HITLER’S ORIGIN

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 June 1939, Page 12

HITLER’S ORIGIN

SOME OF HIS FORBEARS. LONDON, April 24. Who were the ancestors of Herr Hitler? Have any of his predecessors achieved fame? “The Family Tree of the Fuehrer,” recently published in> an official series of “Family Trees of Famous Germans,” gives some slight picture of the forbears of the German leader.

Herr Rudolf Koppensteiner, who has carried out the extensive research work for the Hitler family tree with typical Teutonic thoroughness, has recently managed to trace the Nazi leader’s forefathers right back into the 16th century. . Herr Hitler comes from purely peasant stock, established exclusively in one region in Austria. The 12 generation of Hitlers recorded* in this family tree have not moved from the land on which they settled centuries ago. They did not marry outside the district, so that the family tree reveals only 58 family names. His grandparents, on his father’s side, Johan Georg Hiedler, born in 1792, and Anna Maria Scliickelgrubev, born in 1795, who lived while Napoleon was campaigning in Europe, would surely have been extremely astonished if they had known that their son, Alois, would have a son who would be compared with the great Corsican. These paternal grandparents were in their graves before their famous grandchild, Adolf, was born. A child of his father’s third marriage, Adolf Hitler was born when his father was 52 years old.

There is no variation in the social status of Herr Hitler’s forbears. They were all small peasants who worked in individual cases as millers and weavers. The first “Hitlers,” it is claimed, were to be found in the same district ?.s cawy as the 15th century.

Herr Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, born in June, 1837, the month in which Queen Victoria ascended the Throne, was the first Hitler who managed to raise himself out of the humble ranks of the peasantry into a higher social class.

As both of his parents—already referred to above —-were dead before he was 20, the youthful Alois learned the trade of shoe-making, and must have studied hard, for later on he achieved his great ambition and became an Austrian Custom official.

At the age of 56, while Adolf was still a small child. Alois Hitler retired on a pension and became a farmer. If there had been no French Revolution—so officially hated by the Nazis- ■ Alois would not have been able to emancipate himself from the peasant class.