Life, as a rule, rarely favors the sisters of historically famous personalities. Most often they are hidden in the shadow of their eminent brothers and forever remain a mystery to the general public behind seven seals. However, the fate of Paula, the younger sister of Adolf Hitler, was somewhat different. Given the dictator’s difficult relationship with family and family ties, it remains surprising that he maintained contact with her until his death.
The last daughter of a troubled family
Paula (Paula Hitler) was born in January 1896 in the village of Fischlham in Upper Austria. The girl’s father, Alois Hitler, was a customs official, her mother, Klara Peltzl, was a quiet and inconspicuous housewife, 23 years younger than him. Previously, she worked as a housekeeper in the house of Alois and his second wife, and their love relationship began even before the death of the latter. There is every reason to believe that the marriage of Paula Hitler's parents was incestuous. Clara was the daughter of Alois's sister, therefore, he was his niece. Of the six children born by them, only Adolf and Paula managed to survive to adulthood, the rest died in infancy.
By the birth of Paula, the last child of the Hitler couple, the material affairs of the family went quite well: a good house, stable incomes, a beautiful garden, an apiary. The girl rarely saw her father, who was rather domineering and hot-tempered, he did not like to be at home and was always busy with something. All the upbringing and housekeeping lay on the shoulders of her mother, a meek and hardworking woman.
Rods with love
The official biography of Paula Hitler is not full of details of her childhood and youth, however, like her whole life, only separately pop-up fragments allow us to present the big picture. Adolf replaced his father Paula early, she was six years old when the head of the family had a myocardial infarction. And since the boy’s own childhood was not easy and was characterized by a large number of corporal punishment of the tyrannical parent, he, in turn, showed excessive severity to his sister and resorted to beating, referring to educational goals. Despite this, the younger Hitler always justified her brother, believing that he acted for the good of her and proceeded only from good intentions.
After the death of his father, having sold the house, the family moved to the city of Linz, where four years later (1907), his mother dies from an incurable disease. The Austrian state provided the orphans Paula and Adolf with a small pension, in addition, they still had enough funds from their parents to overcome the first difficulties of an independent life. Having issued the benefits, Adolf leaves to conquer Vienna and leaves his sister with his mother’s aunt, Johanna Peltzl.
Independent life
Having received a commercial education, Paula Hitler goes to Vienna after his brother, where he arranges to work as a secretary with a good salary. The girl’s closed lifestyle allowed some to mistakenly perceive her as a limited and not-so-distant personality. Nevertheless, she had her hobbies, one of which was skiing, and was a regular at fashionable resorts.
My brother Paula met only at the beginning of the 1920s, by this moment he had already presided over the German National Socialist Party and had successfully built his political career. Then their relationship was again interrupted for a while, and until the beginning of the 1930s they practically did not communicate. Only when Paula's employer Ulrich von Wittelsbach fired her from the Vienna Insurance Company, she began to regularly receive financial support from her brother, which lasted until his suicide in 1945.
Being a politically significant figure, and later the leader of the country, Adolf directly or indirectly continued to participate in Paula’s life, although they were rarely seen. Nevertheless, despite financial assistance, he never provided his sister with patronage in his career, because he found her a mentally limited person and spoke of him as a “stupid goose”.
Under a different surname
In 1936, Adolf Hitler invited Paulo to the Olympic Games in Garmisch, where he ordered her to change her last name to Wolf and not be displayed in society, while maintaining strict conspiracy. Without a murmur, the sister submits to her brother and becomes Paula Wolf, hiding from everyone her relationship with an influential politician. Later, she shares that the choice of this surname was not accidental, the brother had such a nickname in childhood, and later more than once used this pseudonym for his own safety.
Paula continued to make attempts to build her career for some time and worked in a Vienna art store. But soon after the change of surname, by special order of Hitler, she left to conduct his household at the Berghof residence, where before this they were managed by their half-sister Angela Raubal. Some sources reported that, with some access to documents, Paula Wulf managed to secretly help people sentenced to death.
Sharing brother's views
Official sources do not report any political activity by Paula, but there is still information that she shared her brother's nationalist views. Nevertheless, Paula Hitler herself claimed that she had never been a member of any parties and organizations, and even Adolf's views and policies did not prompt her to become a member of the NSDAP. Moreover, he himself did not want this, although every year he sent her a ticket to the party congress in Nuremberg. According to Paula, her brother could not give orders for the monstrous killings of people in concentration camps, and his poor attitude towards the Jewish people was most likely caused by his difficult youth.
Failed wedding
The studies of the German historian Florian Beyerl led him to work with Soviet interrogation protocols, from which he managed to find out that Paula Hitler was engaged to Erwin Jekelius, one of the most sinister Holocaust doctors. He practiced atrocious experiments on children and euthanasia, and during the war he was responsible for the killing of more than 4 thousand people in a gas chamber.
In the fall of 1941, Yekelius went to Berlin to officially ask Hitler for his sister's hands. But he did not approve of their love affair. There are suggestions that, due to incest in the family, Hitler was afraid to have both his children and his sister did not allow to get married, suggesting the occurrence of pathology in possible nephews. There was a short conversation with Erwin Yekelius, he was met by the Gestapo and urgently sent to the Eastern Front, where after a while he fell into the hands of the Soviet army.
Arrest of Paula Hitler
During the war years, Paula worked in the hospital as a secretary. Before the surrender of Germany, by order of Martin Bormann, she was sent to Berchtesgaden. At the end of April 1945, Paula receives a farewell gift from her brother, and a month later she was captured by US intelligence officers. The transcript of one agent showed that the woman had obvious physical similarities with her sibling.
Paula spent a year in custody and was repeatedly interrogated, according to the results of which it turned out that she did not have any significant information and the last time she saw Adolf back in March 1941. Freed, the woman returned to Vienna, and for some time modestly lived on her own remaining savings.
Did not make it…
In 1952, Paula moved to Berchtesgaden and, according to some reports, lived in solitude in a two-room apartment named Wolf. Her only passion in those years was the Catholic Church. She also continued to maintain warm relations with former SS members and survivors from the ruling circles of Nazi Germany. In 1957, Paula returned his surname Hitler and began litigation with the Bavarian government for his brother's personal property.
In the fall of 1959, Hitler's sister Paula and her two nephews (the children of the late Angela Raubal) were officially recognized as the legal owners of the inheritance of Adolf Hitler. But the issue of payments was constantly delayed. The catch was that in a will drawn up by Hitler in 1938, it was said that he left all his property to the party or the state. He asked his sister and other relatives to provide only a modest allowance. However, in February 1960, a Munich court recognized two-thirds of the Eagle's Nest estate in the Bavarian Alps for Paula, another part was awarded to relatives.
Paula Hitler did not have time to enter into the inheritance of her brother. She died in early June of the same year at the age of 64 and was buried in the city cemetery of Berchtesgaden.
Conclusion
For a long time, Paula Hitler had a reputation as an innocent woman, very far from politics, and was not identified with her brother's atrocities in any way. But discovered by researchers in 2005, her diary introduced its own corrections. Evidence has been established that directly links the Fuhrer’s sister with Nazi activities. And her relationship with Erwin Yekelius only confirmed this. Paula’s unique recordings also opened up sensational facts and shed light on the distant past of the Hitler family, explaining the formation of the antisocial personality and mental deviations from the Nazi leader. The authenticity of the document was confirmed by examination and is not subject to doubt.