Cris Whetton - Hitler’s Fortune

The illegitimate son of Alois Sr. and Franziska Matzelsberger, he bore her name until being legitimised in 1883. Alois Jr. left home in 1896, aged fourteen, and embarked upon a career as a waiter and petty criminal, being twice imprisoned for theft and once for bigamy. There is some evidence that he may have married, or at least lived with, two other women before 1910, but little, if anything, is known about them. In 1909 or 1910, he moved to Britain, where, in 1911, he married an Irish woman, Brigid Elizabeth Dowling (q.v.), whom he had met while working in Dublin. Shirer met the man, and offers a personal reminiscence:

The coming to power of the National Socialists brought better times to Alois Hitler. He opened a Bierstube a small beerhouse in a suburb of Berlin, moving it shortly before the war to the Wittenbergplatz in the capitals fashionable West End. It was much frequented by Nazi officials and during the early part of the war when food was scarce it inevitably had a plentiful supply. I used to drop in occasionally at that time. Alois was then nearing sixty, a portly, simple, good-natured man with little physical resemblance to his famous half brother and in fact indistinguishable from dozens of other little pub keepers one had seen in Germany and Austria.... Alois himself, I remember, refused to be drawn into any talk whatsoever about his half-brother a wise precaution but frustrating to those of us who were trying to learn all we could about the background of the man who by that time had already set out to conquer Europe.

Shirer makes no mention of a wife. In 1924, Alois Jr. was sentenced to six months jail for bigamy, suggesting that he had married again by that date, and Adolf was not best pleased, calling on his lawyer Hans Frank to hush up the incident.

One of these gave birth to Heinz, also, like Leo Raubal, said to have been Adolfs favourite nephew. After completing his training at the National-Political Education Centre in 1938, he wanted to become a professional soldier, but this was forbidden by Adolf. In the end, he was conscripted and served as an NCO with the 23rd Potsdam Artillery Regiment and was either killed in 1943, or captured at Stalingrad and died in captivity.