Alois Hitler (né Schicklgruber; 7 June 1837 – 3 January 1903) was an Austrian civil servant in the customs service and the father of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany.
Alois Schicklgruber was born out of wedlock. His mother was Maria Schicklgruber, but his biological father remains unknown. This uncertain parentage has led to claims that Alois's third wife, Klara (Adolf's mother), may have also been either Alois's first cousin once removed or his half-niece.
Alois married his first wife, Anna, in 1873. In 1876, Alois convinced the Austrian local authorities to acknowledge his deceased stepfather Johann Georg Hiedler as his biological father. This meant that Klara legally became Alois's first cousin once removed. Alois then legally changed his last name to that of his deceased stepfather Johann, but the authorities misspelled the last name as "Hitler" for unknown reasons.
Also in 1876, while Alois was still married to his first wife, Anna, he hired his relative Klara as a household servant and began an affair with her. Their relationship continued in secrecy until Alois's second wife, Franziska, died and Klara became pregnant, which prompted Alois to marry her in 1885. According to a close friend, Alois was "awfully rough" with his wife Klara and "hardly ever spoke a word to her at home". Alois treated his children with similar contempt and often beat them.
Alois Hitler was born Alois Schicklgruber in the hamlet of Strones, a parish of Döllersheim in the Waldviertel of northwest Lower Austria; his mother was Maria Schicklgruber, a 42-year-old unmarried peasant whose family had lived in the area for generations. At his baptism in Döllersheim, the space for his father's name on the baptismal certificate was left blank and the priest wrote "illegitimate". His mother cared for Alois in a house she shared with her elderly father, Johannes Schicklgruber.
Sometime later, a man named Johann Georg Hiedler moved in with the Schicklgrubers. He married Maria when Alois was five, and Maria died when Alois was nine. By the age of 10, Alois had been sent to live with Johann Georg Hiedler's younger brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who owned a farm in the nearby village of Spital (south of Weitra). Alois attended elementary school and took lessons in shoemaking from a local cobbler. Growing up in the same household with Alois was Johanna, the mother of his future wife Klara.
At the age of 13, Alois left Johann Nepomuk Hiedler's farm in Spital and went to Vienna as an apprentice cobbler, working there for about five years. In response to a recruitment drive by the Austrian government offering employment in the civil service to people from rural areas, Alois joined the frontier guards (customs service) of the Austrian Finance Ministry in 1855 at the age of 18.
Uncertain identity of biological father
Historians have proposed various candidates as Alois's biological father: Johann Georg Hiedler, his younger brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler (or Hüttler), and Leopold Frankenberger (a purportedly Jewish man, whose existence has never been found to be documented). Johann Georg Hiedler became the stepfather of five-year-old Alois and many years later, he was posthumously declared the legal birth father of Alois.
According to historian Frank McDonough, the most plausible theory is that Johann Georg Hiedler was actually the birth father. But the birth father may alternatively have been his younger brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. Regardless of how Nepomuk was related to Alois, if at all, Nepomuk was certainly the maternal grandfather of Alois's third wife (Adolf Hitler's mother) Klara.
Historian Werner Maser suggests that Alois's biological father was not Johann Georg Hiedler, but rather Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who raised Alois through adolescence and later willed to Alois a considerable portion of his life savings, although he never publicly admitted to being Alois's natural father. According to Maser, Nepomuk was a married farmer who had an affair with Maria Schicklgruber and then arranged to have his single brother Johann Georg Hiedler marry Alois's mother Maria to provide a cover for Nepomuk's desire to assist and care for Alois without upsetting his wife. If the theory is true, then Alois's third wife Klara was also Alois's half-niece, but Adolf Hitler biographer Joachim Fest believes that any attempts to pin down whether Johann Georg Hiedler or Johann Nepomuk Hiedler was Alois's father will "peter out in the obscurity of confused relationships marked by meanness, dullness, and rustic bigotry".
In 1931 Adolf Hitler ordered the Schutzstaffel (SS) to investigate the rumors regarding his ancestry, and they found no evidence of any Jewish ancestors. After the Nuremberg Laws came into effect in Nazi Germany, Hitler ordered the genealogist Rudolf Koppensteiner to publish a large illustrated genealogical tree showing his ancestry. This was published in the book Die Ahnentafel des Führers ("The Pedigree of the Leader") in 1937 and purported to show that Hitler's family were all Austrian Germans with no Jewish ancestry and that Hitler had an unblemished "Aryan" pedigree. Alois himself had claimed Johann Georg Hiedler was his biological father, and a priest accordingly amended Alois's birth certificate in 1876, which was considered certified proof for Hitler's ancestry; thus Hitler was considered a "pure" Aryan. Also in 1876, Alois hired 16-year-old Klara as a household servant.
Although Johann Georg Hiedler was considered the officially accepted paternal grandfather of Adolf Hitler by the Third Reich, the question of who his grandfather really was has caused much speculation, and the answer remains unknown. As German historian Joachim Fest wrote:
The indulgence normally accorded to a man's origins is out of place in the case of Adolf Hitler, who made documentary proof of Aryan ancestry a matter of life and death for millions of people but himself possessed no such document. He did not know who his grandfather was. Intensive research into his origins, accounts of which have been distorted by propagandist legends and which are in any case confused and murky, has failed so far to produce a clear picture. National Socialist versions skimmed over the facts and emphasised, for example, that the population of the so-called Waldviertel, from which Hitler came, had been "tribally German since the Migration of the Peoples", or more generally, that Hitler had "absorbed the powerful forces of this German granite landscape into his blood through his father".
Following the war, Adolf Hitler's former lawyer, Hans Frank, claimed that Hitler told him in 1930 that one of his relatives was trying to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his alleged Jewish ancestry. Adolf Hitler asked Frank to find out the facts. Frank says he determined that at the time Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to Alois, she was working as a household cook in the town of Graz, that her employers were a Jewish family named Frankenberger, and that her child might have been conceived out of wedlock with the family's 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger.
Opponents of the Frankenberger thesis have asserted that all Jews had been expelled from the province of Styria – which includes Graz – in the 15th century by Maximilian I, and that they were not officially allowed to return until the 1860s, when Alois was around 30. Also, there is no evidence of a Frankenberger family living in Graz at that time. Scholars such as Ian Kershaw and Brigitte Hamann dismiss the Frankenberger hypothesis, which had only Frank's speculation to support it, as baseless.
Kershaw cites several stories circulating in the 1920s about Hitler's alleged Jewish ancestry, including one about a "Baron Rothschild" in Vienna in whose household Maria Schicklgruber had worked for some time as a servant. Kershaw discusses and also lists Hitler's family tree in his biography of Adolf Hitler and gives no support to the Frankenberger tale. Hans Frank himself seemed skeptical about Hitler's possible Jewish ancestry, saying "The fact that Adolf Hitler had no Jewish blood in his veins, seems, from what has been his whole manner, so blatant to me that it needs no further word". Further, Frank's story contains several inaccuracies and contradictions, such as the statement Frank made that Maria Schicklgruber came from "Leonding near Linz", when in fact she came from the hamlet of Strones, near the village of Döllersheim.