5

The Waldviertel, situated north of the Danube, is a land of tall beautiful pines. Indeed Waldviertel can be translated directly as the “wooded quarter,” and the silences of the forests are dark in contrast to the green of an occasional field. The soil, however, does not welcome agriculture. An Austrian hamlet in these backwoods delineated the meaning of dirt-poor. In those years, the Hiedlers (who later became Hitlers) lived in Spital, a village of sorts, and the Schicklgrubers, their cousins, lived nearby in the aforesaid Strones, which was deep in the mud along its one lane, no more than a few dozen huts with roofs of thatch. If Strones was profuse in pig wallows around each dwelling, cow flop was more prominent in the town meadows, and the redolence of horse manure was valued. This was, after all, an area where many a peasant had to pull his own plow through various grades of mud. There was gumbo thick as lava, rivulets of silt, gravel washes, muck and slops, clods, rocks, common clay. For that matter, Strones did not even have a church. The locals had to walk to another hamlet, Döllersheim. There in the parish registry, the name of Maria Anna’s son was inscribed as “Alois Schicklgruber, Catholic, Male,”—and, as we know—“Illegitimate.”

Maria Anna, born in 1795, was forty-two when Alois was born in 1837. Coming from a family of eleven children of whom five were already dead, she certainly could have cohabited with any one of her several brothers. (Himmler had, of course, no objection to that, since her bastard Alois was, I repeat, Adolf’s father.) In any event, despite the abysmal poverty of Maria Anna’s parents, she dwelt with her son for the next five years in one of her father’s two small rooms. The mysterious money that came in small but dependable installments helped to support these Schicklgrubers.

While we were obviously eager to find a trove of intrafamily copulations, such a desire did not allow us to dismiss the Jew from Graz. Indeed, eight years earlier, in 1930, inquiries had already been made. As Himmler related it, Hitler, on reading his nephew’s letter, had sent it on immediately to a Nazi lawyer, Hans Frank. The Führer, as some may no longer recall, did not become Chancellor until 1933, but Hans Frank was already looking in 1930 to worm his way into the inside circle around the Leader.

Frank had unhappy news to deliver, therefore, concerning Maria Anna’s pregnancy. The likelihood, he declared, was that the father had been a nineteen-year-old, the son of a prosperous merchant named Frankenberger who was, yes, a Jew. It made sense. In those years, the scion of many a well-to-do family had his first carnal outings with a housemaid. Nor did she have to be anywhere near his age. Such an initiation was accepted by the bourgeois mores of a provincial city like Graz as a reasonable if undiscussed practice. It was seen as a good deal better than allowing a well-to-do lad to consort with whores or settle too early on a sweetheart from a less prosperous family.

Frank claimed to have seen some conclusive evidence. He told Hitler that he had been shown a letter written by Herr Frankenberger, the father of the young man who had bedded down with Maria Anna. This letter promised regular payments to take care of Alois until he was fourteen years old.

Our Adolf, however, disagreed with these findings. He told Hans Frank that the true story, imparted to him by his own father, Alois, was that the real grandfather had been Maria Anna’s cousin Johann Georg Hiedler, who had finally come around to marry her five years after Alois’ birth. “All the same,” said Hitler to Hans Frank, “I would like to examine this letter from the Jew to my grandmother.”

Frank told Hitler that he did not as yet possess it. The man who held it was asking too high a price. Besides, the letter must certainly have been photographed.

“You have seen the original?” Hitler asked.

“I was able to look at it while in his office. He had two big fellows standing beside him. He also had a pistol on the table. What must he have been expecting?”

Hitler nodded. “One cannot even expect a sudden end for a man like that. The letter, after all, will be in one place and the photographic copy in another.”

One more concern for Hitler to carry.

By 1938, however, our search had delivered alternatives. It no longer seemed certain that Maria Anna was still receiving steady money five years after Alois was born. Following her marriage in 1842, she and her husband, Johann Georg Hiedler, had been much too poor to have a home of their own. For a time they had had to sleep in a battered old trough once used to feed cattle in a neighbor’s barn. Of course, that did not prove that no money had been sent. Johann Georg could certainly have drunk up the funds. In Strones, he remained a legend due to the extent of his tippling. Indeed, his large intake of liquor had to be at odds with the assumption that they were that poor: For why would a drunk like fifty-year-old Johann Georg marry a woman of forty-seven with a five-year-old brat unless she had enough income to allow him to drink? Moreover, the extent of his boozing would hardly suggest that he had been Alois’ father. Indeed, this Johann Georg Hiedler made no objection when Maria Anna asked Johann’s younger brother, also named Johann (but, in this case, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler), to take the boy in and raise him. This younger brother, Johann Nepomuk, was, by contrast, a sober, hardworking farmer with a wife and three daughters, but he did not have a son.

So Johann Nepomuk now stood out as a likely possibility. Might he not be the father? That was certainly possible. Yet we still had to find enough evidence to discount the Jew.

Himmler sent me to Graz and I went to some pains examining the century-old records. No man named Frankenberger was to be found in the city ledgers. I pored over the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde of the Jewish Registry of Graz, and this finding was confirmed. Back in 1496, the Jews had been expelled from the region. Even three hundred and forty-one years later, in 1837, at the time Alois was born, the Jews had still not been permitted to come back. Had Hans Frank been lying?

After looking at these results Himmler declared, “Frank is one bold fellow!” As Heini put it together for me, one had to go back from 1938 to 1930. At that time, when the missive from William Patrick Hitler arrived, Hans Frank was just one more lawyer ready to hang around our people in Munich, but it was clear enough now what he had done. He had invented the compromising letter in order to stimulate a closer relationship to his leader. Given the absence of the document, Hitler could not know whether Frank was making it up, telling the truth, or, worst of all, actually in possession of such a paper. It could have been the end of Hans Frank, if Hitler had sent a researcher to Graz, but the lawyer must have been ready to wager that Hitler did not want to know.

Since Himmler was grooming me to become his close assistant, he also confided that he would not use my 1938 research to tell Hitler that there were no Jews in Graz back in 1837. Rather, he told Hans Frank. We laughed in unison, for I understood immediately. Could there be one official within our ruling group who was not searching for a dependable grip on any and all of the others? Frank was now in Himmler’s grasp. Given this mutual understanding, he did serve Himmler well. In 1942 (by which time Frank was known as “the Butcher of Poland”) Hitler became nervous again about the Jewish grandfather and asked us to send a good man to Graz. Himmler, looking to protect Hans Frank, told the Führer that he had sent an agent and no tangible evidence was found. Given everyone’s preoccupation with the war, the matter could be put more or less to rest. Such was Himmler’s advice to Hitler.