Alois Hitler, Jr.

Alois Hitler Jr., also known as Alois Matzelberger and Alois Hiller, was a half-brother of Adolf Hitler and a child of Alois Hitler.

Biography
Alois Hitler Jr. was born Alois Matzelsberger, the illegitimate son of Alois Hitler Sr. and his mistress Franziska Matzelsberger, who later became his second wife. It was not until the marriage of his parents in 1883 that Alois Jr. was legitimized and given the Hitler surname. In the same year, his sister Angela was born. After this birth, their mother fell ill with tuberculosis and died on August 10, 1884. Alois and his sister then grew up with their father and his third wife, Klara Hitler (the mother of Adolf). Alois never seemed to have gotten along well with his half-brother Adolf when they were children, and they never communicated much during their lives after Alois Jr. left home (he is never mentioned in "Mein Kampf"). Later, Alois Jr. reported that Adolf had always been favored by his mother Klara whereas Alois Jr. had received some of his father's canings for Adolf's pranks. Since Alois Jr. showed technical talent, his father intended to send him to an appropriate school and let him become an engineer. These hopes seem to have been abruptly dropped, perhaps also by Klara's intervention, since the father was not willing to invest larger sums in the son's education.

Alois Jr. ran away from home at age 14 due to constant fights between him and his abusive father and because of his strained relations with his stepmother, Klara. He moved to Dublin, United Kingdom (now Ireland) and became an apprentice waiter. In 1900, Alois Jr. was arrested for theft and served a 5-month sentence. He also served an 8-month sentence in 1902.

Alois Jr. met his future wife Bridget Dowling in Dublin when he was living there in 1909; they married in Marylebone in London and moved north to Liverpool, where their son William Patrick Hitler was born in 1911. The following four years were marked by family tensions. Alois was a drinker and beat his wife and probably the small child as regularly as he drank. The family lived in a flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, which was destroyed in the last German air raid of the Liverpool Blitz on 10 January 1942. Dowling later wrote a manuscript called My Brother-in-Law Adolf, in which she says that Adolf Hitler moved to Liverpool with her and Alois, remaining from November 1912 to April 1913, in order to dodge conscription in Austria. She claimed that she had introduced Adolf Hitler to astrology and advised him to shave away the edges of his mustache. She did not succeed in selling the manuscript to a publisher, and most historians rejected her work as a fairy tale with which she wanted to monetize her famous relative. There is no evidence that Adolf ever visited his brother's family in Liverpool. Bridget Dowling's own daughter-in-law has said that Dowling admitted to her that the book was fictitious.

In 1915, Alois left Bridget and their son for a gambling tour of Europe, and later returned to Germany. Unable to reconnect due to the outbreak of World War I, Alois abandoned his family, leaving William to be brought up by his mother. In 1924, Alois was accused of bigamy in Hamburg. However, since his first wife did not pursue the charges further, the sentence of six months in prison was suspended or overturned. He also had a child, Heinrich, with his second wife Hedwig Frieda Amalie "Hete" Mickley from Groß-Neuendorf (1889–1966). On 3 August 1926, he joined the Nazi Party (membership number 41,754), but 30 September 1927 he resigned. Around this time, he wrote to Bridget, asking her to send William to Weimar Germany for a visit. She finally agreed in 1929, when William was 18. Alois' second son Heinz Hitler, in contrast to William, became a committed Nazi and in 1942 died in Soviet captivity.

Alois Jr.'s unspecified business in Germany developed positively until the Great Depression, but then went under. Until 1934, he survived with odd jobs. On September 15, 1937, he opened the "Konditorei Cafe Alois" in Berlin, which became a popular meeting place for the SA. Since his half-brother's seizure of power, Alois Jr. and Adolf no longer had any known contact with each other. After the war, he was arrested by the English but was soon released when it was found that he was not a member of the Nazi Party. In later life, he became active in politics (under his birth name) and made money in his senior years selling autographed photos of his step-brother. Before he died, he very badly wanted to be buried next to his father but was urged to have himself cremated because many felt that his grave would be vandalized. When he died of natural causes in 1956, he had himself cremated and his ashes were scattered close to his father's grave.

Appearances

 * Hitler (episode) (Part 1)

Trivia

 * TBA