Alois Hitler

Among the millions of words written about Adolf Hitler, very few words have been dedicated to his father, Alois Hitler. Some of the most telling, however, were penned by his son, writing in Mein Kampf in 1925, “I never loved my father, but feared him.”

Early years and career

Alois Hitler was born Alois Schicklgruber in 1837 to a 42-year-old unwed housemaid Maria Anna Schicklgruber. His baptismal register does not name his father, but he was raised by two successive men. In 1842 his mother married millworker Johann Georg Hiedler, who may have been his biological father. After his mother died in 1847 and her widowed husband disappeared, Alois was raised by his uncle, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. He adopted the Hiedler surname by 1877, either to claim the family inheritance or to honor its legacy. A variation in spelling on the official document changed his name to Hitler.

Alois Hitler left home at age 13 to become a cobbler’s apprentice. He later moved to Vienna to do leatherwork, but he found his true calling when he took a position as a bureaucrat in 1855 at the Imperial Customs Service. He spent nearly 40 years there, retiring in 1895 to work as a farmer. Scholar Louis L. Snyder highlights how Hitler’s appointment as a customs officer in Lower Austrian towns made him “a paragon of lower-middle-class respectability.”

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Alois as husband and father

Alois Hitler was married three times, though the extent to which some of his relationships overlapped is blurry. In 1873 Hitler married Anna Glasl-Hörer, a 50-year-old adopted daughter of another customs collector. According to historian Ian Kershaw, “it is unlikely to have been a love-match,” given Glasl-Hörer was 14 years his senior and ancestrally wealthy. She was infertile and suffered from poor health, so Hitler hired two teen maids, Franziska “Fanni” Matzelsberger and his second cousin Klara Pölzl to care for Glasl-Hörer. These women later became Hitler’s second and third wives. Glasl-Hörer filed for separation in 1880 and died in 1883.

Alois Hitler’s affair with a woman called Thekla Penz resulted in the birth of his first child, Theresia, in 1869. While married to Glasl-Hörer, he started a sexual relationship with Matzelsberger about 1877. Matzelsberger gave birth to Alois, Jr., in 1882, married Alois, Sr., in 1883, and gave birth to a second child, Angela, in July of that year. She was jealous of Pölzl and had her removed from her house. But when Matzelsberger died from tuberculosis at age 23 in August 1884, Hitler invited Pölzl back to his home. On January 7, 1885, Hitler married Pölzl, his third and most beloved wife.

Klara Pölzl, more than twenty years younger than Hitler, was “one of the few people Alois had anything positive to say about,” notes historian Roman Sandgruber, who believes that she was probably “a thoroughly emancipated woman, as we would put it today.” In a letter uncovered in the 2010s, Hitler wrote, “my wife…has the necessary enthusiasm and understanding for finances.”

Notably, close to Pölzl’s death on December 21, 1907, she was treated for breast cancer by a Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch. Adolf Hitler, 18 at the time, reportedly was deeply moved by the care that Bloch showed his mother, referring to him as Edeljude, meaning “noble Jew.” Decades later, in 1940, the world’s most notorious propagator of antisemitism granted Bloch’s family safe passage out of Austria to America.

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Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl had six children, only two of whom survived into adulthood:

• Gustav (born in May 1885—contracted diphtheria and died in December 1887)
• Ida (born in September 1886—contracted diphtheria and died in January 1888)
• Otto (born in 1887—died days after birth)
• Adolf (born in 1889—died by suicide toward the end of World War II in 1945)
• Edmund (born in 1894—died in 1900 of measles)
• Paula (born in 1896—died in 1960, having lived out her final days in hiding under the assumed name “Wolff”)

A legacy of abuse

It seems clear that the lives of the surviving children were marked by physical and emotional abuse.

Alois Hitler was a “master inside his home, where he made the children feel the lash of his cane, switch, and belt,” according to scholar Snyder. Hitler shamed, humiliated, and demeaned his children. There was an instance of Pölzl using her body to shield young Adolf and absorbing her husband’s blows. On another occasion Adolf Hitler recounted to his mother with pride how he withstood a beating from his father:

Father hit me thirty-two times…and I did not cry.

Despite Pölzl’s attempts at protecting her children, Adolf seemed to be learning to do to others what had been done to him. Two years after his father’s death, when he was 15, Adolf abused his 8-year-old sister, Paula, who recounted in her diary “once again I feel my brother’s loose hand across my face.”

Historian Florian Beierl writes, “the terror of the Third Reich was cultivated in Hitler’s own home.” While the degree to which Adolf’s troubled childhood made him the man he became may never be known, Alois Hitler’s son led the Nazi Party, started World War II, and masterminded the systematic killing of six million Jews and millions of others during the Holocaust.

Read more about Adolf Hitler’s place in history.

Some 30 letters written by Alois Hitler in 1895 seem to confirm Beierl’s assessment of Alois. They portray a man with a short temper and a bitterness toward life.

Historian Konrad Heiden concludes that Alois Hitler “had fought a bitter struggle with life, had made the hardest sacrifices, and in the end things had not gone according to his will.” He died from a pleural hemorrhage on January 3, 1903, in Gasthaus Stiefler, an inn in Leonding, Austria.

Adolf Hitler on his father

Most historians agree that father and son had a strained relationship, at best. Adolf Hitler wished nothing more than to avoid what he perceived as the drudgery of his father’s career choices. The more Alois Hitler pushed him toward a civil servant career, the more Adolf aspired to become an artist. Historian Sandgruber describes how Alois Hitler wrote his 1895 letters in a deeply smug, anti-clerical manner that overestimated his abilities. Decades later Adolf Hitler displayed similar tendencies when he said in a 1941 speech, “behind and around me stands the Party with which I became great and which has become great through me.”

Despite the tensions, Adolf Hitler mourned his father’s death when he was just 13, breaking down in tears upon seeing his father’s body. A decade later the younger Hitler would reflect on his father’s role in shaping his character, writing in Mein Kampf:

“Unwittingly, he had sown the seed for a future which at that time neither he nor I would have comprehended.”