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Subject:
A bit of history: 20 April 1889: The birth of Adolf Hitler: A sad day for humanity
tjkhan
4/20/2006 5:01:36 AM
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Wikipedia records:
"Early years
Childhood and heritage
Adolf was born on April 20, 1889, at Braunau am Inn, Austria, a small town in Upper Austria, on the border with Germany. He was the fourth of six children of Alois Hitler (1837?1903), a customs official, and Klara Pölzl, Alois's niece and third wife. Of these six children, only Adolf and his younger sister Paula reached adulthood. Alois Hitler also had a son (Alois Junior) and a daughter (Angela) by his second wife. Adolf Hitler was raised a strict Catholic: he was baptized, served as an altar boy, sang in the choir, and received the sacraments and Communion; in public discourse he continued frequently to proclaim his Christianity and Catholicism.[1] However, later in life he did not attend mass and therefore was not in this way a practising Catholic as an adult.
His father Alois was born out of wedlock and used his mother's surname, Schicklgruber, until he was 40. In 1896, he began using the name of his stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler, after visiting a priest responsible for birth registries and declaring that Georg was his father (Alois gave the impression that Georg was still alive but he was long dead). The spelling was probably changed to "Hitler" by a clerk. Later, Adolf Hitler was accused by his political enemies of not rightfully being a Hitler, but a Schicklgruber. This was also exploited in Allied propaganda during the Second World War when pamphlets bearing the phrase "Heil Schicklgruber" were airdropped over German cities.[citation needed] Adolf was legally born a Hitler, however, and was also closely related to Hiedler through his maternal grandmother, Johanna Hiedler.
Hitler was not sure who his paternal grandfather was, but it was probably either Johann Georg Hiedler or his brother Johann von Nepomuk Hiedler. There have been rumours that Hitler was one-quarter Jewish and that his paternal grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, had become pregnant after working as a servant in a Jewish household in Graz. During the 1920s, the implications of these rumours along with his known family history were politically explosive, especially for the proponent of a racist ideology. Opponents tried to prove that Hitler, the leader of the anti-Semitic Nazi Party, had Jewish or Czech ancestors. Although these rumours were never confirmed, for Hitler they were reason enough to conceal his origins. Soviet propaganda insisted Hitler was a Jew, though more modern research tends to diminish the probability that he had Jewish ancestors. Historians such as Werner Maser and Ian Kershaw argue this was impossible, since the Jews had been expelled from Graz in the 15th century and were not allowed to return until well after Maria Schicklgruber's alleged employment.
Because of Alois Hitler's profession, his family moved frequently, from Braunau to Passau, Lambach, Leonding, and Linz. As a young child, Hitler was reportedly a good student at the various elementary schools he attended; however, in sixth grade (1900-1), his first year of high school (Realschule) in Linz, he failed completely and had to repeat the grade. His teachers reported that he had "no desire to work."
Hitler later explained this educational slump as a kind of rebellion against his father Alois, who wanted the boy to follow him in a career as a customs official, although Adolf wanted to become a painter. This explanation is further supported by Hitler's later description of himself as a misunderstood artist. However, after Alois died on January 3, 1903, when Adolf was 13, Hitler's schoolwork did not improve. At the age of 16, Hitler left school with no qualifications.
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