Hitler has no descendants, so why don’t he have any relatives?

Adolf Hitler once claimed: "I have no sense of family at all. These things do not belong to my nature, I only belong to my people." Although this was

Hitler was bragging about himself , but historians seem to agree with him, because in the past 50 years, in the many biographies written by historians about Hitler, his family members have rarely been mentioned. "You don't read about the family in the books," one of Hitler's relatives recently told New Yorker reporter Timothy Rybak. "It's like we don't even exist."

Discovering Hitler A big family

However, Hitler’s relatives naturally exist. After years of tracking and investigation, Ryback finally discovered the whereabouts of Hitler's descendants.

Adolf Hitler's father's name was Alois Hitler, and his mother, Carrara Perceau, was his father's second wife. Hitler was born in 1889. He also had a sister who was 7 years younger than him, named Paula. Alois's first wife, Francesca, died of tuberculosis and gave birth to two children: a son named Alois Jr., born in 1882, and a daughter named Angela, born in 1883. So Adolf also had a half-brother and a half-sister.

Although Hitler had no biological children, his brothers and sisters had many descendants. Paula, who is now deceased, wrote to a friend in 1955 that many of her relatives who had served on behalf of Adolf Hitler were purged after the end of World War II. According to Rybak's understanding, many descendants of the Hitler family are still living in this world.

Most of these relatives live in a border industrial city called Linz on the border between Austria and the Czech Republic, not far from the cemetery where Hitler's parents are buried. They are both descendants of Adolf's half-sister Angela and great-nephews of Hitler.

But it is the descendants of little Alois who can really inherit Hitler's surname. Little Alois had always been at odds with his father and ran away from home when he was 14 years old. In 1909, while working as a hotel waiter in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, he met a 17-year-old Irish girl, Brigid Dowling. They eloped to London to get married in 1910, and later settled in Liverpool, England, where they gave birth to their son William. William immigrated to New York in 1939 and settled there until his death. His children are now U.S. citizens and live on Long Island, not far from Manhattan, New York.

All Hitler's relatives lived a very low-key, almost reclusive life, trying their best to avoid the public, especially the media. In Austria, they often flatly denied that they were related to Hitler and sometimes even refused to answer phone calls. In the United States, through a lawyer, they repeatedly refused to be interviewed for fear of being implicated because of their blood ties to Hitler.

Hitler’s nephew serves as a soldier in the United States

Hitler called his eldest nephew Wilhelm “one of my most hateful relatives.” There were profound conflicts between them.

According to Rybak's report, when William just became an adult, he took advantage of his blood relationship with Hitler and accepted an interview with a British newspaper, claiming that he was Hitler's nephew. After Hitler learned of the situation, he summoned him and reprimanded him: "What did you say to reporters? Who allowed you to make irresponsible remarks on my personal affairs? You destroyed everything I built with my own hands!" Hitler gave him the words afterwards. He paid William 2,000 pounds and asked him to return to England to publicly withdraw his statement that he was Hitler's nephew.

An FBI report stated that William arrived in New York in March 1939, six months before Hitler launched his lightning strike on Poland. In the next two years, he gave many speeches in the United States and Canada, and published an article titled "Why I Hate My Uncle" in an American magazine, calling Hitler a rather uncomfortable surname. On March 3, 1942, William, who lived in Queens, New York, wrote a three-page letter to US President Roosevelt. In the letter, he called himself "the nephew of the notorious German Führer who brutally attempted to enslave the world." Free Christian" and asked Mr. President to give him the opportunity to serve in the U.S. military.

On March 14, President Roosevelt forwarded the letter to then FBI Director Hoover. After a month of investigation, Hoover reported to the White House that there was "no intelligence that William was engaged in any subversive activity." The FBI's impression of him was that he was "extremely lazy, unwilling to work, and wanted to make a lot of money." In March 1944, Hitler's 33-year-old nephew became a first-class private in the U.S. Navy until February 1946.

Life in anonymity

After retiring, William told reporters that he would live with his mother living in Harlem, New York, and applied to become an American citizen. Later, he graduated from college in New York City and worked in a local hospital, but his life was never rich. After marrying a local German woman, he moved to Long Island and changed his last name from Hitler to Hiller. They have four sons. Except for the youngest son who died in the late 1980s, William's other three sons still live in Long Island, aged between 40 and 50 years old. William himself died in 1987 at the age of 76.

Two years ago, a reporter from a South African newspaper found traces of the Hitler family in the United States, but was turned away by William's 70-year-old widow.

Rybak also discovered their whereabouts in March last year, but when he contacted them by phone, they did not respond. Later, he simply went straight to the apartments of William's children on Long Island. There was no one in one of the apartments, and from the other apartment, which was the house where William had lived, a middle-aged man wearing a T-shirt and jeans walked out. He said nervously that he could not talk about anything about William without consulting other members of the family, and quickly closed the door. Rybak later called the third brother, but the other brother hung up the phone as soon as Rybak introduced himself. Finally, a lawyer called on their behalf to tell Ryback that his client didn't want to talk about it.

It seems that this family is determined to avoid public attention, so even their death has become a secret. The widow of William's youngest son never mentioned anything about her father-in-law William after she remarried. There is no surname on William's epitaph. His death certificate is kept at the local town hall, but he left no will.