Have you ever heard that the infamous Nazi dictator has a nephew, who is half British/Irish and fought in the US Navy against Nazis in WW2?
The story begins with Alois Jr. – Hitler’s elder half-brother from his father’s second marriage, who was born in 1882. Alois left his house at fourteen years old, after a fight with his father, a fight so severe that he was removed from family inheritance no more than what the law required. He moved to Ireland and worked as a waiter in the famous Shelbourne hotel. He was arrested for theft and served a five month sentence in 1900, then another nine months in 1902.
In 1909, he met an Irish woman named Bridget Dowling and moved to London and married in 1910. Then they moved and settled in Liverpool and William Patrick Hitler was born in 1911. After several unsuccessful job attempts, Alois decided to return to Germany just before the Great war. After the start of the war returning to England became impossible due to obvious reasons, but strangely, in 1916, he married again in Germany and abandoned his first family.
Early years of William is unknown, possibly living under poverty as his mother and Irish relatives were helping the family to live. William grew up in North London, and moved to Highgate when he was 18. He was working in an accounting firm named Benham and Sons. However things were not going well for William in England, so instead he wanted to visit Germany first time to see his father’s restaurant business. Then again he visited in 1933, to earn money again and gain some benefits from his famous uncle’s rising power in Germany since his uncle had became the chancellor of Germany that year. His uncle found him a job in Reichskreditbank (Central Bank of Germany until 1945), and he worked there a couple of years. He was aiming for higher positions, and asking for his uncle to arrange better jobs, which resulted in him working as a salesman in the Opel car factory. However the infamous uncle was not happy about his nephew’s requests and after a year of struggle between each other, he was asked to get rid of his British passport to be given a high ranking government job. Instead he blackmailed Hitler by threatening to expose his long-time rumored family secrets, as his grandfather was a Jewish merchant, and had an affair with his grandmother. This was obviously not revealed until Hans Frank, (the famous former Nazi lawyer who was responsible for millions of deaths while he was the Governor General of Poland) mentioned it in the Nuremberg trials after the war.
This was the last bit probably, as he fled Germany and moved back to England. However he was not welcomed there because of the family name. He tried to gain publicity by writing an article in the Look magazine, “Why I hate my Uncle.”
The Second World War started in 1939. When William and his mother were on a lecture tour in the USA, William wrote a letter to President Roosevelt to be enlisted in the US Army to fight the war against Nazis. He attempted to enlist in the British army earlier, but got rejected due to obvious reasons. The letter was checked by FBI and finally he got green light to join the US Navy in 1944 as a pharmacist’s mate (a designation later changed to hospital corpsman) until he was discharged in 1947. As a famous anecdote reported in several newspapers at the time has William declaring his name to a recruiting officer who said: “Glad to see you Hitler. My name’s Hess.” It’s also speculated as William was wounded in service and received a purple heart for his heroics.
After the war William changed his surname to “Stuart-Houston” and married a German- born woman named Phyllis Jean-Jacques. They had four children, the eldest one was given the middle name Adolf surprisingly. He lived in a town called Patchogue in New York and opened a laboratory to analyse blood samples for hospitals. William died peacefully in 1987 and was buried in a Catholic church yard in Coram, New York. His remaining sons and other relatives remained in the United States. His third son even became a special agent of the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), but tragically died in a car crash while investigating a case in 1989. Journalist David Gardner wrote a book in 2001 named The Last of the Hitlers to detailed about the remaining bloodline of Adolf Hitler.
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