I think one of them had typhoid or pneumonia, or something like that. They mentioned how the boy Edmund died, but I can’t remember.
i would wonder about family holidays at the king house. “where are my grandchildren?” “why aren’t there any grandchildren?” “look at those kennedys… children all over the place!!” “what are y’all doing about this?”
all said in a perfect southern lady manner.
it is a bit odd that out of 4 children not one has married. they are a very good looking family.
alois being a black sheep!!! good heavens, that is sooooome family if he is the black sheep.
Last fall I was analysing a large document that traced my grandmother’s family back to the 1300s in Germany. I can tell you that there were many cases at least that bad. In some cases it was childbirth/death/childbirth/childbirth/death ad infinitum until maternal death. Followed of course by new wife and another round of births and deaths. Two out of 6 was pretty good. I saw one, two, or none out of a dozen births. Remember there was little or no chance of surviving something like appendicitis, which today is just an annoying 3 days in the hospital. A difficult birth that today is yet another caesarian was at that time likely to be the death of either mother or child, if not both. And then there were all those diseases like whooping cough and diptheria which are prevented now by vaccination.
I’m unaware of any good books on the subject. But then it’s one of those subjects that, while open to an undeniable degree of obvious human interest, isn’t of any real historical significance and so doesn’t attract quality research.
David Gardner’s The Last of the Hitlers and the accompanying TV documentary were the obvious recentish trawl though the subject. I’ve only ever skimmed through the book, but it looks pretty mediocre, devoting much of its space to fairly uncritically regurgitating material from The Diary of Bridget Hitler, which is almost certainly a fake. (And is mainly remembered as the source of the Adolf in Liverpool story.) Granted, I suspect its account of the three brothers on Long Island is probably broadly accurate, but I’d also guess this was mainly Gardner raking up a story that was probably not too difficult to uncover if one had wanted to.
The Death of Hitler (RCB, 1995) by Ada Petrova and Peter Watson has a brief appendix on what they came across about Hitler relatives in the Russian archives. Maria Koppensteiner was a cousin (their mothers’ were sisters). Arrested by the Soviets at the end of the war, interrogated and then imprisoned, she died in a gulag in 1953. She apparently had various brothers who were also rounded up in 1945.
Leo Raubal was Geli’s sister. He was captured by the Soviets near Stalingrad in 1943 and held as a POW. While his Soviet captors knew of his connection with Hitler, he seems to have been treated fairly normally for a prisoner in those circumstances and was let go as part of the more general release of Germans in 1955. They don’t say what happened to him then.
Petrova and Watson are pretty pitiful researchers, so I wouldn’t take these stories on trust.
As a recommendation for reliable sources, I suggest starting from Ian Kershaw’s footnotes. His biography doesn’t particularly concentrate on the family, but he’s been through the literature and his notes make pretty clear what he regards as sensible and what he doesn’t.
Thank you, bonzer. I’ll have to look into it.
Koppensteiner! That was the name of the man interviewed in the program, I’m almost certain of it. He reiterated that his parents never hurt a single soul and how frightened he was of the Soviets.
Does anyone remember the episode of an 80s US TV show - was it Hill St Blues, or LA Law? - featuring Vic Hitler, the narcoleptic comedian? Some elderly relative on his deathbed made him promise not to change his last name. His audiences used to try and stress him out on stage to make him fall asleep.
The things one remembers.
Played by Terry Kiser (Bernie from “Weekend at Bernie’s”). And he was actually narcoleptic. He never knew when he was going to suddenly nod off.
Note that Gustav and Otto died the same year and Ida one (calendar) year later. If the 1887 deaths were in December and the 1888 death was in January, they may have all died in a single outbreak. THAT was very common, to have childhood diseases sweep through a neighborhood carrying off dozens of young kids in a town.
As memory serves, Klara was from a similar family herself. She had several siblings who died, a sister who was a hunchback from a childhood illness. I’m not sure how accurate this page is but I know that the part about the hunchback sister and, of course, the older children dying is correct.
To correct myself, that should be The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler. It was Adolf who was the diary writer in the family. 
Did Bridget contribute anything to it, or was it written without her knowledge? Such things aren’t unknown-someone wrote an “autobiography” of Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be the long lost Grand Duchess Anastasia, and no one even bothered to contact her and let her know!
Infant death rates can be mindblowing. Queen Anne of Britain was pregnant eighteen times, only five were born alive, and of those five only one (William of Gloucester) lived to see his eleventh birthday. And she could’ve expected the best medical care available in that day and age, and still didn’t see any offspring survive to maturity.
On the other hand, some folks produced HUGE families without a problem. One of my GGGgrandmothers produced fourteen children, one a year, all healthy and thriving, with no problems. She died in her eighties. Another GGgrandmother gave birth to eleven, including two sets of twins. I’m sure a lot of it was just genetics and luck.
The origins of the Memoirs are entirely obscure. Nothing is known of their provenance prior to being deposited in the New York Public Library. This original also apparently differs, to some non-trivial degree, from the text as published.
Since by most accounts she was near-illiterate, it must either have been ghosted or, more likely, had nothing to do with her at all.
The manuscript is unfinished. Since there are references to Adolf in the present tense, it would superficially appear to have been written before the end of the war. There’s no internal evidence to suggest why she was apparently choosing to tell her story when she did or why the book was abandoned. Aside from the celebrated - but otherwise undocumentable - story of her meeting Hitler in Liverpool, the other major addition to the known facts of her life that they would add if genuine is a long account of a visit it claims she made to Germany in the 1930s. The highlight here is a visit to the Berghof, where she is reintroduced to Adolf.
The convincing argument developed by Hugh Trevor-Roper when it appeared was that the “highlights” of the book were both implausible claims in themself and also unlikely to have been believed by Bridget. Thus, sensationally, the Memoirs claim that it was an open secret amongst those close to him that Hitler personally shot Geli. They even have Hitler’s full sister Paula stating this directly to Bridget. She is supposed to have heard the same via William Patrick Hitler, her son.
On top of this, Bridget is supposed to have heard from Paula about the Jewish blood in the family. (On these rumours, see Cecil’s column on whether Hitler was partly Jewish.)
Trevor-Roper pointed out that none of this could have been circulating in the Dowling branch of the family during the 1930s. William Patrick was interviewed by American intelligence after his arrival in the US and the transcripts have survived. Eager to come over as disillusioned with Germany and now staunchly anti-Nazi, he was anxious to discredit his uncle in any way he could. Yet he neither mentions hearing rumours or tales of Hitler being either a murderer or part-Jewish. If the Memoirs are to be credited, he was sitting on both these bombshells and never mentioned them when it’d be to his advantage to do so.
Note that whether the rumours were true or not is irrelevant. The Memoirs imply that William Patrick Hitler and his mother thought they were true at the time and that’s what important in comparing it against the contemporary documentation of the transcripts.
Thus the suggestion was that someone had constructed them from the known details of Bridget and William Patrick’s lives and four sets of outright fabrication, three of them sensational: the Liverpool visit, the Geli story, the Jewish ancestory claim and the Berchtesgaden visit. Without the two meetings with Hitler himself, the whole exercise would be pointless. Without the claims about Geli and his grandfather, the book would have nothing truly extraordinary to add to what was already known. It just all looks a bit too conveniently constructed to ring true.
The loose end was that the motive for this fabrication remained obscure. And nothing’s emerged in the last thirty years to shed light on that.
It might have been better for me to have phrased that as “a murderer in a private capacity”. Or something.
One thing I do not understand. These relatives of Hitler that live in Long Island. Do they use the name Hitler? Or do they use Heidler or Schicklgruber?
By the way, People Search identified seven people named Hitler in New York State, including two named Adolph. But none of them seem to be the three living relatives, Brian and the two others, that are identified in the Hitler family tree.
Also, I am not surprised that the Long Island Hitlers keep a low profile. If I were a relative of Hitler living within an hour’s drive of several million Jews, Poles, gypsies, gays and others, I would not shout it from the rooftops either.
I believe they changed their name to Stuart-Houston, if wiki is to be believed.
So if they made a movie of Bridget Hitler’s Diary, would Hitler be played by Hugh Grant or Colin Firth?
The Last of the Hitlers by David Gardner has high school yearbook photos of three of the half-grandnephews who live on Long Island. And no, they look nothing like their infamous relative.
While there may not be a trademark that is registered, the so-called urban legend appears to be substantially correct:
Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. - Wikipedia. (successsful claim of copyright in text of I Have A Dream Speech by King Estate - suit brought against CBS)
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/foia/ttab/2aissues/1999/96881.pdf
(assertion of trademark interest in phrase “I Have a Dream” by King heir)
(article discussing King Estate’s claim of rights to image, name, and speeches of Dr. King, with numerous cites)
Copyright and trademark are two different things.