DICTATOR’S FOREBEARS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4803, 28 June 1939, Page 7

DICTATOR’S FOREBEARS

BORN OF PEASANT STOCK. The celebration of Chancellor Hitler’s fiftieth birthday lends special interest to “The Family Tree of the Fuhrer,” published in an official series of “Family Trees of Famous Germans,” says the London “Observer.” Unlike practically all great men in European history, who have been tremendously interested in their own childhood, Herr Hitler dislikes having his early years discussed. For a long time German newspapers have been forbidden to publish anything about the Nazi leader’s early years. Herr Hitler’s personal history before 1914 swept him into the Bavarian Army is a blank, therefore, for the German people, except for the few meagre details to be found in the first chapters of “Mein Kainpf.” “The Family Tree,” while leaving Herr Hitler’s early life untouched, does not give a slight picture of his forbears.

Herr Rudolf Koppensteiner, who lias carried out the extensive research work for the “Hitler Family Tree” with typical Teutonic thoroughness, has actually managed to trace the Nazi leader’s forefathers right back into the sixteenth century. This is not the first “Hitler Family Tree to be published. In 1932 Herr Karl Fredrich von Frank brought one out in a Viennese geneaological journal. From one point of view Herr Koppensteiner’s task has not been as difficult as it might appear. Herr Hitler comes from purely peasant stock, established exclusively in one region. The twelve generations of Hitlers recorded in this “Family Tree” have not moved from the land on which they settled several centuries ago. These families of peasants, living in little villages off the beaten track in Upper and Lower Austria —the Forest District between the swiftlyflowing Danube and what used to be the Czech-Austrian frontier—have remained tenaciously rooted to the soil and their modest possessions. They did not marry outside the district, so that the “Family Tree” reveals only fifty-eight family names.

Quite interesting from the purely sociological point of view, the “Family Tree” does not reveal anything remarkable or startling in Herr Hitler’s ancestry or throw light on why he should have emerged and shot up like a comet to German leadership.

His grandparents, on his father’s side, Johann Georg Hiedler, born in 1792, and Anna Maria Schickelgruber, born in 1795, who lived when Napolean Bonaparte was rampaging through 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.

There is no variation in the social status of Herr Hitler’s forebears. They were small peasants who worked, in individual cases, as millers and weavers. The first “Hitlers,” it is claimed, were to be found in this district as early as the fifteenth century. Herr Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, born in June, 1837, the month Queen Victoria came to the throne, is 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 twenty, the youthful Alois learned the trade of shoemaking, and must have studied hard, for later on he achieved his great ambition and became an Austrian Customs official.

At the age of fifty-six, while Adolf was still a small child, he retired on a pension and became a farmer. If there had been no French Revolution —so officially hated by the Nazis— Alois Hitler would not have been able to emancipate himself from the peasant class. His father’s ambitious nature, therefore, and by the social changes brought about by the French Revolution, made it possible for Adolf Hitler to enjoy an excellent education at the Linz Secondary School.