Did Adolf Hitler Visit England between November 1912 and April 1913?

Something that rears its ugly head every so often – and is often exploited by jews and the congenitally gullible to call Adolf Hitler a ‘British agent’ – is what is called the ‘Missing Year’ in the biography of Adolf Hitler where we lose Hitler in the historical record between 1912 and April/May 1913.

There is however a source which claims to know the answer to this lacuna: Hitler’s sister-in-law Bridget Elizabeth Hitler (nee Dowling) who was the wife of Hitler’s ne'er-do-well half-brother Alois Hitler Jr.

The basis for this is a manuscript written in 1939 by Bridget Hitler in the United States while – or just after – she was giving a paid lecture tour of the country that had been organized by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. (1)

The claimed story is well summarised by Jonathan Brown and Oliver Duff in the ‘Independent’ as follows:

‘Much attention has been focused on a visit to the family said to have been made at this time by his down-and-out half-brother. In her memoirs, My Brother Adolf, Bridget said the future Führer stayed with the family between November 1912 and April 1913.

Back in Vienna, Hitler had been on the brink of destitution. By day he worked as a labourer, shovelling snow and beating carpets. At night he flopped down in a men's hostel. Worse was the threat of the draft and, claimed Bridget, he fled his native Austria for Britain to avoid it.

Most contemporary historians have come to regard My Brother Adolf as a work of fiction and reject its depictions of cosy conversations around the kitchen stove with the future architect of European genocide. Among the claims made by Bridget is that she introduced Hitler to astrology - something which influenced many of the Reich's military strategies. She also claimed to have persuaded him to clip and restyle his handlebar moustache.’ (2)

Now anyone with a decent working knowledge of Hitler’s life will know that Bridget Hitler’s account of how she ‘persuaded him to clip and restyle his handlebar moustache’ simply cannot be true, because Hitler still had his handlebar moustache during his time the trenches in the First World War and only adopted his famous clipped moustache after the war along with his friend and early NSDAP member Gottfried Feder.

For example, in these photographs of Hitler during the First World War we can clearly see his moustache was not clipped and was a relatively normal handlebar moustache of the period:

We can thus see that Bridget Hitler’s account cannot be true as it gets these sorts of basic details wrong, but there are other obvious problems with such as the claim that she ‘introduced him to astrology’ – and no the Third Reich’s decisions were not based on astrology or any other ‘occult science’ – which is odd because Hitler never evinced an interest in astrology we know of – beyond writing a poem to Venus in the First World War – but may be explained by the fact that Bridget Hitler’s alleged manuscript was only published in 1973 by Michael Unger in the ‘Liverpool Daily Post’ three years after Bridget Hitler died in 1969 and then in book form as ‘The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler’ in 1979.

How is that possible?

Well Alois Hitler Jr. and Bridget Hitler’s son Patrick Hitler (also known as Patrick Stuart-Houston) was behind it and is notorious for his 1939 paid article in ‘Look’ magazine titled ‘Why I Hate My Uncle’ which is well-known to be a tissue of lies including many propagandistic slurs on Hitler’s character that have since been abandoned as untrue by his biographers.

The problem you see is that all we know about Bridget Hitler’s manuscript is that it is from 1939 and appears to have been intended as a way to earn money for her and her son Patrick – she’d been more or less destitute since Alois Hitler Jr. left her after the First World War and had relied on the charity of Irish relatives sending her money to get by – (3) and after going on her paid lecture tour of the United States with Patrick at Hearst’s invitation – she wasn’t going to pass up such a well-paying business opportunity for obvious reasons – she was stranded there without any means of support nor a way to get home following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. (4)

Hence the manuscript of what became ‘My Brother-in-Law Adolf Hitler’ (aka ‘The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler’) was written for profit (in all possibility at the beginning of the Second World War) and while that doesn’t mean it is necessarily wrong it gives us a motivation for why much of what it claims about Hitler is so utterly ludicrous as well as often demonstrably incorrect such as her moustache claim that we’ve just discussed.

But how does this tie into the astrology claim?

Well since Bridget Hitler’s 1939 manuscript was never published at the time we don’t know if it was actually written then – for argument’s sake I will assume it was as it makes sense that it would have been – and whether any alterations were subsequently made by her son Patrick to make it more sensational and thus saleable.

This is where the astrology comes in because the ‘Hitler was an occultist’ claims date from the 1960s – before that point we simply don’t hear about these claims other as war-time British propaganda written by an eccentric British Christian named Lewis Spence – and it is odd that the Bridget Hitler manuscript would mention that specifically when it was published at the beginning of the ‘Occult Reich’ craze which had begun in the 1960s with Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels’ 1960 best-seller ‘The Morning of the Magicians’. (5)

So, in other words it is likely – even probable – that the manuscript published by Michael Unger in the ‘Liverpool Daily Post’ in 1973 had been altered by Patrick Hitler to make it more marketable/saleable both to potential publishers and the public at large since it would then confirm the ‘Occult Reich’ hypothesis and thus increase both interest and sales.

Thus, we can see that the claims of Bridget Hitler’s ‘My Brother-in-law Adolf Hitler’ cannot be taken seriously as a way to fill in the ‘Missing Year’ in Hitler’s biography.

But what of the alleged ‘testimony’ of former wartime ‘British Security Co-Ordination’ (hereafter BSC) chief William Stephenson?

The problem with this is that the source of this claim isn’t actually William Stephenson – the wartime head of BSC – but rather a Canadian writer named William Stevenson – no relation of his subject – and it is merely Stevenson’s claim this is based on not Stephenson’s testimony and the book it is contained has been repeatedly challenged as extremely factually inaccurate. (6)

Stevenson writes as follows:

‘Hitler’s little-known sojourn in England between November 1912 and April 1913 is authenticated by BSC documents and an unpublished account by Bridget Elizabeth Hitler, “My Brother-in-law Adolf.” Hitler’s brother Alois married the actress Bridget Elizabeth Dowling in London in 1910. They lived at 120 Upper Stanhope Street, Texteth Park, Liverpool, and ran a small restaurant nearby. When the son of Alois, moved to New York in 1940, he disclosed details of the Liverpool period, taken from his mother’s diaries and letters, before himself adopting another name. He was known to BSC as PEARL. His usefulness as a source of information on the Fuhrer was limited, but as a link with Hitler’s brief life in England, he added a curious footnote to history. BSC records suggests that Adolf Hitler spent much of his time watching the flow of sea traffic through Liverpool to the four corners of the British Empire, undoubtedly impressed by this evidence of maritime power.’ (7)

We can see from this that all Stevenson is actually saying is that there are unspecified ‘BSC documents’ and ‘BSC records’ – remember BSC was a British wartime intelligence organization operating in the United States where both Bridget and Patrick Hitler were trapped – and that they had a codename for Patrick Hitler which was ‘PEARL’.

Stevenson here is telling you the truth without saying it because he is using circular logic to make the claim he is making, i.e., BSC have ‘documents’ and ‘records’ which ‘prove’ Hitler went to live in Liverpool between November 1912 and April 1913 but Patrick Hitler was a confidential source – codenamed ‘PEARL’ – and was likely the origin of the ‘documents’ and ‘records’ held by the BSC. So essentially Stevenson has Patrick Hitler being the source that proves his own claims along with those of his mother; this is especially dubious because Patrick Hitler was one or two years old when Hitler allegedly moved into his home in Liverpool in 1912 so he was hardly in a position to confirm anything!

Thus, we can see that it isn’t actually evidence for the authenticity of Bridget Hitler’s claim that ‘Hitler went to Liverpool in 1912 to 1913’.

However, we don’t have to rely on purely negative evidence for why the story of Hitler’s visit to Liverpool in his ‘Missing Year’ is a fabrication – likely for money – by Bridget and Patrick Hitler.

As academic Hitler biographer Brigitte Hamann explained in her ‘Hitler’s Vienna’ which dealt in detail with Hitler’s Vienna years and especially his ‘Missing Year’ of 1912 to 1913 before he shows up in Munich in May 1913:

‘Hitler’s British sister-in-law Bridget Hitler made up an even more spectacular story: she claimed that Hitler, “a shabby young man,” had been in Liverpool between November 1912 and April 1913, and had lived off her, her husband Alois, and their son Patrick, who was born in 1911. However, the painstakingly kept registration records in Vienna alone prove that this trip never took place.’ (8)

This is fatal to the ‘Hitler visited Liverpool’ narrative as if we have police registration records of Hitler in Vienna at the time of the ‘Missing Year’ then he cannot have been in Liverpool in England at the same time – especially as Hitler would have had to presented himself in person at the local police station in Vienna to validate his registration – and in addition to this we have the testimony of the Austrian artist Reinhold Hanisch that in early 1913 – which is again partly backed up by official documentation - Hitler spent his time drawing and painting in the reading rooms of Vienna. (9)

Thus, we can see there is absolutely no evidence Adolf Hitler visited Liverpool (or England) between 1912 to 1913 and that we also have good evidence for both official documentation and one piece of witness testimony that he was in Vienna during his ‘Missing Year’ of 1912 to 1913.

References

(1) https://web.archive.org/web/20191211105607/https://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/hitlers-erben_aid_108295.html

(2) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-black-sheep-of-the-family-the-rise-and-fall-of-hitlers-scouse-nephew-412206.html also see https://www.hindustantimes.com/world/hitler-enjoyed-drinking-at-uk-bar-in-1912/story-oZI4pl8rP98ryFK9CXqflI.html

(3) https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-on-bridget-dowling-hitler-s-sister-in-law-1.4085596

(4) https://web.archive.org/web/20191211105607/https://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/hitlers-erben_aid_108295.html

(5) On this see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, 2019, ‘The Occult Roots of Nazism’, 3^rd Edition, Tauris Parke: London, pp. 217-225

(6) David Stafford, 1987, ‘'Intrepid': Myth and Reality’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 303–307

(7) William Stevenson, 2000, ‘A Man called Intrepid: The Secret War’, 2^nd Edition, Lyons Press: Guilford, pp. 120-121, n. 1

(8) Brigitte Hamann, 1999, ‘Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship’, 1^st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 198

(9) Peter Longerich, 2019, ‘Hitler: A Life’, 1^st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 27