[BITList] "The Hitler, who served in the US Navy During WW2."

[John Feltham]

FOR more than 50 years, the relatives of Adolf Hitler have hidden  
under false names in Long Island, New York. They have not spoken  
publicly since the Second World War. In a revelatory new book to be  
launched this week, they break their silence. David Gardner tells  
their story.

The faint lilt of German folk music floated through the open window of  
the dark-wood alpine bungalow as I walked down the short path to the  
front door. The property straddled two small roads on a forested  
private estate nestling into one of the bays tucked behind slivers of  
land protecting the New York coastline from the full impact of the  
Atlantic Ocean.
Neither close enough to New York city to be overrun by urban sprawl  
nor fashionable enough to compete with the wealthy weekend getaways in  
the Hamptons, it was a community left largely untouched by the passing  
of the years.

This was the place where Liverpool-born William Patrick Hitler had  
chosen to escape from the world.

For more than five decades, scores of historians and academics had  
been searching in vain for any clues that would solve one of the  
untold mysteries of the Second World War: whatever happened to the  
English Hitler?

William Patrick was the son of Adolf Hitler's half-brother, Alois, but  
there was little family affection: "Uncle Adolf" referred to William  
Patrick as "my loathsome nephew".
After a difficult childhood in England, a spell in Germany before the  
war, and a tour of duty as a US seaman fighting with the Allies during  
the war, the burden of his name simply became too much. William  
Patrick Hitler adopted a double-barrelled surname and dropped out of  
sight in 1946, creating a new life for himself a world away from the  
horror of the Holocaust.

Now I was about to ask his widow the question she had been dreading  
for 50 years: "Is your real name Mrs Hitler?"

I knew William Patrick would not be answering the door. I had just  
been to visit his grave, a 20-minute drive away, at the closest Roman  
Catholic cemetery, where I was given the name and address of his  
widow, Phyllis.

The music stopped and a tall, elegantly-dressed woman peered from  
behind the screen and spoke with a distinct German accent. Even from  
behind the grey mesh I could tell the reason for my visit was already  
dawning on her. She must have envisaged this very conversation  
countless times over the years.

"Perhaps we will talk about it when the boys are older," she said. "We  
were married a long time and my husband never wanted anyone to know  
who he was. Now my sons don't want anything to do with it. It was all  
too long ago. There has been enough trouble with this name."

Despite my polite attempts to persuade her to tell me more, she was  
adamant she did not want to talk about her extraordinary family  
secret. It was only when I drove slowly away from the house that I  
realised the implications of what Phyllis had told me; that the Hitler  
line did not die out with William Patrick Hitler when he died in 1987,  
aged 76. It lived on through her sons.

 From that first, short conversation with William Patrick's widow  
through subsequent dealings with her family over a period of three  
years for my book, The Last of the Hitlers, and a Channel 5  
documentary, set to be screened on February 4, I have kept a pledge  
not to reveal the name adopted by the Hitler family in New York, nor  
the town where they live.
I was to discover that the Hitler bloodline was carried on through  
William Patrick's four sons - one of whom died in a road accident in  
1989 - and that the brothers had decided in a remarkable pact not to  
have children themselves in order that Adolf Hitler's genes would die  
with them.

The eldest of these sons holds an even more remarkable secret; he was  
named after his despotic uncle. So an Adolf Hitler lives on to this  
day in a forgotten corner of America. Alexander Adolf Hitler  
understands the enduring fascination with his great-uncle but, like  
his mother, he doesn't want his life overturned, and possibly  
endangered, by revealing his true identity.

He told me: "I know that in England there is still a lot of interest  
in Hitler and it is on the television and in books and newspapers more  
often than it is here. Just make sure you say good things about my  
father because he was a good guy. He came to the United States, he  
served in the US Navy, he had four kids and he had a pretty good life."

Just in case I was in any doubt, Alex wanted to spell it out: "My  
father was definitely anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler. " So why did he name  
his eldest son Adolf? "I don't know. I wasn't there when that was  
decided."

The naming of Alexander Adolf is one of the many contradictions in the  
fascinating saga of a family's attempt to escape from its surname.

As a journalist working in New York, I spent nearly four years trying  
to unravel the secret of William Patrick's disappearance. I was  
fascinated and intrigued by what I unearthed - with the help of FBI  
files, intelligence reports and, eventually, through interviews with  
his family and friends - about his remarkable life.

The story begins with William Patrick's father, Alois - Adolf Hitler's  
older half-brother. He was touring Britain studying, he said, the  
hotel industry and met a farm girl called Brigid Dowling in Dublin in  
1909. The couple eloped to London before moving up to Liverpool where  
Brigid gave birth to their only son, William Patrick, in a flat at 102  
Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth, in 1911.

Alois ran in turn a small restaurant in Dale Street, a boarding house  
on Parliament Street and a hotel on Mount Pleasant, which went bust.  
Bankrupt, Alois left his wife and young child to fend for themselves  
and returned to Germany.

When William Patrick grew up he moved to London but by this time his  
uncle had risen to power in Germany. For the first, but not last, time  
the curse of his surname struck and he was laid off from the job he  
had found.

He decided, therefore, to travel to Germany and make full use of the  
Hitler family connections. His father and uncle helped him find work  
but the young William Patrick thought that he deserved something  
better than the book-keeping jobs he was given. He eventually fell  
foul of his uncle when he suggested that if he wasn't found something  
more befitting a member of the Fuhrer's family, he would go public  
with rumours that the Nazi leader's grandfather was an Austrian Jew.

This prompted an ultimatum by Hitler: William Patrick was ordered to  
renounce his British citizenship and take a senior position in the  
Third Reich. The young man instead chose to flee from Germany. It was  
now 1939 and he received a cold welcome in London, so he left England  
with his mother for a lecture tour of America on the subject of "My  
Uncle Adolf".
He arrived in New York at the end of March 1939 and "divested himself  
of a lot of uncomplimentary remarks about uncle Adolf", according to a  
report in the New York Daily News. His lectures attracted considerable  
attention at first but once America was forced into the war at the end  
of 1941 interest began to wane.

In 1942 William Patrick wrote to President Roosevelt asking to be  
allowed to join the US army. "I have attempted to join the British  
forces," he wrote. "The British are an insular people and while they  
are kind and courteous, it is my impression, rightly or wrongly, that  
they could not in the long run feel overly cordial or sympathetic  
towards an individual bearing the name I do."

He continued by saying that he and his mother owed a "great debt" to  
the United States and pleaded: "More than anything else I would like  
to see active combat as soon as possible and thereby be accepted by my  
friends and comrades as one of them in this great struggle for liberty."

As a result of the letter William Patrick was investigated by the FBI,  
who found no evidence of any subversive activities, and he was given  
hope that he may be allowed to join up. But it wasn't until 1944 that  
he was finally enlisted into the US navy.
There was one moment of comic coincidence when William Patrick arrived  
at the draft office and was asked his name by the recruiting officer.  
"Hitler," he replied.

"Glad to see you Hitler," said the officer, "my name's Hess."
The event was recorded by several newspapers - it was the last time  
that William Patrick Hitler was seen or heard of in public. Once in  
uniform he disappeared from public sight for ever.

My inquiries to discover what had happened to him eventually led me to  
a small cemetery tucked beside a freeway in Long Island, where I found  
that Brigid and William Patrick shared the same grave. He died in  
1987, 18 years after his mother, in the anonymity he craved for much  
of his life. His family even considered leaving the grave unmarked,  
but decided instead to bury him under the false name that had brought  
him peace.

I discovered that William Patrick had first met his wife Phyllis in  
Germany in the 1930s through her brother. With war looming, the  
brother had asked William Patrick to look after Phyllis in New York  
and dispatched the girl - who was 12 years younger than Hitler - into  
his safekeeping. Romance blossomed and the couple married after the  
war in 1947.
Their three surviving sons - Alex, 52, Louis, 50, and Brian, 36 -  
fiercely guard their privacy and their family secret. Alex is a social  
worker and his brothers run a gardening business.
Their father, they told me, was wounded in action during the war and  
later set up a blood analysis laboratory in the home he moved to in  
the countryside to escape from prying eyes.

None of the three sons has married, and there are no children. Alex  
initially denied that there had been a pact between the brothers to  
ensure that the Hitler line was not continued. Then he told me: "Maybe  
my other two brothers did [make a pact], but I never did." It was just  
one more contradiction to add to the many that already cloud his  
family history.

http://www.telegrap h.co.uk/news/ worldnews/ northamerica/ usa/ 
1382115/ Getting-to- know-the- Hitlers.html

Unlike his half-brother William Patrick Hitler, whom Adolf reportedly  
called "my loathsome nephew", Heinz was a strong Nazi and his uncle's  
favorite. He attended an elite Nazi military academy, the National  
Political Institutes of Education (Napola) in Ballenstedt/ Saxony- 
Anhalt. Aspiring to be an officer, Hitler joined the Wehrmacht as a  
signals NCO with the 23rd Potsdamer Artillery Regiment in 1941, and he  
participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation  
Barbarossa. On January 10, 1942, he was sent to recover communications  
equipment from a forward position. This was one of the things that  
worried Adolf Hitler, who did not want his nephew to serve on the  
front line because of the risk of death. Heinz never returned.





ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20090828/5d686d1e/attachment-0001.shtml