My girlfriend told me that Hitler’s mom wanted to have an abortion when she was pregnant with Adolf, but her doctor (who was Jewish) talked her out of it. This sounds kind of bogus to me, can anyone provide references?
I think your girlfriend (mis)remembers a famous story by, if I am not mistaken, Roald Dahl. In this story, a doctor makes it to a snowy village after a long, long drive, just in time to deliver a little baby that had almost died during labour. The story ends with something like “Thanks doctor! May little Adolf lead a productive and happy life!”.
Could that be it?
I had the same thought as I read the thread title, Coldfire.
The story’s called “Genesis and Catastrophe,” and it appeared in the superb collection KISS, KISS, which also included “Royal Jelly” and “Pig,” two of my all-time short story favorites.
Coldy is correct. I don’t remember the title, but it was filmed as one of Dahl’s “Tales of the Unexpected” TV anthology series. It seems to me, though, that in the filmed version that the father (Hitler’s dad) was afraid that such a small baby would not survive–and that he actually wanted to kill it. But, it’s been 20 years, and I could be mis-remembering.
Ah, if I only had a time machine and some RU-486…
I think I may have found a propagation of this rumor here:
http://limiting.tripod.com/f5.htm
Which says simply, “Adolf Hitler’s mother considered an abortion.”
It also says:
“Adolf Hitler had a square mustache that was modeled after Charlie Chaplin, his favorite comedian.” Hmmm. Never heard that one before.
“Adolf Hitler designed the Volkswagon.” No. He asked Ferdinand Porsche to create a design, which evolved into the VolkswaGEN.
And, it includes these fun factoids as well:
“The average child watches 30 hours per week.”
“Because there is no gravity in space, astronauts cannot cry.”
“One in three male motorists pick their nose while driving.”
“The voice of Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc, was allergic to carrots.”
Next they’re gonna tell me that Turks flew across the Bosporous in rockets.
The abortion story is too neat and ironic to be true, but Hitler’s mother’s doctor was indeed Jewish, and worked hard to save her life when she was dying. When Hitler took over Austria, he gave word that the doctor was not to be harmed.
I seriously doubt Hitler was imitating Chaplin.
Actually Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots which caused problems as no other vegtable made the same sound when chewed.
I don’t think Chaplin or Hitler were imitating the other but the similarity was not lost on Chaplin when he made The Great Dictator Worth watching when it comes around on AMC. Seeing Charlie in the little tramp getup and speaking is jarring.
The rest is pure glurge AFAIK. There were prototype Volkswaggens made but the bulk of wartime production was kubelwagens and schwimmwagens.
Uh, oh. I don’t want to have to tangle with Padeye here. So I’ll let Mel say it himself:
I don’t especially like carrots, at least not raw. And second, I found it impossible to chew, swallow, and be ready to say my next line. We tried substituting other vegetables, including apples and celery, but with unsatisfactory results. The solution was to stop recording so that I could spit out the carrot into a wastebasket and then proceed with the script. In the course of a recording session I usually went through enough carrots to fill several. Bugs Bunny did for carrots what Popeye the Sailor did for Spinach. How many lip-locked, head-swelling children were coerced into eating their carrots by mothers cooing, “…but Bugs Bunny eats HIS carrots.” If only they had known.
from http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Animation/Voice_Actors/B/Blanc,_Mel/desc.html
But at least we all agree that Mel didn’t swallow…
Doh.
Stephen Fry wrote a novel (title escapes me) about just that - a scientsit sends s yrum back in time and styrlises all the men in Hitlers’ parents village, bingo, no Adolph.
Unfortunately, conditions in Germany being ripe for a bold leader to step forward (Hitler only filled a role,he didn’t create the conditions), another leader does, only thing, this guy’s smarter than Hitler and wins the war, wiping out any trace of the Holocaust (winner writes the history, right?)
As insidious and unspeakably evil as Hitler’s actions were, it could have been worse - he could have won.
And there’s this PC game named Command & Conquer:Red Alert where some scientist invents a device named the Chronosphere, which is a time machine, and sends his assistant (or himself, I can’t remember), and goes back to the pre-WWII period to kill Hitler and undo the second World War. What happens is the soviet union gains enormous power and a war erupts between the Allies and the Soviets. That’s the plot of the game anyway…
That’s called CounterFactual History, I believe.
What if.
Chances are VERY good that if Hitler hadn’t been there, Stalin would’ve been the big time baddy. And Stalin was even worse than Hitler.
The story is highly doubtful. Adolf’s mother Klara had three children before Adolf (not counting her step-children), and all of them died before Adolf was born. By all accounts she loved and doted on her son. When Adolf was five years old, she had another son.
Hitler had a mother?
The story I heard was that she moved away before he was born…
Yeah, Hitler’s sibling, a half-brother, I think, ran a bar, during and after the war. He didn’t like to talk about his brother.
padeye said:
Add to this that Hitler was aware of the film and it ENRAGED him (Chaplin was implicitly mocking Hilter in the film), and that Chaplin had well known socialist leanings (I am not positive, but from what little I know I think he took some serious flak for this during the commie scare between the two world wars), I doubt that he was Hitler’s favorite comedian…
Slightly off topic, but the A & E biography of Saddam Hussein was on last week, and it said that his mother, when Saddam was just a cute cooing little baby nutbar, had actually wished that he had not been born (wished she had had a “miscarriage” or something). I can’t remember for sure, but I don’t think she really even wanted the pregnancy.
Aside from the Roald Dahl story already mentioned, one of Paul Harvey’s pieces dealt with this topic. It was a hypothetical setup in which the listener was to imagine his or herself as a doctor. The cases of two pregnant women in different but difficult circumstances were described, and the listeners were asked to consider whether or not they would advise either or both of these women to have an abortion. In typical Paul Harvey fashion it was revealed at the end that one of the women was Hitler’s mother, and the other was Leonardo da Vinci’s mother. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone hadn’t heard this story and gotten confused about the “hypothetical” part and ended up believing that Hitler’s mother really had asked her doctor if she should have an abortion.
Also, from what I recall, Hitler was obsessed with his half niece, Geli. She eventually committed suicide-I believe I heard that he probably raped her.
He was also, from what I saw on a program on the History channel, quite the sadist in bed.
Big surprise.