Adolf Hitler's paternal grandmother was Maria Anna Schicklgruber. She was born in 1795 in the hamlet of Strones, in a rural forested area of Lower Austria, north–west of Vienna. Her family were poor peasants; she was one of eleven children, only six of whom survived infancy.
In 1837, at the age of 42, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, and named him Alois. She registered the birth with the parish priest in the nearby village of Döllersheim, but refused to reveal the identity of the child's father. (Döllersheim was evacuated in 1938 to make way for a military training ground.)
Alois would go on to become the father of Adolf Hitler.
Some time after Alois was born, an "itinerant journeyman miller" named Johann Georg Heidler moved in with Maria and her father. In 1842 he and Maria married. Maria died in 1847, and Johann Georg Heidler died ten years later.
In 1850 – three years after his mother's death, and seven years before the death of his stepfather – Alois went to Vienna to begin an apprenticeship as a cobbler. In 1855 he joined the Austrian civil service as a customs officer.
Alois fathered an illegitimate daughter in 1869, and in 1873 he married for the first time. In 1875 he was posted to Braunau am Inn as an inspector of customs. The following year he went to the parish priest in Döllersheim and asserted that Johann Georg Heidler was his biological father. He called three relatives, including Heidler's brother Johann Nepomuk Heidler, as witnesses. The priest agreed to amend the baptismal record, and when the change was entered into the government records (in 1877) the father's name was given as Georg Hitler. From that time forward, Alois Schicklgruber was known as Alois Hitler.
The Heidlers apparently used the surname Hüttler (meaning 'one who lives in a hut') on occasions. In German, the pronunciation of 'u' with an umlaut ('ü') is somewhere between the English 'u' and 'i' – so that 'Hüttler' would have been somewhere betwen 'Huttler' and 'Hittler'. This is just my speculation, but I suggest that this may well be how the change came about.
Alois is said to have had numerous extra–marital affairs, and he and his first wife Anna separated in 1880 after seven years of marriage. Anna had been an invalid since shortly after the marriage, if not before it, and she died in 1883. By this time Hitler had a second illegitimate child – a son, Alois Jr. – with Franziska 'Fanni' Matzelsberger. Fanni was a servant girl, 24 years Alois's junior, at the inn in Braunau where he had lodgings. They married less than two months after Anna's death; he was 45, she 21. They legitimised Alois Jr., and less than three months into the marriage (less than five months after Anna's death) Fanni gave birth to a second child, Angela.
Before long, Fanni in turn became seriously ill, and Hitler engaged Klara Pölzl as a servant to look after his wife and children. Klara was the grand–daughter of Johann Nepomuk Heidler (who was, according to the official records, Hitler's uncle). He'd previously engaged Klara as a household servant in 1876, while he was still married to Anna, but had discharged her on Fanni's insistence.
Fanni died in August 1884, aged only 23, and Hitler retained Klara (who was approximately one year older than Fanni) as his housekeeper. He was keen to marry Klara, but because of their close relationship (they were officially first cousins, once removed) a waiver was required from the church. Permission was duly granted, and they married in January 1885.
In May 1885 (nine months and seven days after Fanni's death) Klara gave birth to a son – Gustav – followed sixteen months later, in September 1886, by a daughter – Ida. But tragedy struck in 1887 when both Gustav and Ida died of diphtheria.
On 20 April 1889, still in Braunau, Klara gave birth to a second son: Adolf. He was a sickly child, and his mother fretted over him. A third son, Otto, was born in April 1892, but survived for only a few days.
Also in 1892, Alois received a new posting and the family moved to Passau – just over the German border, in Bavaria. The following year, Alois accepted a better position and moved to Linz (back in Austria). Klara had just given birth to another son, Edmund, so the rest of the family (Klara, Alois Jr., Angela, Adolf and Edmund) stayed in Passau.
In 1895, a few months before his retirement, Alois bought a farm in Hafeld, near Lambach, approximately 30 miles southwest of Linz. He lived there with his family for the remainder of his life, but was not successful in running the farm.
In January 1896 Paula was born, and in February 1900 Edmund died of measles (aged 6).
On the morning of 3 January 1903, Alois Hitler went to the local inn for his customary glass of wine. On being offered the newspaper, he collapsed; a doctor was summoned, but Alois died at the inn, probably from a pleural haemorrhage. He was 65 years old. On seeing his father's corpse, the thirteen–year–old Adolf is said to have burst into tears.
Klara Hitler died in December 1907. She was 47 years old; Adolf was 18.
Alois Hitler is said to have had a fierce temper, to have been 'awfully rough' with his wife Klara, and to have beaten the children. He disinherited his eldest son, Alois Jr., after a violent argument, and his second surviving son Adolf rebelled against him, refusing to comply with his father's wishes and enter the civil service.
As already stated, the Schicklgrubers were a poor peasant family; and as a single mother, Anna struggled to provide for her son Alois, who was taken in and cared for as a boy by Johann Nepomuk Heidler. Historians have speculated that it may have been Johann Nepomuk Heidler, and not his brother Johann Georg, who was Alois's biological father, but that as a respectable married man he was reluctant to admit to being the father of an illegitimate child. One supposes that if the bachelor Johann Georg had been the father, there would have been far less stigma attached to his being named on the register; and as Maria and Georg did marry just five years after the birth, why didn't they just come clean and marry sooner?
During the Nuremberg trials, Hans Frank, who had acted as Adolf Hitler's personal lawyer, gave evidence that Alois Schicklgruber's father was in fact a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenberger, for whom Maria Schicklgruber had been working as a cook around the time of Alois's birth. But he also stated that Adolf Hitler himself had dismissed this possibility, believing that his grandmother had merely been (in modern parlance) 'trying it on' with the wealthy Frankenberger family in order to extract money.
Historians attach little credence to Frank's claim; there is no evidence to suggest even that there was anyone named Leopold Frankenberger living in the area concerned in the 1830s.
Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Johann Nepomuk was Alois's biological father.
If he were, it would mean that Alois's third wife Klara (Johann Nepomuk's grand–daughter), as well as being Adolf Hitler's mother, was also Alois's half–niece and Adolf's half–first–cousin (if there is such a thing as either of these). If, as the official records state, Johann Georg was Alois's biological father, Klara was Alois's first cousin once removed and Adolf's second cousin.
(If, on the other hand, Alois's father was someone completely different and one or both of the Heidler brothers were acting simply out of kindness or decency, Alois wasn't related to Klara at all, before their marriage; and neither was Adolf – except of course that she was his mother.)
Either way, no one disputes the fact that Maria Schicklgruber (married surname Heidler) was Adolf Hitler's paternal grandmother. His father was Alois Hitler (né Schicklgruber), and his mother was Klara Hitler (née Pölzl). Klara, as we've already seen, was also (officially) his second cousin or (possibly) his half–first–cousin.
It's said that there are people with the surname Schicklgruber living in Lower Austria to this day. It is, I would suggest, fortuitous that the surname Hitler, which would go on to become so notorious, was created – apparently as the result of a clerical error – for one man, and that that man has few (if any) surviving descendants.
© Haydn Thompson 2017