Adolf Hitler was one of six children born to his mother, and one of eight born to his father from two of his three marriages. Alois Hitler, né Schicklgruber, was an official of the Austrian customs service, and the combination of an imperial uniform and a severe drinking habit seems to have ensured that Hitler’s father was a drunken bully given to beating his children if they were not instantly obedient.
Alois had two children, Alois junior and Angela, by his second wife, and six by his third, Hitler’s mother Clara, of whom four, all boys, died at birth or in infancy. Young Adolf was therefore left with a half-brother, Alois, and half-sister, Angela, and a full sister, Paula, who died in 1960. When Hitler killed himself in April 1945, all his siblings were still living and some had children of their own. So, what happened to them?
The answer is that no one was really certain until David Gardner published this book in 2001, having patiently and steadfastly tracked down Hitler’s living relations to the USA, and made contact with some of them. Now revised and updated, this is a fascinating study of a little-known side of Hitler’s history, as well as a riveting account of how the author traced and contacted the survivors of a bloodline that most of the world probably hoped had become extinct.
About the author
David Gardner is a best-selling author and journalist, who worked as an editor with Newsweek until 2021. He also worked for the Daily Mail as a crime writer and senior foreign correspondent, filing dispatches from war-torn Beirut, covering the first Gulf War – he was the first British print journalist into Baghdad – and travelling around the world on assignments for the award-winning newspaper. He moved to California as the Mail’s Los Angeles correspondent, which saw him cover four presidential elections and all the biggest US stories of the past two decades and worked until recently as the London Evening Standard’s US correspondent. His most recent book, 9/11: The Conspiracy Theories was a Sunday Times bestseller. His other books include The Last of the Hitlers (2001), an account of how he discovered the descendants of the German dictator, The Tom Hanks Enigma (John Blake Publishing, 2007) and Legends: Murder, Lies and Cover-Ups (John Blake Publishing, 2016), in which he investigated some of the most famous celebrity deaths in recent history, including those of President John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Diana, Princess of Wales. He has also written two novels. He divides his time between the UK and LA.
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