August Kubizek - The Young Hitler I Knew

For a vital phase during the early years of his life, his late teenage years in Linz and Vienna, when we otherwise have tantalisingly little to go on, Hitler had a personal and exclusive friend, who later composed a striking account of the four years of their close companionship. This friend was August Kubizek. His account is unique in that it stands alone in offering insights into Hitlers character and mentality for the four years between 1904 and 1908. It is unique, too, in that it is the only description from any period of Hitlers life provided by an undoubted personal friend even if that friendship was both relatively brief and almost certainly one-sided. For, like everyone else who came into contact with Hitler, Kubizek would soon learn that friends, like others, would be dropped as soon as they had served their purpose.

For every study of Hitlers early years, including the first parts of my own biography, Kubizeks story has proved an indispensable source. His recollections of his time together with Hitler, first published in 1953, are now in their sixth edition. An English translation, with an introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, was published in 1954 and later reprinted, and has had to serve for those without access to the German original until the present. Yet this earlier English-language version was neither a complete nor an altogether satisfactory translation of Kubizeks German text. Numerous passages, in fact some entire chapters, were omitted. This new translation remedies these deficiencies and omissions. For the first time, it makes the entire text of Kubizeks recollections of his friendship with Hitler available to an English readership. This is greatly to be welcomed.

August Kubizek was born in Linz in 1888. After leaving school he served as an apprentice in his fathers small upholstery workshop. But he was musically talented, and this offered him an exit-route from the upholstery trade. While the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna was rejecting his friend Hitler, Kubizek was gaining entry to the Vienna Conservatoire to study music. He subsequently obtained a position as second conductor in the municipal theatre at Marburg on the Drau, and was just married when war broke out in 1914. He served in the Austrian Army for the duration of the war, suffering a serious lung infection in 1915 from which he never fully recovered. After the war he became town clerk of Eferding, near Linz, where his duties included organising the small communitys musical events. And there he remained, a quiet, retiring family man, helping to bring up his three sons, and conscientiously involved in the local cultural life.

In the meantime, his erstwhile friend had become famous. Kubizek sent a note of congratulation when Hitler became Reich Chancellor in January 1933, and later received a personal reply. Hitler even suggested that Kubizek might pay him a visit one day. Nothing came of this for five years. But shortly after the Anschluss, Kubizek made his way to Hitlers hotel in Linz, and was allowed in to see his former friend for the first time since their ways had parted in 1908. Hitler greeted him warmly though now used the formal Sie mode of address not the more intimate Du (which he had still used in his note to Kubizek five years earlier). Invitations followed to the Bayreuth Festival in 1939 and again in 1940, when, with Hitler at the height of his power, he and Kubizek met for the last time.

Kubizek had by then gained recognition among leading Nazis as a friend of the Fhrer as a young man, and was known to have memorabilia from that time. He had already in 1938 been approached and agreed to write his recollections for the Party archive. His insights were said to be staggering, revealing the inconceivable greatness of the Fhrer in his youth.in Eferding. These became the basis of the book, Adolf Hitler Mein Jugendfreund, published in 1953, and an immediate sensation. Kubizek died three years later, now widely known as a first-hand witness to Hitlers early, formative years.

But how valuable is Kubizeks book as a source for Hitlers life in Linz and Vienna? The core of the book, we should recall, began life as a manuscript commissioned by the Nazi Party. A copy of the second part of this original text survives today. The Austrian publishing house denied that it had provided any assistance. But either Kubizek suddenly discovered the art of writing, or he had help from a person or persons unknown.