Hitler's Family

Podcast Transcript

Adolf Hitler was unquestionably one of the most evil people, not just of the 20th century, but in all of history.

His very name has become a metaphor for someone bad or someone you want to associate with someone horrible.

However, he was a person, and as such, he had parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews.

How did they deal with being related to the most infamous person in the world, and what exactly do you do when you have the last name Hitler?

Learn more about Hitler’s family and how they dealt with being related to Hitler and having the Hitler family name on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

This episode is not meant to humanize Hitler. Hitler was a monster, and the countless crimes he committed, and those which were done under his name, were some of the greatest in history.

Since Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s, the name Hitler has gone far beyond being a surname. It has become one of the most potent metaphors in modern language for evil, cruelty, or authoritarianism.

It became a shorthand reference for absolute evil. Instead of being seen as just a historical figure, Hitler became a cultural archetype: the ultimate villain. Writers, journalists, and political commentators began using his name as a stand-in for tyranny or monstrous behavior.

In fact, it is hard even to use a metaphor to describe Hitler because Hitler has become a metaphor. If someone or something is evil, you compare them to Hitler.

No one wants to be compared to Hitler, but what if that was literally your name? Even worse, what if you were related to Hitler? How do you deal with that?

In this episode, I want to talk about Hitler’s relatives and how those who survived the war lived with the shame of the name and their association with their relative Adolf.

We’ll start with Adolf’s father, Alois.

He was born Alois Schicklgruber in the Austrian village of Strones to Maria Anna Schicklgruber, an unmarried peasant woman. His biological father was never definitively established, though several men have been suggested, and questions about his paternity have fueled speculation for generations.

Alois began his career as a customs official in the Austro-Hungarian civil service, where he rose steadily in rank and developed a reputation as strict, ambitious, and domineering. He married three times, and his third wife, Klara Pölzl, was Adolf’s mother. Accounts describe him as authoritarian at home, often harsh toward his children, and prone to temper.

Alois was known to have had many affairs, so it is possible that there were unknown half-siblings of Adolf that existed.

He changed his surname in 1876, when he was almost forty, after his foster father, Johann Hiedler, was retroactively declared his legal father. A parish priest recorded this change, registering his name as Hitler, a variant spelling of Hiedler. This legitimization allowed him to alter his social status and secure a more respectable family name, which he believed would help his civil service career.

Klara Hitler was the mother of Adolf Hitler. She came from a modest peasant family in rural Austria and was Alois Hitler’s third wife, as well as his niece by marriage.

The home of Alois and Klara was constantly being disrupted by time travelers who were visiting them, trying to kill their son.

Adolf, her fourth child, was the center of her affection, and he later spoke of her with deep reverence, describing her as the person he loved most. Her life was cut short when she died of breast cancer in 1907 at the age of forty-seven, an event that profoundly affected Adolf, who mourned her intensely and never fully recovered from the loss.

In 2012, the tombstone for Alois and Klara was removed from the parish cemetery where they were buried on the request of a unidentified distant relative because it was constantly being defaced.

Adolf had six full siblings, five of whom died in childhood. His only full sibling that survived into adulthood was his sister Paula.

When he came to power, Adolf had two surviving half-siblings from his father’s previous marriages: Alois Jr. and Angela.

His sister Paula worked as a secretary and did not play any political or public role during the Nazi years, though she benefited from her brother’s financial support. She used the alternate spelling Hiedler, and during the war, used the surname Wolff at the request of her brother to avoid attention.

After World War II, she was interrogated by Allied authorities but was found to have had no involvement in Nazi politics.

In 1952, she formally changed her last name to Wolff to avoid the scrutiny and attention that the name Hitler had.

She maintained a reclusive existence and occasionally spoke about her brother with a mixture of loyalty and dismay, once acknowledging his cruelty but insisting he remained her brother.

She died in Vienna in 1960 at the age of sixty-four, unmarried and without children.

Angela Hitler was Adolf Hitler’s half-sister, the daughter of Alois Hitler and his second wife, and was six years older than Adolf.

Angela married Leo Raubal, with whom she had three children: a son, Leo Jr., and two daughters, Geli and Friedl.

Angela served as the housekeeper at Hitler’s Berghof mountain retreat.

After the war, Angela lived quietly in Germany, largely outside public attention, and died in 1949 at the age of sixty-six.

Her daughter, Geli, actually lived with Adolf for several years in his Munich apartment starting in 1929. In 1927, she began a relationship with Adolf’s chauffeur, and when he caught wind of it, he forced her to end the relationship and fired him.

After that, he became very controlling of her, not allowing her to go out without him or someone he trusted. Geli wanted to go to Vienna to pursue a career singing and to marry a man she knew from back home, but Hitler forbade it.

On September 18, 1931, they had an argument, and after Hitler left for Nuremberg, she was found dead in his apartment. She had been shot in the chest with Hitler’s personal pistol.

Adolf went into an extreme depression and kept photos of her with him the rest of his life. He reportedly said she was the only woman he ever truly loved.

Her brother, Leo Jr., was trained as an engineer and worked in various technical positions during his early life. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the German Luftwaffe.

He was stationed on the Eastern Front, where he was seriously wounded and captured by Soviet forces at Stalingrad in 1943. The Soviets considered using him as a bargaining chip in a potential prisoner exchange for Joseph Stalin’s captured son, but the deal never materialized.

Leo spent years as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union before being released in 1955. After his return to Austria, he resumed a quiet life, working as a teacher and engineer, and remained largely outside the public eye. He died in Linz in 1977 at the age of seventy-one.

He had one son, Peter, an engineer, whom I will get to in a bit.

Angela’s third child, Elfriede, known as Friedl, lived a very quiet life. She had one child, a son, Heiner Hochegger, who was born in 1945….more on him in a bit.

Friedl died in 1993 at the age of 83.

The most interesting branch of the family was that of Adolf’s half-brother, Alois Jr.

Alois Hitler Jr. was Adolf’s older half-brother. His early life was troubled; he frequently clashed with his father and left home as a teenager.

As a young man, he lived in various places, working as a waiter and hotel manager, including a period in Dublin, Ireland, where he met Bridget Dowling, whom he married in 1910.

The couple had one son, William Patrick Hitler, but the marriage later collapsed, and Alois abandoned Bridget and their child to return to Germany. There, he remarried bigamously before being forced to annul the union and eventually settled down with a third wife, with whom he had another son, Heinrich Hitler.

During the Nazi era, Alois Jr. ran a restaurant in Berlin but lived mostly outside the political spotlight. After the war, he lived quietly in Hamburg until his death in 1956.

His younger son, Heinrich, was really the only true believer in the family.

Born and raised in Germany, he grew up during the rise of the Nazi regime and was regarded as a bright, studious young man who admired his famous uncle.

Heinrich joined the Hitler Youth and later became a loyal supporter of the regime, choosing to serve as a signals operator in the German army rather than pursue higher education.

During the Second World War, he was captured by Soviet forces on the Eastern Front in 1941. Unlike his cousin Leo Raubal Jr., who was eventually released, Heinz was interrogated harshly, reportedly tortured, and died in Soviet captivity in 1942 at the age of twenty-one.

His death was felt within his immediate family but received little public acknowledgment during the Nazi years.

This leaves the English-born William Patrick Hitler.

He was born in Liverpool, England, and grew up in a household marked by tension after his father abandoned the family. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, William traveled to Germany to meet his famous uncle, hoping his family name might open doors.

Uncle Adolf initially tolerated him and even gave him minor jobs, but their relationship soured as William demanded better opportunities and threatened to expose embarrassing family details. By 1939, sensing danger, William returned to Britain and embarked on a lecture tour in the United States, where he denounced his uncle.

When World War II broke out, William chose to remain in the United States. In 1944, after some difficulty, he was cleared to serve in the U.S. Navy, where he worked as a hospital corpsman until the war ended.

According to legend, when he showed up at the recruiting station, he was asked his name, and he said, “Hitler,” to which the officer replied, “Glad to meet you, Hitler, my name is Rudolph Hess.”

So, yes, there was literally a Hitler fighting in the American military during WWII.

Afterward, he changed his surname to Stuart-Houston to distance himself from his notorious relative, married, and settled in Long Island, New York, where he lived a quiet life as a medical technician. He and his wife, Phyllis, had four sons: Alexander, Louis, Howard, and Brian.

Though his story occasionally drew public curiosity, he largely avoided the spotlight. William Patrick Hitler died in 1987 at the age of seventy-six, leaving behind descendants who continue to live privately in the United States.

Howard died in 1989, and the three other sons are still alive.

As of the recording of this podcast, Adolf Hitler has five living great-nephews.

Peter Raubal, the son of his nephew, Leo Jr.

Heiner Hochegger, who is the son of his niece, Elfriede.

…and Alexander, Louis, and Brian Stuart-Houston, who are the sons of William Patrick Stuart-Houston, formerly Hitler.

All five men have taken a vow never to marry or have children and to have their family’s bloodline die with them. They currently range in age from 59 to 94.

Being a great-half-nephew is a pretty tenuous relationship, but it is enough of one for all five men to completely alter their lives because of someone they never even met.

Before I close, I should mention a possible even closer relation to Adolf Hitler: his son.

During the First World War, a French woman named Charlotte Lobjoie had a brief affair with a young German corporal named Adolf Hitler. In March 1918, she had a son named Jean-Marie Loret.

Supposedly, before her death in 1948, she told her son that his father was Adolf Hitler. Previously, he had only known that his father was a German soldier.

He later came forward with his claim, which was seemingly confirmed by Hitler’s valet, who published his memoirs in 1980. He claimed that Hitler had a German official track down a woman from the same village. Hitler supposedly spoke of having an unnamed son in France.

German Army documents also reportedly show money being sent to Charlotte Lobjoie during the war.

Jean-Marie died in 1985, but he had 10 children. One of them, Philippe, offered to perform a DNA test years ago, but nothing has come of it.

In 2008, a Belgian reporter collected samples of DNA from Hitler’s last surviving relatives and compared them to what were reportedly DNA samples of Jean-Marie Loret taken from a postage stamp he licked.

He claimed the tests were negative, but he also couldn’t verify that he, in fact, licked the stamp.

Most people consider the idea that Hitler had a son to be unlikely, but it also hasn’t been proved conclusively one way or the other.

Unlike his grand-nephews, who are actively trying to distance themselves, the children of Jean-Marie Loret are actively trying to claim relation, as they could, in theory, claim royalties from Mein Kampf.

I should also note that the family name Hitler was never common in Germany or Austria. However, in the 19th century, a George Hitler migrated to Pickaway County, Ohio.

There, they have roads and a cemetery named after the Hitler family.

Documentary director Matt Ogens actually produced a film in 2014 titled Meet the Hitlers, where he interviews people who still have the name Hitler.

When asked why they haven’t changed their name, most of them gave the same response that Michael Bolton did in the movie “Office Space”: “He’s the one who sucks, why should I have to change it?”

Every surviving, known member of Adolf Hitler’s family took some steps to distance themselves from their infamous relative after the war. Some just led a quiet life and tried to forget it.

Others changed their name, and in the case of his grand-nephews, they have actively decided to end their lineage.

What has happened to the Hitler family and other people named Hitler is pretty minor, given the horrors that were inflicted on the world during the Second World War, but it does go to show just how far-reaching things can be when the events spawned by a single man are still directly impacting people today.