"Adolf Schicklgruber" would have been Hitler's name. His father changed his last name in 1877.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Alois Schicklgruber was born illegitimately, and his paternity was never established. This means that Adolf Hitler could not prove who his grandfather was and thus prove his own 'Aryan descent'.
Hitler was saved from drowning
by a priest when he was 4 years old.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler never admitted to the near-drowning accident in later life, but a small cutting from a 1894 newspaper was found, chronicling how a boy of four was saved from drowning. This confirms the story, told by priest Max Tremmel, of how his predecessor Johann Kuehberger had rescued the terrified Hitler.
During WW1, a British soldier spared the life of a wounded German: Adolf Hitler.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Henry Tandey, a highly decorated British private, claims to have encountered an enemy soldier wounded, who did not even attempt to raise his own rifle, during WWI. Tandey chose not to shoot. The German soldier saw him lower his rifle and nodded his thanks before wandering off. Although disputed, that soldier is purported to have been Adolf Hitler.
Hitler only had
one testicle.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
German historian Professor Peter Fleischmann claims to have discovered the results of a medical examination on Hitler after his arrest in 1923. The reports confirm that Hitler suffered from a birth defect known as 'right-side cryptorchidism', an undescended right testicle.
As a child, Hitler wanted to be a priest.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler’s mother was a devout Catholic, while his father considered religion a scam. In his childhood, Hitler was enthralled by the pomp and ritual of the Catholic Church and for a while he even considered becoming a priest, but ended up rejecting religion as a teenager.
Hitler, while in prison, wrote to a Mercedes dealership begging for a car loan.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler went to own a fleet of Mercedes cars, but when he was in jail in 1924, he wanted a 11/40 model which at the time cost 18,000 Reichsmarks. He wrote a dealership owner explaning that 'the biggest payment for my work is not expected until the middle of December (...) so I am compelled to ask for a loan or an advance.' The answer is unknown.
There was a Jewish-Austrian doctor who didn't charge Hitler's family due to their economic hardship. Hitler had him protected and called him "Noble Jew".
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The then 18-year-old Hitler granted him his 'everlasting gratitude' for this, which may have saved his life when Hitler took power decades later.
The recommendation came from Erik Gottfrid Christian Brandt, a social democratic member of the Swedish parliament. He called Hitler a 'a God-given fighter for peace' and his book Mein Kampf 'the best and most popular piece of literature in the world.'
Hitler suffered chronic flatulence and took 28 different drugs to fight it.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The revelations came from a 47-page account compiled by his six chief physicians, each specializing in different areas of treatment, and of a 178-page report dated June 12, 1945, which was compiled by Dr. Erwin Giesing, while he was interned by American forces.
The American secret service tried to spike Hitler's food with female hormones to feminize him.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Other Allied plots included dropping glue on Nazi troops in an attempt to stick them to the ground and disguising bombs in tins of fruit being imported to Germany. They also considered dropping boxes of poisonous snakes on enemy troops. Professor Brian Ford, a science writer and fellow of Cardiff University, discovered these plots by looking through stacks of recently declassified files.
In 1938, Hitler was TIME Magazine's Man of the Year.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Time named him Man of The Year after reducing 'Czechoslovakia to a German puppet state' and forcing a 'drastic revision of Europe's defensive alliances'.
Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Mussolini and Hitler, all suffered from ailurophobia, the fear of cats.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Also Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, William Shakespeare, Louis XIV and Isadora Duncan.
Hitler planned to collect thousands of Jewish artifacts to build a "Museum of An Extinct Race" after the war.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The museum's curators were set to work cataloguing between 140,000 and 150,000 artifacts, ranging from wedding portraits and infant cradles to Torah scrolls and hand-embroidered synagogue fabrics. Between 1942 and 1945, the incoming flow of artifacts filled the museum's premises as well as those of eight other buildings and more than 50 warehouses.
Both Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden were announced dead on May 1.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler was informed that Mussolini had been executed by the Italian resistance movement on the previous day; this presumably increased his determination to avoid capture. On 30 April 1945, Soviet troops were within a block or two of the Reich Chancellery when Hitler shot himself in the head, and his death was announce the following day.
In 1913, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Freud all lived within a few miles of each other in Vienna, with some of them being regulars at the same coffeehouses.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
In 1913, Vienna was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so it had its own kind of cultural soup, attracting the ambitious from across the empire.
Hitler never learned to drive. Yet, he spearheaded the development of the Volkswagen car.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler declared that it 'is for the broad masses that this car has been built. Its purpose is to answer their transportation needs, and it is intended to give them joy.'
The German WW1 officer that recommended Hitler for an Iron Cross was Jewish. He was later arrested, then released by the SS once they discovered his identity.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hugo Gutmann was arrested by the Gestapo, but released as a result of the influence of SS personnel who knew his history. In 1939, he left for Belgium and again to the U.S. in 1940.
During Hitler's years in power, his book "Mein Kampf" was given away for free to every newlywed couple.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
It was also given to every soldier fighting at the front. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies of the book had been sold or distributed in Germany.
Hitler believed he was attractive to women, so he remained single for political gain. The German people were unaware of Eva Braun until after the war.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler and Braun never appeared as a couple in public; the only time they appeared together in a published news photo was when she sat near him at the 1936 Winter Olympics.
Before the Holocaust, Hitler gave the U.S., Great Britain, and many other nations a chance to take in Jewish refugees. They refused.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The Évian Conference, convened in 1938 to discuss the 'Jewish refugee problem', was ultimately doomed, as delegations from the 32 participating nations failed to come to any agreement about accepting the refugees fleeing the Third Reich.
When the D-Day forces landed, Hitler was asleep. None of his generals dared send re-enforcements without his permission, and no-one dared wake him.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Crucial hours were lost in the battle to hold on to Normandy because of it.
Adolf Hitler was obsessed with America's Old West.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
As a child, Hitler was obsessed with German author Karl May's adventurous tales of the American wild west. Ironically, May had never been to America when he wrote these well-loved books.
Adolf Hitler was member #555 in the Nazi Party, but the party started counting at 500 to look bigger.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler later claimed to be the seventh party member. He was in fact the seventh executive member of the party's central committee and he would later wear the Golden Party Badge number one.
Hitler himself was never elected by the people. He lost the presidential election but the Nazis formed a coalition that got them enough seats to demand the position of Chancellor for Hitler.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Paul von Hindenburg actually won the 1932 election with 53% of the votes, leaving Hitler with just 36.8%. However, in 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, which later paved the way to dictatorship, war, and Nazi rule.
In 1939, Adolf Hitler's nephew wrote an article called "Why I Hate My Uncle."
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool in 1911, a product of the romance between the Fuhrer's brother and his Irish sweetheart. Before the war, he went on a lecture tour of the United States, regaling audiences with tales of his uncle's wickedness and the shortcomings of the Third Reich.
Hitler killed his dog with a cyanide capsule. He also shot the five puppies and buried them with their mother.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler expressed doubts about the cyanide capsules he had received through Heinrich Himmler's SS. To verify them, Hitler tested one on his dog, Blondi, who died as a result.
Hitler married Eva Braun less than 40 hours before they died.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler and Braun were married in a small civil ceremony within the Führerbunker. The event was witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann.
The Eiffel Tower was inaugurated the same year Nintendo was founded and Adolf Hitler was born: 1889.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
1889 was also the year the Coca-Cola Company originally incorporated as the Pemberton Medicine Company, Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night and the first issue of The Wall Street Journal was published.
Anophthalmus hitleri is a blind beetle found only in five caves in Slovenia. Named after Hitler in 1933, it is now endangered due to collectors of Nazi memorabilia.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The name came from a German collector, Oscar Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in 1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Hitler, who had recently become Chancellor of Germany.
Adolf Hitler was the first European leader to ban human zoos.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The last was in Belgium, in 1958.
20 babies born in Britain since WWII have been named Adolf.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Before the war there were 320 Adolfs registered in England and Wales, but the name became less popular in the years following the conflict.
Hitler was a big tax evader, and was even fined by his own government over it in 1934. He then got the tax department to declare him exempt from taxation.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
One year after becoming Chancellor, the tax office of Munich sent Hitler a fine of 405,494.00 Reichsmarks for not paying taxes nor properly declaring his income. Hitler responded by ordering a state secretary of the ministry of finance to intervene, which resulted in Hitler becoming tax-free.
Allied forces hired a makeup artist to draw sketches of Hitler in various disguises.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
In a series of altered photographs, reportedly created for the U.S. government, Hitler sports a beard. He has glasses, is bald, and parts his hair differently.
Hitler's home phone number and address was listed in Who's Who book until 1945. It was Wilhelmstraße 77, Berlin.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
UK's Who's Who is a source of biographical data on more than 33,000 influential people from around the world, published annually since 1849.
The place where Hitler killed himself is now a children's playground.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The playground is 28 feet above Hitler's concrete bunker in Berlin.
In 1932, Winston Churchill went to a hotel in Munich two days in a row to have tea with Hitler. Hitler stood him up both times and the two men never met.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
Hitler also invited Czechoslovakia's President to Berlin on 14 March 1939 and kept him waiting for four hours while he finished watching a film.
A 2018 study of Hitler's teeth, held in Moscow, claims to prove he died after taking cyanide and shooting himself in the head in 1945.
♦ SOURCE
♺ SHARE
The researchers reached their conclusion after they were given rare access to fragments of Hitler’s teeth which have been held in Moscow since the end of World War II.
