You seem to have an enormous talent for making acquaintances. The girl is in Bonn for four weeks and already knows the names of half the University and has found herself an interesting lame student whom she encounters six times a day. The interesting lame student with the spectacles and fair beard! He undoubtedly had his legs shot up in a duel. Only why does he still limp when walking? Does he limp in an interesting way or ordinarily, like other lame people? Which foot is lame — the right one or both? Does he wear a hat with a red cock’s feather? Could he not be the diable boiteux [Limping devil, an allusion to the title character of Le Sage’s novel]? I'd like to know a great deal more about this interesting, lame, bearded, bespectacled, sharp-eyed student.

Have you continued to make friends in Ostende? Isn’t there an interesting lame Fleming there who meets you on the beach six times a day? Look:

Happily the Convent leaving,
Free to move again am I.
I can laugh and I can chatter,
In the window I can lie!

With Duennas watching round me,
Oh, what agony of mind,
Sitting at the daily lessons,
Cribbed and cabined and confined!

Oft I heard those Heidelbergers
Singing outside merrily;
Could not even reach the window
All the gallant lads to see!

Now I'm free at last, and want to
Taste my new-found liberty.
There’s a new life waiting after
All that grey monotony!

I'll look out my newest clothes and
Dress as pretty as I please.
I'll be off to see the poshest
Of the posh Academies!

Poppelsdorf and Königswinter!
Rolandseck and Drachenfels!
Goggle at my so sparkling eyes
And my sparkling teeth as well!

And I'll bet that though our fellow
Students may be quite a host,
Getting our address will take them
Eight days at the very most.

Landlord Stamm be truly grateful
That your lodging-house we chose.
Tippling students throng your garden,
And the money really flows.

Best of all, when I'm out walking,
How I'm crowded round and courted!
See the poor Professors’ daughters
All alone and unescorted!

Bottle-heroes Count d'Alviella,
Von Szczepansky come and linger:
See me twist those gallant fellows
Round and round my little finger!

Herr von Diest, the truly love-lorn,
Runs my errands all the while.
Chapeau plays his fife for dancing,
Bunsen sings to make me smile.

But there’s something always haunts me
When I leave the busy throng,
And it is a handsome student
Limping painfully along.

While the others are so busy
Doing all that I want done,
How am I to meet that handsome
Lame and interesting one?

Now I've left my town of Bonn
For the North Sea’s level shore.
No more rousing student ditties,
Just the ocean’s mighty roar.

With the French and with the Belgians
I go strolling by the seas, just as in the Convent, I must
Speak French only, if you please.

Once again, crowds of admirers
Follow me along the strip,
Follow me into the briny
When I take my morning dip.

Otherwise, it’s just like Bonn,
And I have no cause to grumble.
Food and lodgings both are decent,
And the landlord’s tolerable.

Yet, for all those bathers, someone’s
Missing, when all’s said and done.
Woe is me! I just can’t find that
Lame and interesting one!

This describes you perfectly, don’t you think? I want to set it to music for you so you can sing it. But you'll only get the score when I answer your next letter, otherwise I would spoil you by sending such a magnificent gift. I have other things to do than to praise you in song — that can only be permitted as a reward for an especially long letter.

You must try to learn the Flemish or Netherlandic dialect while you are in Ostende. It is a very clumsy language, but it has its advantages and anyway it is very comical. If you know Low German, you'll probably be able to understand Flemish. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

I now have a dog whom I got from August Bredt of Barmen when he left here. It’s a handsome young spaniel, much bigger than our dear Mira and quite crazy. He has a great talent for boozing and if I go to a restaurant in the evening, he always sits near me and has his share, or makes himself at home at everybody else’s table. He’s also remarkable for an invisible collar. He is an excellent swimmer but too crazy to learn any tricks. I have taught him one thing. When I say “Namenloser” (that’s his name)"there’s an aristocrat!” he goes wild with rage and growls hideously at the person I show him.

While everybody has been forecasting that the Rhine wine will be splendid this year, the Grüneberger has turned out to be disgracefully bad. Do you know Grüneberger? Grüneberger is a Lausitz vine which only grows in sand and never produces good grapes except in a very wet year. When the hardness of the grapes turns from stone to wood, i. e., when you can cut into them with a knife, then they are ripe. They are pressed by steam-engine and people reckon that it takes a twelve horse-power machine working for an hour to press a hundred grapes. The best year for Grüneberger was ‘40. It cannot be put into casks because it splits the wood. When it is good you should eat a dozen pins, then drink a glass of Grüneberger, and if the pins are not dissolved or destroyed in five minutes it means the wine is no good. It is a very long-lasting wine for if you take a swig, your throat is sore for four weeks. It has a very fine bouquet and only a connoisseur can tell the difference between it and vinegar. A mixture of nitric acid and wine-vinegar comes closest in taste to this noble wine. Well, you've had enough now, and I still have to write to Mother. Adieu.

Today, Friday, April 15, I am going for a drive. The weather has greatly improved. A whole lot of carriages are lined in front of my house where they have taken up their quarters. The cabbies are usually drunk and entertain me vastly. It is very convenient for me if I ever want to take a trip in one of the cabs. I live very agreeably on the first floor, in an elegantly furnished room — the front wall of it is made up of three windows separated only by small pillars, so it is very bright and friendly.

I was interrupted yesterday when I had written this. Today I can tell you the glad news that we are probably not going on parade tomorrow because His Most Supreme Majesty, the King [Frederick William IV], has condescended to leave for Potsdam and Brandenburg. All of which suits me very well, for I have no desire to knock around that cursed palace yard tomorrow. Let us hope we shall have no parade at all. We now also have a most charming exercise on the Grützmacher, so called, which is a very large open space where you sink up to your knees in sand and which has the delightful peculiarity of being electric. When the 12th Guards Artillery Company, to which I belong, and which is also electric, but negative, arrives there, positive and negative electricity collide, causing confusion and chaos in the atmosphere and attracting the clouds. Otherwise I cannot think how to explain why it always rains or snows when our company is on the Grützmacher. Incidentally I have now been a bombardier for four weeks, and, in case you didn’t know, I wear braid and piping and a blue collar with red edgings. You won’t understand all this, but it is not really necessary, as long as you know that I am a bombardier, that’s enough.

You will certainly not have heard yet that Herr Liszt has been here and enchanted all the ladies by his piano playing. The Berlin ladies were so besotted by him that there was a free fight during one of his concerts for possession of a glove which he had dropped, and two sisters are now enemies for life because one of them snatched the glove from the other. Countess Schlippenbach poured the tea which the great Liszt had left in a cup into her Eau-de-Cologne bottle after she had poured the Eau-de-Cologne on to the ground. She has since scaled the bottle and placed it on top of her writing-desk to his eternal memory and feasts her eyes on it every morning, as can be seen in a cartoon which appeared about it. There never was such a scandal. The young ladies fought over him but he snubbed them frightfully, and preferred to go and drink champagne with a couple of students. But there are a couple of pictures of the great, charming, heavenly, genial, divine Liszt in every house. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  I will draw you a portrait of him. Here is the man with the Kamchatka hair style. By the way, he must have earned at least 10,000 talers here and his hotel bill amounted to 3,000 talers — apart from what he spent in taverns. I tell you, he’s a real man. He drinks twenty cups of coffee a day, two ounces of coffee in every cup, and ten bottles of F. Liszt champagne, from which it can fairly safely be concluded that he lives in a kind of perpetual drunken haze, which may also be confirmed. He has now gone off to Russia and one wonders whether the ladies there will go as crazy too.

I must go out now, so I will close. Farewell and write soon.

Earlier in his career the world had watched him with amusement. Many people refused to take him seriously on the grounds that "he could not possibly last." As one action after another met with amazing success and the measure of the man became more obvious, this amusement was transformed into incredulousness. To most people it seemed inconceivable that such things could actually happen in our modern civilization. Hitler, the leader of these activities, became generally regarded as a madman, if not inhuman. Such a conclusion, concerning the nature of our enemy, may be satisfactory from the point of view of the man in the street. It gives him a feeling of satisfaction to pigeon-hole an incomprehensible individual in one category or another. Having classified him in this way, he feels that the problem is completely solved. All we need to do is to eliminate the madman from the scene of activities, replace him with a sane individual, and the world will again return to a normal and peaceful state of affairs.

This naive view, however, is wholly inadequate for those who are delegated to conduct the war against Germany or for those who will be delegated to deal with the situation when the war is over. They cannot content themselves with simply regarding Hitler as a personal devil and condemning him to an Eternal Hell in order that the remainder of the world may live in peace and quiet. They will realize that the madness of the part of wholly the actions of a single individual but that a reciprocal relationship exists between the Fuehrer and the people and that the madness of the one stimulates and flows into the other and vice versa. It was not only Hitler, the madman, who created German madness, but German madness which created Hitler. Having created him as its spokesman and leader, it has been carried along by his momentum, perhaps far beyond the point where it was originally prepared to go. Nevertheless, it continues to follow his lead in spite of the fact that it must be obvious to all intelligent people now that his path leads to inevitable destruction.

From a scientific point of view, therefore, we are forced to consider Hitler, the Fuehrer, not as a personal devil, wicked as his actions and philosophy may be, but as the expression of a state of mind existing in millions of people, not only in Germany but, to a smaller degree, in all civilized countries. To remove Hitler may be a necessary first step, but it would not be the cure. It would be analogous to curing an ulcer without treating the underlying disease. If similar eruptions are to be prevented in the future, we cannot content ourselves with simply removing the overt manifestations of the disease. On the contratry, we must ferret out and seek to correct the underlying factors which produced the unwelcome phenomenon. We must discover the psychological streams which nourish this destructtve state of mind in order that we may divert them into channels which will permit a further evolution of our form of civilization.

The present study is concerned wholly with Adolph Hitler and the social forces which impinged upon him in the course of his development and produced the man we know. One may question the wisdom of studying the psychology of a single individual if the present war represents a rebellion by a nation against our civilization. To understand the one does not tell us anything about the millions of others. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  In a sense this is perfectly true. In the process of growing up we are all faced with highly individual experiences and exposed to varying social influences. The result is that when we mature no two of us are identical from a psychological point of view. In the present instance, however, we are concerned not so much with distinct individuals as with a whole cultural group. The members of this group have been exposed to social influences, family patterns, methods of training and education, opportunities for development, etc., which are fairly homogeneous within a given culture or strata of a culture. The result is that the members of a given culture tend to act, think and feel more or less alike, at least in contrast to the members of a different cultural group. This justifies Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire , to some extent, our speaking of a general cultural character. On the other hand, if a large section of a given culture rebells against the traditional pattern then we must assume that new social influences have been introducod which tend to produce a type of character which cannot thrive in the old cultural environment.

When this happens it may be extremely helpful to understand the nature of the social forces which influenced the development of individual members of the group. These may serve as clues to an understanding of the group as a whole inasmuch as we can then investigate the frequency and intensity of these same forces in the group as a whole and draw deductions concerning their effect upon its individual members. If the individual being studied happens to be the Ieader of the group, we can expect to find the pertinent factors in an exaggerated form which would tend to make them stand out in sharper relief than would be the case if we studied an average member of the group. Under these circumstances, the action of the forces may be more easily isolated and subjected to detailed study in relation to the personality as whole as well as to the culture in general. The problem of our study should be, then, not only whether Hitler is mad or not, but what influences in his development have made him what he is.

(f) That it would be peculiar for Alois Hitler, while working as a customs official in Braunau, should choose a Jew named Prinz, of Vienna, to act as Adolph's godfather unless he felt some kinship with the Jews himself.

This is certainly a very intriguing hypothesis and much of Adolph's later behavior could be explained in rather easy terms on this basis. However, it is not absolutely necessary to assume that he had Jewish blood in his veins in order to make a comprehensive picture of his character with its manifoid traits and sentiments. From a purely scientific point of view, therefore, it is sounder not to base our reconstruction on such slim evidence but to seek firmer foundations. Nevertheless, we can leave it as a possibility which requires further verification.

In any event, Maria Ann Schicklgruber died when he was five years of age. When he was thirteen he left the Waldviertel and went to Vienna where he learned to be a cobbler. The next twenty-three years of his life are largely unaccounted for. It seems probable that during this time he joined the army and had perhaps been advanced to the rank of non-commissioned officer. His service in the army may have helped him to enter the Civil Service as Zellamtsoffizial later on.

His married life was stormy. His first wife (born Glasl-Hoerer) was about thirteen years older than himself. She is alleged to have been the daughter of one of his superiors and seems to have been in poor health. In any event, the marriage turned out badly and they finally separated since, as Catholics a complete divorce was not possible. His first wife died in 1883.

In January, 1882, Franziska Matzelsberger gave birth to an illegitimate son who was named Alois. After the death of his first wife on April 6, 1883, Alois Hitler married Franziska Matzelsberger on May 22, 1888 and legitimized his son,. On July 28, 1883 his second wife bore him another child, Angela, and a year later, on August 10, 1884, she also died. During the time of his first marriage the couple had taken as a foster-daughter Klara Poelzl, Alois Hitler' s second cousin, once removed. He had reared her up to the time of the separation from his first wife when she went to Vienna as a servant. During the last months of the life of his second wife, Klara Poelzl returned to his home to look after the invalid and the two children. She remained in his home as housekeeper after the death of his second wife and on January 7, 1885 he married her.

On May 17, 1885 she gave birth to a son who died in infancy. It is alleged by William Patrick Hitler that an illegitimate child was born previously, but we have no other record of this. In any event, at least one child was conceived out of wedlock. Four more children were born of this union. This is certainly a tempestuous married life for a customs officer - three wives, seven or possibly eight children, one divorce, at least one birth and possibly two before marriage, two directly after the wedding, one wife thirteen years older than himself and another twenty-three years younger, one the daughter of a superior, one a waitress, and the third a servant and his foster-daughter. All of this, of course, has never been mentioned by Hitler. In MEIN KAMPF he gives a very simple picture-of conditions in his father's home.

Very little is known about Alois Hitler's character. It seems that he was very proud of his achievements in the Civil Service and yet he retired from this service at the astonishing age of fifty-six, four years after Adolph was born. In very rapid succession the family moved into several different villages and the father tried his hand at farming. It is said, however, that he always wore his customs official's uniform and insisted on being addressed as Herr Oberoffizial Hitler. According to reports, he liked to lord it over his neighbors whom he may have looked down upon as "mere" peasants. In any event, it seems quite certain that he enjoyed sitting in the tavern and relating his adventures as a customs official and also in discussing political topics.

He died on his way to the tavern in Leonding from a stroke of apoplexy in 1903.

He is generally described as a very domineering individual who was a veritable tyrant in his home. William Patrick Hitler says that he has heard from his father, Adolph's elder half-brother, that he used to best the children unmercifully. On one occasion it is alleged he beat the older son into a state of unconsciousness and on another occasion beat Adolph so severely that he left him for dead. It is also alleged that he was somewhat of a drunkard and that frequently the children would have to bring him home from the taverns. When he reached home a grand scene would take place during which he would beat wife, children and dog rather indiscriminately. This story is generally accepted and yet there is little real evidence in favor of it except what Hitler himself tells us in MEIN KAMPF.

Heidan, who interviewed a number of the villagers in places where the family lived, had nothing of this sort to report. They found the old man rather amusing and claimed that his home life was very happy and quiet except when his wife's sister came to visit with the family. Why this should be a disturbing factor is unknown. Heiden suspects that the legacy was a bone of contention.

There is some doubt about the complexion of Alois Hitler's political sentiments. Hanisch reports "Hitler heard from his father only praise of Germany and all the faults of Austria." According to Heiden, more reliable informants claim that the father, though full of complaints and criticisms of the government he served, was by no means a German nationalist. They say he favored Austria against Germany and this coincides with William Patrick Hitler's information that his grandfather was definitely anti-German just as his own father was.

Mother Klara Poelzl, as has been said, was the foster-daughter of her husband and twenty-three years his junior. She came from old peasant stock, was hard-working, energetic and conscientious. Whether it was due to her years of domestic service or to her upbringing, her home was always spotlessly clean, everything had its place and not a speck of dust was to be found on the furniture. She was very devoted to her children and, according to William Patrick Hitler, a typical step-mother to her step-children. According to Dr. Bloch who treated her, she was a very sweet and affectionate woman whose life centered around her children and particularly Adolph, who was her pet. She spoke very highly of her husband and his character and the happy life they had together. She felt it was a real deprivation for the children to have lost their father while they were still so young.

One could question her background. Her sister is married and has two sons, one of whom is a hunchback and has an impediment in his speech. When we consider that Klara Poelzl may have lost one child before her marriage to Alois Hitler, another son born in 1885 who died in 1887, another son born in 1894 who died in 1900, and a girl who was born in 1886 and died in 1888, one has grounds to question the purity of the blood. There is even cause for greater suspicion when we learn from Dr. Bloch that he is certain that there was a   daughter, slightly older than Adolph, who was an imbecile. He is absolutely certain of this because he noticed at the time that the family always tried to hide the child and keep her out of the way when he came to attend the mother. It is possible that this is Ida who was born in 1886 and who is alleged to have died in 1888, except that Dr. Bloch believes that this girl's name was Klara. He may, however, be mistaken in this particularly since both names end in "a" and he never had any close contact with her. There is no other record of a Klara anywhere in the records.

The younger sister, Paula, is also said to be a little on the stupid side, perhaps a high-grade moron. This is certainly a poor record and one is justified in suspecting some constitutional weakness. A syphilitic taint is not beyond the realm of possibility. The mother died following an operation for cancer of the breast on December 21,1907. All biographers have given the date of her death as December 21, 1906 but Dr. Bloch's records show clearly that she died in 1907 and John Gunther's record of the inscription on her tombstone corroborates this. The last six months of her life were spent in extreme pain and during the last week it was necessary to give her injections of morphine daily.

It is often alleged that she was of Czech origin and spoke only a broken German and that consequently Adolph may have been ashamed of her among his playmates. This is almost certainly untrue. Dr. Bloch reports that she did not  have any trace of an accent of any kind nor did she show any Czech characteristics. Alois Hitler's first wife was of Czech origin and later writers may have confused her with Adolph's mother.

Siblings

Alois, Jr

Alois Hitler, Jr. was born January 13, 1882, the illegitimate son of the father's second wife born during the lifetime of the first wife. He is the father of William Patrick Hitler, one of our informants. He seems to have taken very much after his father in some respects. He left the parental home before the death of his father because, according to his son, he could tolerate it no longer. His step-mother, according to the story, made life very difficult for him and continually antagonized her husband against him. It seems that Alois, Jr. had considerable talent for mechanical pursuits and his father had planned on sending him to a technical school for training as an engineer. Until his third marriage the father was very fond of his oldest boy and all his ambitions were wrapped up in him. But the step-mother systematically undermined this relationship and finally persuaded the father that Alois, Jr. was unworthy and that he should save his money for the education of her son, Adolph. She was finally successful and Alois, Jr. was sent away from home as an apprentice waiter.

Evidently the profession of waiter did not intrigue him, for in 19OO he received a five-months' sentence for thievery and in 1902 he was sentenced to eight months in jail for the same reason. He then went to London where he obtained a position as a waiter and, in 1909, married Bridget Dowling, an Irish girl. In 1911 William Patrick Hitler was born and in 1915 his father deserted the family and returned to Germany. The family was not a happy one and broke up several times in the course of these four years. It is alleged that the father drinks quite frequently and would then come home and create tremendous scenes during which he frequently beat his wife and tried to beat the small infant.   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  During these four years when his mother and father had separated for a time, his father did go to Vienna. This would agree with Hanfstangl's conviction that Alois, Jr. was in Vienna at the same time that Adolph was there.

In 1924 Alois, Jr. was brought before the court of Hamburg charged with bigamy. He was sentenced to six months in prison but since his first wife did not prosecute the sentence was suspended. He has an illegitimate child by the second wife who lives in Germany. During all these years he has never sent any money for the support of his first wife or child. Up until the time of the inflation it is alleged that he had a very successful business in Germany. The business failed and he has had various jobs up until 1934 when he opened a restaurant in Berlin which became a popular meeting-place for S.A. men.

According to the son, Alois, Jr. heartily disliked Adolph as a boy. He always felt that Adolph was spoiled by his mother and that he was forced to do many of the chores that Adolph should have done. Furthermore, it seems that Adolph occasionally got into mischief which his mother would blame on Alois and Alois would have to take the punishment from his father. He used to say as a boy he would have liked to have wrung Adolph's neck on more than one occasion and considering the circumstances this is probably not far from the truth. Since Hitler came to power, the two brothers have practically no contact with each other. They have come together a few times but the meeting is usually unpleasant, with Adolph taking a very high-handed attitude and laying down the law to the rest of the family. Alois, Jr.     Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire   is not mentioned in MEIN KAMPF and only a few people in Germany know of his relationship to Hitler.

Richard Roth left here a week ago for a grand tour of South Germany and Switzerland. Thank God that I too am leaving this dreary hole where there is nothing to do but fence, eat, drink, sleep and drudge, voilà tout. I don’t know if you have heard that Father and I shall probably be going to Italy at the end of April in which case I shall do you the honour of visiting you. If you behave properly I may even bring you something, but if you are high and mighty, stiff and haughty, then you will be in for trouble. Nor will you escape just punishment if you write any more such nonsense as you did in your last letter but one, teasing me about the fencing lesson. I was very glad to hear that the Stabat mater is by Pergolese. You must in any case get me a copy of the piano arrangement containing all the vocal parts with the score showing the singing parts above those which have to be played, as in a piano arrangement of an opera. It occurs to me that there are no tenor or bass parts in Pergolese’s Stabat mater. There are probably more sopranos and altos instead. Never mind.

If I really do go to Milan in the spring I shall meet Roth, and Wilhelm Blank from Elberfeld, and we'll have a high old time there with Turkish tobacco and Lacrime di Christo. Six months after we've gone, the Italians should still be talking about the three jolly Germans, so famous do we intend to make ourselves.

I was very much amused to read your description of your innocent carnival. I should like to have seen you. Nothing very amusing has happened here, apart from a couple of boring fancy-dress balls which I didn’t go to. In Berlin, too, the carnival was a terribly flat affair. They're still best at that sort of thing in Cologne.

There is one thing in which you are less fortunate than I. You cannot hear Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor today, Wednesday, March 10, while I can. This and the Eroica are my favourites. Practise Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies well, so that I shan’t be ashamed of you later on. I am going to hear them not just in the piano arrangement, but played by the full orchestra.   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

March 11. What a symphony it was last night! You never heard anything like it in your whole life if you don’t know this wonderful work. What despairing discord in the first movement, what elegiac melancholy, what a tender lover’s lament in the adagio, what a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration of freedom by the trombone in the third and fourth movements! Besides this I also heard a wretched Frenchman sing yesterday and it went something like this:

and so on, no melody or harmony and a pathetic French text and the whole joke was called L'Exilé de France. If all French exiles indulge in such caterwauling then nobody will want to have them anywhere. This boor also sang a song called Le toréador, which means the bull-fighter, with the refrain, every other second, of Ah que jaime 1'Espagne! This was even more pitiful-if that were possible sometimes with leaps of fifths, sometimes twisting about in chromatic passages as if to signify an attack of stomach-ache. If it hadn’t been followed by the tremendous symphony I would have run away and left the crow to squawk in his miserable, thin baritone. Meanwhile see that the next letters you send are folded better. This way [X] is very unpractical and in bad taste, it must be like this [x] or like this [X] please note.