The Origins of Hitler: Lies, Loss, and a Forged Identity
A blunt look at the missing grandfather, dead siblings, name changes, and why his family chose to disappear
People talk about Adolf Hitler in isolation as if one day he exploded into history from a thundercloud: no word on parents, childhood, and awkward teenage years. A ready-made villain dropped off by fate. It’s comforting to imagine evil arriving that way. It keeps us from asking harder questions.
The real story is much smaller and much sadder. Hitler came from a tiny Austrian family that couldn’t keep children alive, couldn’t tell the truth about its own past, and couldn’t even agree on its last name. His father changed identities like paperwork, his mother buried child after child in silence, and the family line collapsed long before the world knew his name.
There was no royal blood, no ancient destiny, no dramatic origin story. Just an ordinary house filled with fear, sickness, and secrets. And from that tiny, miserable corner of the map came a man who convinced millions he was chosen by history when his own family never produced another generation.
If you expect monsters to come from hell, this one walked straight out of a farm kitchen.
A Father With a Manufactured Identity
Hitler’s father, Alois, began life as a nobody. Born in 1837 to a 42-year-old unmarried woman, Maria Schicklgruber, he entered the world already stamped “illegitimate.” In the 1800s, that wasn’t just gossip—it was legal status. A “bastard” had no father on record, no inheritance rights, and no claim to a surname unless a man came forward. In Vienna, that was a scandal. In rural Austria, it was just life.
Maria married a miller named Johann Georg Hiedler years later. Whether he was Alois’ real father, no one ever proved. After both were dead, Alois somehow persuaded a priest to rewrite the church record, naming Hiedler as his father. When the new entry got copied into civil documents, sloppy handwriting turned Hiedler into Hitler. And that’s how history got its most infamous name—from a clerk’s mistake.
If that paperwork had gone differently, Adolf would have been Adolf Schicklgruber. Imagine the rallies: “Heil Schicklgruber!” Doesn’t quite roar off the tongue, does it?
Alois rose through the ranks of the Austrian customs service. He liked uniforms, rules, and obedience—traits he later forced on his family. At home, he was the law. No one questioned him. He barked orders, expected silence, and believed affection made people weak. He married three times: first for status, second for youth, and third for domestic service—his maid, Klara Pölzl.
He died in 1903 after collapsing at a tavern, leaving behind a family both controlled and frightened of him. His biggest legacy was the house atmosphere: cold, strict, and built on false paperwork.
His father, Alois, was born out of wedlock … the baptismal register did not include his father’s name. … In 1876, Alois changed his last name to ‘Hitler,’ when he added his step-father’s name to his birth certificate. ‘Hitler’ was one spelling of the last name ‘Hiedler’— Holocaust Encyclopedia
A Mother Who Lived With Death
Klara Pölzl, Hitler’s mother, was everything her husband wasn’t: gentle, submissive, religious, and endlessly patient. She spent her short life washing, nursing, and burying children. Out of six births, only two made it to adulthood.
Gustav, Ida, and Otto died in infancy. Edmund died at six. Only Adolf and Paula survived.
For a mother, that’s a lifetime of grief inside one small house. In rural Austria, medicine was poor, water unclean, and death came fast. Every loss wrapped Klara tighter in silence. She clung to the children who lived, especially Adolf, treating him not just as a son but as what remained of all the others.
She developed breast cancer in 1907. Her doctor, Eduard Bloch, was a Jewish gentleman who treated her free of charge out of compassion for the poverty-stricken Hitler family—a detail that later became darkly ironic when Hitler’s regime turned on the very people who had once shown him kindness. Out of gratitude, the Führer later gave Bloch the rare title of “Noble Jew” and arranged his safe passage from Austria, one of the few acts of mercy ever associated with him.
Bloch described the young Hitler as polite and deeply shaken by his mother’s suffering. When Klara died, seventeen-year-old Adolf was left with nothing but bitterness, resentment, and memories of the only person who had ever shown him softness.
Klara—luckily for her—never saw what her beloved Adolfo became. She didn’t have to watch the world burn under her son’s name. She died believing he was just another lost boy.
Outwardly, his love for his mother was his most striking feature. While he was not a ‘mother’s boy’ in the usual sense, I have never witnessed a closer attachment— Dr Eduard Bloch
Dr. Bloch,” said Hitler, “is an Edeljude — a noble Jew. If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish Question— Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal
A Family Shrinking to Nothing
By 1900, the family tree looked less like a tree and more like a dying branch. Alois’s earlier marriages had produced two half-siblings for Adolf: Alois Jr. and Angela.
Alois Jr. couldn’t stand his father. He ran off, got into trouble, drifted from job to job, and later opened a restaurant. Angela managed a calmer life and eventually worked in Nazi Germany under her brother’s shadow, running his household for a while. Her daughter, Geli Raubal, was rumored to have had a disturbing, possibly incestuous relationship with Hitler before she died under mysterious circumstances in 1931.
Paula, the youngest, stayed quiet and poor. Unbeknownst to her, she was destined to live under a false name after the war, refuse interviews, and die childless.
By the time Hitler reached power, the extended family already looked like a ghost story—people missing, dying young, or vanishing into new names. The bloodline was thinning itself out.
The Myth of Jewish Blood
No subject in Hitler’s ancestry caused more gossip than his missing grandfather. Because the baptism record left the “father” line blank, people started speculating—especially his enemies. The rumor claimed that Maria Schicklgruber had worked for a Jewish household and become pregnant by her employer.
It’s a convenient story: the man who wanted to exterminate Jews supposedly descended from one. But historians have searched for proof for nearly a century and found nothing—no family records, no DNA, no contemporary gossip from the time. The first mention came decades later, from a hostile source trying to smear him politically.
During his rise to power, Hitler secretly ordered his genealogy investigated. The researchers found nothing unusual, and he buried the report. That secrecy only fueled more rumors. But the truth is dull: the identity of his grandfather was lost because peasants didn’t always bother to write things down.
The idea that Hitler was “part Jewish” survives because people like irony. That said, is it possible he had Jewish blood? Of course. Black people discriminate against other Black people; plenty of homophobic men are gay themselves—so why couldn’t a man with Jewish blood try to wipe out Europe’s Jews? The bigger irony, if you ask me, is that the Nazis were predominantly Christian—Catholic or Protestant—yet the Savior they worshipped, Jesus, was Jewish.
Rumours to that effect circulated in Munich cafés in the early 1920s, and were fostered by sensationalist journalism of the foreign press during the 1930s
— Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936
The Nephew Who Fought Against Him
Alois Jr. had a son named William Patrick Hitler. Born in 1911, he grew up hearing about his famous uncle and decided to cash in. He traveled to Germany in the 1930s, bragged about his name, and tried to land a high-paying job through family ties. Hitler humiliated him, called him a “miserable little runt,” and sent him packing.
William fled to England, then to the United States. When the war started, he published articles warning Americans about his uncle’s insanity, then enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served honorably, fighting against the family name that once promised him privilege.
After the war, he changed his last name to Stuart-Houston, married, and settled in Long Island. He had four sons, all of whom reportedly agreed never to have children. They kept the pact.
The Quiet Collapse
When Hitler shot himself in 1945, he didn’t just end a regime; he closed a family history that had been crumbling for a century. Think about the timeline:
1837: Alois Schicklgruber born illegitimate
1876: Name rewritten as “Hitler” through paperwork
1889: Adolf born in a small Austrian village
1903: Father dies suddenly
1907: Mother dies painfully of cancer
1945: Adolf dies in a bunker, no wife, no children
1960: Paula dies childless
21st century: Last relatives agree to end the name
No dynasties. No statues. No continuation. Just ashes and silence.
For all his rants about blood purity and racial destiny, Hitler’s own bloodline eliminated itself—by disease, by infertility, and by choice. His ideology demanded that the strong multiply, but his genes quietly erased themselves from history.
Why People Prefer the Myth
The myth of Hitler as a supernatural villain comforts people. It draws a line between “him” and “us.” If he’s a freak of nature, we can sleep better. We can tell ourselves evil doesn’t grow in ordinary houses.
But once you read about his family, the comfort vanishes. He wasn’t born on a lightning bolt; he was born in a small farmhouse with peeling walls and constant death. His father lied about his name. His mother lit candles for dead children. The house stank of grief and control. From that, he built a fantasy of destiny.
People followed him because he spoke to their hunger for meaning. He gave their misery a villain, their poverty a cause, and their despair a flag. They didn’t follow a monster—they followed a reflection of themselves twisted into rage.
The myth protects us from asking how ordinary people end up cheering for extraordinary cruelty. His story shows how easy it is when someone offers you belonging in exchange for conscience.
From the Farm Kitchen to the Führerbunker
Picture the contrast: a barefoot child in rural Austria, sitting in a cold kitchen while his mother stirs soup; decades later, the same man in a bunker, ordering armies that stretch across continents.
That’s the arc of the twentieth century—from mud floor to marble palace to concrete tomb. But the kitchen explains more than the bunker ever could. It’s where he learned silence, obedience, and the power of pretending to be chosen.
No devils, no destiny—just a man who found his stage at the exact moment a broken country wanted a savior.
The Ending Nobody Notices
After the war, historians combed through the wreckage of Hitler’s life looking for clues—his school reports, his drawings, his love letters. They found mediocrity everywhere. No genius, no plan, no mystical aura. Just a man who failed at art school, bullied underlings, and lied his way upward.
And when the guns stopped, nothing of his family remained. No cousins lobbying for rights to the estate. No grandchildren changing their names for shame. The line ended like a candle that never should’ve been lit in the first place.
The world remembers the man, not the blood. The family was too small to matter and too ordinary to mythologize. That’s the real horror. The twentieth century’s greatest nightmare came from a family so unremarkable it could’ve lived next door.
Last Thoughts
People still want a grand explanation for Hitler—some hidden gene, cursed ancestry, or demonic influence. But evil rarely has that kind of origin story. It’s built one small decision at a time, by people convinced they’re doing what’s right.
His father wanted order. His mother wanted peace. He wanted power. That’s the whole chain. Nothing supernatural about it.
When people look back on the Holocaust and say, “How could this happen?”—the answer isn’t found in his DNA. It’s found in the willingness of millions to hand over their judgment to a man who promised certainty. The comfort of blind belief is what keeps making new monsters.
Coming up next: In Defence of Adolf Hitler — for paid members only. Subscribe today to be among the first to read it. And no, it’s not a neo-Nazi rant, but the history lesson few dare to tell.
I have read speculation that if Hitler's artwork had been praised instead of panned by critics, we never would have had Hitler the politician. He would have lived and died an artist.
Who coined the Phrase, the banality of evil?