I’m sure in the years after World War II anybody in the world with the surname “Hitler” must have had to undergo a legal name change lest they suffer random beatings for the rest of their lives. Now, fifty-plus years later, are there any Hitlers out there? Any stories about folks named Hitler and their experiences?
A school teacher near here married a guy whose last name was Hitler. After the first gasp it wasn’t quite as difficult as I thought it would be. She was a sweet little blondie with a great sense of humor. She did divorce him a couple of years later, said he turned out to be a jerl. I think she canned the name, too.
That’s Hilter, Torgo mein chum.
AltaVista found 8 Hitlers with addresses. Among them are Adolph Hitler in Louisiana and Sue Hitler in Wisconsin. No Adolf, though.
No Hilters. But 7 or 8 Hilterbrans.
According to William L. Schirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Adolf’s father was Alois Schicklgruber, an illegitemate child with several suspect fathers. One of them, by the name of Heidler, disappeared for several decades and then returned, very shortly before Adolf was born, to fill out the paperwork necessary to legitimize Alois. Inexplicably, at least to Shirer, the elder Heidler had changed the spelling of his name to Hitler in the meantime. So Hitler missed by a few months becoming pariah of the world with a vaguely humorous (even to Germans) four-syllable name instead of the now evil-sounding two syllable name.
Presumably, anyone who had that oddly spelled and almost unique surname quickly changed it back in the post-war years. I suppose just as many wackos in America could have changed their names to Hitler since. Any way, it was not the name you wanted on your job application for several decades, unless perhaps you were applying for Grand Dragon.
Incidentally, a Yahoo people search reveals 190 addresses in the United States with the last name of Heidler. Obviously, as the name was modestly common in Germany, these people cannot be automatically assumed to be descendants of the Hitler line.
I should have said, “German-speaking Europe.” Hitler was Austrian. Okay, I’ll go away now.
According to “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader”, there were 22 Hitler’s in the New York phone book before World War II and none after.
Using my “PowerFinder USA One, 1999 2nd Edition,” I found the following Hitlers:
Adolph - LA
Balasubramanian - WI (I did NOT make that name up!)
George - OH
George - SC
George - FL
Louis - OH
Peter - WI
Scott - IN
Scott - WI
Sue - WI (Peter’s wife I assume - same address/tel #)
Apparently here in Wisconsin it’s okay to use that last name.
I read an interview reprinted in Harper’s magazine with a German gentleman named Adolf Hittler (two t’s), who says he doesn’t take too much grief for his name, even though he’s a tour bus operator! He describes himself as a pacifist.