnable role of the Jews, and the hagiography of the Third Reich elevated this doctrine to the status of Holy Writ, but, indeed, the sources before 1919 are either silent on Hitler’s presumed anti-Semitism or actually contradict the dogma. It is true that Hitler learned from the socialists that political propaganda cannot allow for ambiguity: there must be one enemy and only one. Yet it would appear, as we will see later, that Hitler did not begin to develop a coherent anti-Semitic concept until 1919 at the earliest.

It would seem that in this autumn of 1910 Adolf gave the Academy another shot. He secured an appointment with Professor Ritschel, the curator, and brought examples of his work, but nothing came of it; either because the professor denied him entry or because Adolf did not have the funds for a renewed application. (35)

From the little we know, the third rejection perhaps did not surprise him any more, but for a time deepened his funk; he became even more of a recluse, neither liked nor disliked by the other hostel occupants, living in a dissonant universe of his own design. …

Meanwhile, he had become an institution himself, a part of the hostel’s inventory. His demeanour had changed somewhat, and he had recovered some of his old confidence: to the fellow occupants that clustered around the oak table and admired his work in statu nascendi, he confessed that he was only toying around; that he had not yet learned how to paint properly, that they should not take these efforts too seriously. In 1944, he admitted to photographer Heinrich Hoffmann that “Even today these things [i.e. paintings] shouldn’t cost more than 150 or 200 Reichsmark. It is insane to spend more than that on them. After all, I didn’t want to become an artist, I painted the stuff only to make a living and afford to go to school.” (37) If he sought artistic pleasure, he did architectural drawings, not watercolours. In some way, the work gave his life back the element of structure that it had lost when he ditched school; now he spent his days in the sort of dependability developed by men who neither fear nor hope for change.

Vienna National Opera House by Adolf Hitler

Yet occasionally the tranquillity was interrupted. One of the reasons for Hanisch’s temporary disappearance from the hostel had been money: Hitler had finished a better than usual painting of the parliament building, which Hanisch, as usually, did sell but, inexplicably, forgot to give Hitler the share and vanished without a trace. On August 4, 1910, Siegfried Löffner, who knew about the affair, recognized Hanisch on the street, and, after attempting to convince Hanisch to pay his debt, an argument ensued. Eventually, the police arrived, and Hanisch was detained because he could not establish his identity. Löffner then filed the following statement at the Wieden, IVth District, police station:

Siegfried Löffner, Agent, XXth District, 27 Meldemannstrasse, states: “I learned from a painter at the men’s hostel that the arrested man [Hanisch] sold pictures for him and had misappropriated the money. I do not know the name of the painter, I only know him from the men’s hostel, where he and the arrested man always used to sit next to each other.” (38)

A day later, August 5, 1910, Hitler was asked to appear at the local police station in Brigittenau to give a statement. Meanwhile, the police had found forged identity papers in Hanisch’s possession that gave his name as Walter Fritz. Adolf testified:

Adolf Hitler, artist, b. 4-20-1889 in Braunau, resident of Linz, Cath., single, XXth District, registered at 27 Meldemannstrasse, states:It is not true that I advised Hanisch to register as Walter Fritz, all I ever knew him as was Walter Fritz. Since he was indigent, I gave him the pictures I painted, so he could sell them. I regularly gave him 50% of the profit. For the past approximately two weeks Hanisch has not returned to the hostel and misappropriated my painting Parliament, worth c. Kronen 50, and a watercolour worth Kronen 9. The only document of his that I saw was his workman’s passbook issued to the name Fritz Walter. I know Hanisch from the hostel in Meidling, where I once met him. Adolf Hitler.” (39)

The trial took place on August 11. It was the first time Adolf Hitler was present in a criminal court as a witness. His beef with Hanisch, however, had been over the alleged embezzlement, not a false identity. That he did testify against Hanisch in the matter of the false papers was simple retaliation, and his testimony played a material role in the identity count of which Hanisch was convicted and received a seven-day jail sentence. But on the embezzlement charge, Hanisch had to be acquitted, perhaps because the money trail or its absence could not be proven either way, which raises the suspicion that Hitler may have lied in his statement of August 5. Summa summarum, Hitler first engagement in a court of justice included perjury and fraud, not an auspicious beginning to his relationship with the law.

Oil Painting “Karlskirche
Old Court in Munich, by Adolf Hitler

By now he sold everything he painted. His choice of subjects had always been classically conservative, some might say boring, and this taste remained with him all through his life. There are few instances in which his small bourgeois outlook on the world becomes as obvious as in his taste in art, and although he lived in a time that revolutionized the arts, he did not pay any attention. He despised or was ignorant of the Secessionist painters, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, or Oskar Kokoschka; he disliked the compositions of Arnold Schönberg, Anton von Webern or Alban Berg, who introduced twelve-tone music and serialism; he never read Rilke, Zweig or Hofmannsthal. All his life he remained a captive of the artistic perceptions of the nineteenth century. Yet his taste coincided with what the good burghers of Vienna coveted, and so his paintings followed the eternal laws of demand and supply.

We do contrast here a few examples of the masters mentioned above – strikingly revealing how deep Hitler was stuck in the aesthetics of the past century.

Egon Schiele – Two Women
Egon Schiele – Female with Towel (Weiblicher Akt mit gelbem Handtuch)- 1917
The Kiss, by Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt 1907, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, until 2017 the most expensive painting worldwide
'Bride of the Wind" by Oskar Kokoschka,a self portrait expressing his unrequited love for Alma Mahler (widow of composer Gustav Mahler) 1913
‘Bride of the Wind” by Oskar Kokoschka,a self-portrait expressing his unrequited love for Alma Mahler (widow of composer Gustav Mahler) 1913
Oskar Kokoschka - The Prometheus Tryptich "Apokalypsis"
Oskar Kokoschka – The Prometheus Triptychon “Apokalypsis”

As one would assume, the part of the conversation in the hostel’s reading rooms that did not revolve around women centred on politics. As far as the former topic is concerned, his old flame Stefanie might still haunt his dreams, or perhaps the elusive Emilie (see below), but he had no interest to mingle in the conversations of lonely men fabulating about the women they’ve known and the monies they’ve squandered, ingredients of fading memories, solitary men mourning irretrievable losses. Politics was a different thing altogether. Since Brigittenau was a worker district, the Social Democrats commanded a clear majority and their sympathizers were well represented in the Männerheim. Yet as far as Hitler’s political ideas, if any, in Vienna are concerned, the little our sources report is contradictory, and Hitler’s assertions in Mein Kampf, again, not truly credible. He claimed to have “learned to orate less, but listen more to those with opinions and objections that were boundlessly primitive,” (41) which would seem to characterize his opinion of the socialists. But no documents suggest that Hitler was at this time truly interested in politics, and, except for his Pan-Germanism, what he truly thought of Jews and socialists we do not know.

In early 1913, a young man from Moravia, Karl Honisch, took up residence at the hostel and became acquainted with Hitler. He was approached by the NSDAP in the 1930s to write up his memories. Clearly, the result must be taken cum grano salis, for he could not allow himself to write anything negative. As it would be expected, he portrays an abundantly politicizing Hitler, yet is silent on details.

“But if finally the opinions he heard really rubbed him the wrong way, he all of a sudden had to contradict. It then frequently happened that he would jump up from his chair, throw brush or pencil across the table, and explained his views in an extremely hot-tempered way, not even shying away from strong expressions; his eyes were ablaze, and again and again he threw back his head to throw back his hair, which kept falling over his forehead.” (42)

Honisch felt called upon to point out the good sides of his then-comrade, who was now head of the government and certainly not a man one would want to affront.

“[Hitler] … used to sit in his place day by day with almost no exception and was only absent for a short time when he delivered his work, and because of his peculiar personality. Hitler was, on the whole, a friendly and charming person, who took an interest in the fate of every companion.” (43)

And further:

“Nobody allowed himself to take liberties with Hitler. But Hitler was not proud or arrogant; on the contrary, he was good-hearted and helpful … and [if a comrade needed a short-term loan] I saw him several times starting such collections with a hat in his hand.” (44)

It was perhaps in late 1912 that several circumstances caused Hitler to contemplate a change of residence. One reason was the new Austrian army law that, although reducing the obligations of new draftees to two years of peacetime service, plus ten years in the reserves, increased the yearly intake of recruits from 103,000 in 1912 to 159,000 in 1914 and thereby was likely to prompt increased activities of the local draft boards. (45) It is clear that, by moving to Vienna, Hitler had evaded his draft board in Linz since 1909, when, at twenty years of age, he had been required to present himself for military service. It is obvious that he had no intention to serve in the forces of the detested Habsburg monarchy, and it seems that in this period his plans for an eventual emigration to Germany in general and to München in particular – he had talked about such a move as early as 1910 to Hanisch and Neumann – approached maturation.

Another reason was that he was through with Vienna; he knew the city inside out, like the face of a long-time lover, from the polished elegance of the buildings along the Ringstraße to the slums of the outer districts. He saw the Sword of Damocles hanging over the Habsburg Empire, kept from dropping only by the emperor’s fragile health. But why not set out for the Holy Grail right now? Hitler had a third, excellent reason to wait; as Ian Kershaw reports, at the occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday on April 20, 1913, he became eligible to receive his patrimony.

On 16 May 1913, the District Court in Linz confirmed that he should receive the sizeable sum, with interest added to the original 652 Kronen, of 819 Kronen 98 Heller, and that this would be sent by post to the “artist” Adolf Hitler at Meldemannstrasse, Vienna. With this long-awaited and much-welcome prize in his possession, he needed to delay his departure for München no longer. (46)

In February 1913, the nineteen-year-old pharmaceutical apprentice Rudolf Häusler took up residence at the Männerheim and made Hitler’s acquaintance in the reading room. (47) Häusler was interested in music and the arts, had painted himself, and Hitler took the youth under his wings. As Adolf had, Häusler had suffered under a tyrannical father who, in the bargain, was a Customs official, as Alois Hitler had been. The sire had thrown the offspring out of his house and Rudolf could only visit his mother, whom he, like Adolf, adored, and his siblings in the old man’s absence. To these sneaky visits he eventually brought his older friend Adolf, who, it would appear, made a good impression upon the mother, as Brigitte Hamann found out:

Ida Häusler, who was fifty at the time, a self-confident, educated woman from a good family, was glad that her unruly son had found a well-bred older friend, trusted Hitler, and was supportive of their friendship. Furthermore, she generously invited the obviously destitute young man to eat with them. Häusler’s seventeen-year-old sister Milli [Emilie] soon had a crush on Adi, who liked the comfortable, clean bourgeois atmosphere which resembled that of his former home in Linz. Father Häusler remained invisible. (48)

That we knew little about Rudolf Häusler until 1999, when Brigitte Hamann located his daughter Marianne Koppler, nee Häusler, interviewed her and published her finds in the book “Hitler’s Vienna” [see below], shines the proverbial light on the completeness and reliability of our sources on the early years; all the more so for Häusler apparently was the closest friend Adolf had since August Kubizek. [FN2] Not surprisingly, the fact that Hitler met an Emilie in the Häusler household, Rudolf’s sister, has led to speculation whether this Emilie could be identical with the girl Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder referred to in her memoirs; when she once opined that Emilie was an ugly name, Hitler allegedly said: “Don’t say that. Emilie is a beautiful name; that was the name of my first love!” (53)

[FN2] Anton Joachimsthaler discovered the earliest record of Rudolf Häusler in articles written by Thomas Orr for the München “Revue” Magazine, vols. 37/1952 to 8/1953. (49) Orr had learned of and interviewed a few alleged witnesses in Hitler’s old München neighbourhood and mentions Häusler but did not make the connection to Frau Koppler. For reasons that are not clear until today, Hitler never mentioned Häusler, nor did the Popps, the landlords of the room in which he lived together with Hitler in München for almost nine months. This has prompted Brigitte Hamann to speculate whether the two friends and the Popps, for unknown motives, concluded a pact of silence. (50) Häusler had early contacts with the Nazis: Joachimsthaler has him as a member of the NSDAP since June 1933 [the Austrian NSDAP since September 1, 1938], (51) although Frau Hamann cites an affidavit from the Austrian Ministry of the Interior that he had only been a membership candidate from 1938 to 1944. (52) Clear is that he worked for the DAF, the Nazi labour union, from December 1938 on, and was the manager of the Vienna NSDAP office from 1940 to 1945. He died in Vienna on July 26, 1973.

A photograph purporting to show Rudolf Häusler in his Austrian army uniform.

If true, this could indicate that the relation with Emilie was somewhat more, say, substantial than his earlier infatuation with Stefanie; on the other hand, given his penchant for telepathic love affairs, conceivably any Emilie in Vienna could have been the target of his supernatural affections. Frau Koppler reported that Emilie was the shyest, quietest and most sensitive of the siblings, and “gave the impression of being fearful and in need of protection.” (54) That she, being seldom outside of the house and not making many acquaintances, developed a crush on her brother’s elder friend seems entirely possible; reportedly she asked him to draw something for her scrapbook and received, as Frau Koppler, who saw the drawing in her youth, remembers, a Germanic warrior in front of an oak tree, signed “A.H.”. (55) A few postcards by Hitler were later found in the family papers.

Two reasons, however, argue against Emilie having been Hitler’s physical lover. One, the girl would not be allowed to leave the house without a chaperone, and it seems unlikely that Hitler was to breach the trust he received from the mother. Two, the time frame seems to be the wrong one, for Frau Wohlrab’s and the Café Kubata cashier girl’s memories [supra] place the relation with the mysterious girlfriend into the time when Hitler lived at Felberstrasse, from November 1908 to August 1909, not the early spring of 1913, when he met the Häuslers.

Eventually, Adolf convinced Rudolf to accompany him to München, or, rather, Rudolf’s mother, as he had five years earlier convinced Herrn Kubizek to release August to Vienna. Around May 20 Hitler must have received the patrimony and around this time they paid a farewell visit to the Häusler family. On May 24 they informed the Vienna police of their leaving the men’s hostel, without, however, providing a forwarding address. More likely than not this was Hitler’s idea, a cautionary measure to evade the attention of his home draft board in Linz. But because he had not only not registered in the fall of 1909, but also failed to present himself for recruitment in the spring of 1910, when due, nor in 1911 or 1912, the Linz police issued a warrant for evasion of his military service duty on August 11, 1913. (56)

Westbahnhof around 1895

The next day, Sunday, May 25, 1913, Karl Honisch and a few old hands from the Männerheim accompanied the two friends to the Westbahnhof, where not only the trains to Linz originated but those to Bavaria and thus München as well. Quite probably, the two friends bought the cheapest tickets, third class, Wien Westbahnhof – München Hauptbahnhof (Vienna, Western Railway Station — München, Central Railway Station), 5 Kronen 80 Heller each. (57)

A “Westbahn” Train like that must have brought Hitler and Häusler to Munich.

Adolf Hitler left nothing and no one in the city that he felt had betrayed him, and set out for Germany – the Promised Land.


Next Post: Adolf Hitler in Munich before the War


Hamann, Brigitte, Hitler’s Vienna, 1st Ed. Oxford UP 1999, Tauris Parks 2010, ISBN 978-1-84885-277-8 / Quotation Number see Page(s): (2) 134 (6) 152 (7) 153 (13) 156 (15) 158-61 (29) 164 (31) 164 (32) 350 (33) 173-74 (34) 350 (38) 275 (39) 172 (42) 381 (45) 393 (46) 397 (47) 395 (48) 396 (50) 192 (52) 192 (53) 364 (54) 364 (55) 192

Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf [US Edition], Houghton Mifflin 1942, (5) 28

Joachimsthaler, Anton, Hitler’s Weg begann in München 1913 – 1923, F.A. Herbig, München 2000, ISBN 3-7766-2155-9, (4) 46 (9) 268 (49) 330, n. 277 (51) 323 (56) 27

Jones, Sydney J., Hitler in Vienna 1907-1913, Cooper Square Press 2002, ISBN 0-8154-1191-X, (11) 141 (37) 275

Kershaw, Ian, The Hitler of History, Vintage Books 1998, ISBN 0-375-70113-3, (46) 68

Österreichische Bundesbahnen (57) https://www.oebb.at/

Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, Praeger Publishers 1973, Lib. Con. 72-92891, (1) 79-80 (12) 82-3 (14) 83 (16) 85

Smith, Bradley F., Adolf Hitler – Family, Childhood and Youth, Hoover Institution Press 1979, ISBN 0-8179-1622-9, (35) 140-41

Toland, John, Adolf Hitler, Anchor Books 1992, ISBN 0-385-42053-6, (3) 39 (8) 40 (10) 41-2 (30) 46 (41) 49 (43) 50 (44) 50


Next: Adolf Hitler arrives in Munich

The German Workers’ Party

Adolf Hitler joins the Party


(© John Vincent Palatine 2015/19) Translations by author

Hits: 745

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén