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  THE YOUNG HITLER

  I KNEW

  THE YOUNG HITLER

  I KNEW

  The Memoirs of Hitler’s

  Childhood Friend

  August Kubizek

  Introduction by

  Ian Kershaw

  Translated by

  Geoffrey Brooks

  FRONTLINE BOOKS

  ________________

  A Greenhill Book

  The Young Hitler I Knew

  A Greenhill Book

  This edition published in 2011 by Frontline Books,

  an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Limited,

  47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

  www.frontline-books.com

  and

  Published and distributed in the United States of America and Canada

  by Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales

  promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be

  created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing,

  307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. ®,

  a Delaware corporation. Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  Copyright © August Kubizek, 1953

  Translation © Lionel Leventhal Limited, 2006

  Introduction © Ian Kershaw, 2006

  United Kingdom edition © Pen & Sword Books Limited, 2011

  North American edition © Arcade Publishing, 2011

  The right of August Kubizek to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  Frontline edition ISBN 978-1-84832-607-1

  Arcade edition ISBN 978-1-61145-058-3

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  First published in 1953 by Leopold Stocker Verlag as Adolf Hitler Mein Jugendfreund.

  An abridged English language version entitled Young Hitler was published in 1954 by Allan

  Wingate Publishers Ltd. Greenhill Books released a hardback edition with a new introduction by

  Ian Kershaw in 2006.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into

  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any

  person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal

  prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP data record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kubizek, August.

  [Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund. English]

  The young Hitler I knew: the definitive inside look at the artist who became a monster/by August Kubizek; introduction by Ian Kershaw.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-61145-058-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945--Childhood and youth. 2. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945—Friends and

  associates. 3. Kubizek, August. 4. Friendship—Case studies. 5. Art students--Austria--

  Biography. 6. Heads of state--Germany--Biography. I. Title.

  DD247.H5K813 2011

  943.086092--dc22

  [B]

  2011004538

  Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Limited

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction by Ian Kershaw

  Original Publisher’s Foreword

  Author’s Introduction – My Decision and Justification

  Chapter 1

  First Meeting

  Chapter 2

  Growth of a Friendship

  Chapter 3

  Portrait of the Young Hitler

  Chapter 4

  Portrait of His Mother

  Chapter 5

  Portrait of His Father

  Chapter 6

  Adolf’s Schooldays

  Chapter 7

  Stefanie

  Chapter 8

  Enthusiasm for Richard Wagner

  Chapter 9

  Hitler the Young Volksdeutscher

  Chapter 10

  Adolf Rebuilds Linz

  Chapter 11

  ‘In That Hour It Began …’

  Chapter 12

  Adolf Leaves for Vienna

  Chapter 13

  His Mother’s Death

  Chapter 14

  ‘Come with Me, Gustl!’

  Chapter 15

  No. 29 Stumpergasse

  Chapter 16

  Adolf Rebuilds Vienna

  Chapter 17

  Solitary Reading and Study

  Chapter 18

  Nights at the Opera

  Chapter 19

  Adolf Writes an Opera

  Chapter 20

  The Mobile Reichs-Orchestra

  Chapter 21

  Unmilitary Interlude

  Chapter 22

  Adolf’s Attitude to Sex

  Chapter 23

  Political Awakening

  Chapter 24

  The Lost Friendship

  Chapter 25

  My Subsequent Life and Reunion with My Friend

  Index

  * * *

  Illustrations

  Adolf Hitler’s birth certificate

  Klara Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s mother

  Alois Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s father

  Adolf Hitler and the fourth form at the Leonding primary school

  Adolf Hitler and the first form at the Linz Realschule

  Adolf Hitler as a baby

  Adolf Hitler aged sixteen

  Alois Hitler in uniform

  Leopold Pötsch, one of Hitler’s teachers

  No. 9 Blütengasse, Linz, Hitler’s home for a time

  August Kubizek

  Sketch by Hitler of his idea for a Linz concert hall

  Signatures by Alois and Adolf Hitler

  Stefanie, Hitler’s first love

  Wedding photograph of Angela and Leo Raubal

  Notice of Klara Hitler’s death, signd by her son

  Hitler’s design for a villa he wanted to build for Kubizek

  Hitler’s application for an orphans’ pension for himself and his sister

  Postcards from Hitler to Kubizek from Vienna

  Water colour by Hitler of Pöstlingberg castle

  Hitler’s letter to Kubizek of August 1933

  * * *

  Introduction

  For a vital phase during the early years of his life, his late teenage years in Linz and Vienna, when we otherwise have tantalisingly little to go on, Hitler had a personal – and exclusive – friend, who later composed a striking account of the four years of their close companionship. This friend was August Kubizek. His account is unique in that it stands alone in offering insights into Hitler’s character and mentality for the four years between 1904 and 1908. It is unique, too, in that it is the only description from any period of Hitler’s life provided by an undoubted personal friend – even if that friendship was both relatively brief and almost certainly one-sided.* For, like everyone else who came into contact with Hitler, Kubizek would soon learn that friends, like others, would be dropped as soon as they had served their purpose.

  For every study of Hitler’s early years, including the first parts of my own biography, Kubizek’s s
tory has proved an indispensable source. His recollections of his time together with Hitler, first published in 1953, are now in their sixth edition. An English translation, with an introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, was published in 1954 and later reprinted, and has had to serve for those without access to the German original until the present. Yet this earlier English-language version was neither a complete nor an altogether satisfactory translation of Kubizek’s German text. Numerous passages, in fact some entire chapters, were omitted. This new translation remedies these deficiencies and omissions. For the first time, it makes the entire text of Kubizek’s recollections of his friendship with Hitler available to an English readership. This is greatly to be welcomed.

  August Kubizek was born in Linz in 1888. After leaving school he served as an apprentice in his father’s small upholstery workshop. But he was musically talented, and this offered him an exit-route from the upholstery trade. While the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna was rejecting his friend Hitler, Kubizek was gaining entry to the Vienna Conservatoire to study music. He subsequently obtained a position as second conductor in the municipal theatre at Marburg on the Drau, and was just married when war broke out in 1914. He served in the Austrian Army for the duration of the war, suffering a serious lung infection in 1915 from which he never fully recovered. After the war he became town clerk of Eferding, near Linz, where his duties included organising the small community’s musical events. And there he remained, a quiet, retiring family man, helping to bring up his three sons, and conscientiously involved in the local cultural life.

  In the meantime, his erstwhile friend had become famous. Kubizek sent a note of congratulation when Hitler became Reich Chancellor in January 1933, and later received a personal reply. Hitler even suggested that Kubizek might pay him a visit one day. Nothing came of this for five years. But shortly after the Anschluss, Kubizek made his way to Hitler’s hotel in Linz, and was allowed in to see his former friend for the first time since their ways had parted in 1908. Hitler greeted him warmly – though now used the formal ‘Sie’ mode of address not the more intimate ‘Du’ (which he had still used in his note to Kubizek five years earlier). Invitations followed to the Bayreuth Festival in 1939 and again in 1940, when, with Hitler at the height of his power, he and Kubizek met for the last time.

  Kubizek had by then gained recognition among leading Nazis as a ‘friend of the Führer’ as a young man, and was known to have memorabilia from that time. He had already in 1938 been approached and agreed to write his recollections for the Party archive. His insights were said to be ‘staggering’, revealing ‘the inconceivable greatness of the Führer in his youth’.* By 1942, after Kubizek had joined the Nazi Party and become a local functionary (mainly in charge of propaganda and cultural matters in Eferding), he had received a direct commission from the Party leadership to write about his early friendship with the ‘Führer’. Kubizek had certainly made a start by 1943, and was given a better-paid position by the Party to help him to complete his task. But he made slow progress. When the Third Reich fell, he was interned for sixteen months by the Americans. But he had hidden his draft ‘memoirs’ and memorabilia in a cavity of a wall in his house in Eferding. These became the basis of the book, Adolf Hitler – Mein Jugendfreund, published in 1953, and an immediate sensation. Kubizek died three years later, now widely known as a first-hand witness to Hitler’s early, formative years.

  But how valuable is Kubizek’s book as a source for Hitler’s life in Linz and Vienna? The core of the book, we should recall, began life as a manuscript commissioned by the Nazi Party. A copy of the second part of this original text survives today.* The fifty typescript pages, dealing with the Vienna period, are far shorter than the corresponding sections of the book. A great deal, therefore, has been added to the original account – itself composed over thirty years after the events it describes.† Glowing adulation of Hitler is abundantly evident in the typescript, whereas the book is inevitably more guarded, even though an unmistakable current of admiration remains. And the style of the original is prosaic, compared with the far more fluent, even literary style of the book. Episodes recounted briefly and without literary graces in the original text are far more extensively and elegantly described in the published work.‡ Kubizek admitted that writing the original manuscript had not come easily to him. ‘Writing for me is a cross to bear. It doesn’t suit me’, he conceded in 1949.§ There must, therefore, be some suspicion that the embellished ‘memoirs’ which appear in the book are the result of help from a ‘ghost-writer’. In fact, Kubizek acknowledged in June 1949 that his text required a complete reworking. Producing a more ‘effective’ version meant that the completion of his work ‘belonged in the hands of a writer (Dichter)’, he wrote. He even contemplated publication as a stage play.¶ The Austrian publishing house denied that it had provided any assistance. But either Kubizek suddenly discovered the art of writing, or he had help from a person or persons unknown.

  Kubizek’s recollections need to be read critically and treated with great care for other reasons. The young Hitler, for example, is frequently and extensively cited verbatim in Kubizek’s published text (though seldom in the original manuscript). Kubizek is far from alone among those who later wrote of their experiences of Hitler in putting words directly into his mouth years after the events described. But it is self-evidently impossible that he could have remembered exactly what Hitler said over four decades later. The direct quotations have, therefore, to be seen as a literary device of Kubizek (or his ghost-writer) rather than precise expressions of the young Hitler. This does not in itself discredit their veracity as statements of Hitler’s views. But, obviously, they ought not to be taken at face value as quotations.

  Beyond this, some of Kubizek’s recollections have more than an air of fabrication about them. His story of Hitler denouncing to the police a kaftan-clad Jew was probably an embellishment of a well-known episode in Mein Kampf (on which Kubizek drew quite extensively in his book). The description of a visit together with his friend to a synagogue sounds equally dubious. The claim that Hitler joined the Anti-Semitic League in 1908, and registered Kubizek for membership at the same time, is plainly wrong. No such organisation existed in Austria at the time. Kubizek’s passages on Hitler’s anti-semitism, in fact, deserve generally to be treated with scepticism. They are clearly designed to distance himself from his former friend’s radical views (which he, almost certainly wrongly and in contrast to Hitler himself, dated back to the influence of home and school in Linz), though his own anti-semitism had not been concealed in the manuscript version.

  Another story described by Kubizek, and repeated in countless books on Hitler, also seems elaborated to the point of near fantasy. This is the lengthy episode of the nocturnal climb up the Freinberg, a mountain just outside Linz, following a visit to a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, an early work about a Roman tribune of the people who was eventually cast down by his one-time followers. Kubizek has Hitler, in near ecstasy, elucidating the meaning of what they had seen in almost mystical terms. After the war Kubizek remained insistent that the story was true.* The evening evidently left its mark on him, and he reminded Hitler of it when they met at Bayreuth in 1939. Kubizek concludes his chapter on the ‘vision’ by telling how Hitler recounted the episode to his hostess, Winifred Wagner, ending: ‘in that hour it began’. But this was Hitler showing off his ‘prophetic qualities’ to an important admirer, Frau Wagner. Whatever happened on the Freinberg that night that so impressed the impressionable Kubizek, nothing ‘began’ then.

  A further episode, that of Stefanie, a young woman in Linz who, Kubizek claims, was Hitler’s first love, has a distinctly improbable ring to it. There can be little doubt that Kubizek greatly embellishes what was at most a passing juvenile infatuation. But the story has at least one point of interest. Franz Jetzinger, a librarian in Linz who himself was working on Hitler’s early life, was able to track Stefanie down. She did exist (though she knew nothing of Hitler’s supp
osed passion for her at the time). In his letters to Jetzinger, Kubizek refers to her surname before she married – Isak.* It was plainly Jewish-sounding. She was, in fact, not Jewish – though neither Hitler nor Kubizek could have known that. The irony that Hitler’s one and only boyhood ‘flame’ might have been Jewish at least suggests that Kubizek’s emphasis upon his friend’s pronounced anti-semitism already in Linz is incorrect.

  Despite these, and other, undoubted weaknesses, limitations, and distortions – even outright inventions – which underline the need for great caution in using Kubizek, his account of his experiences with Hitler cannot be dismissed – as it was by the more scholarly, but jaundiced, early historian of Hitler’s youth, Franz Jetzinger – as a mere ‘work of fable’. Jetzinger was originally on good terms with Kubizek (who showed him his typescript and memorabilia of his time with Hitler). But he became an implacable critic once Kubizek’s book appeared. His own book on Hitler’s youth, which appeared three years later, is replete with attacks on Kubizek.† Jetzinger was certainly able to expose Kubizek’s memory as fallible. Kubizek admitted that his original typescript contained errors, which he put down to the constant interruptions through Party work at the time. He insisted, however, that he was telling the truth, and not making things up.‡

  Jetzinger’s scholarship is, in fact, not invariably superior to Kubizek’s vivid pen-picture of the young Hitler, and contains some weaknesses of its own, both factual and interpretative. Kubizek’s description of a distraught Hitler at his mother’s deathbed in December 1907 was, for instance, rejected by Jetzinger, who, largely on the basis of the oral testimony of an old lady he himself described as ‘senile’, preferred the image of a heartless son turning up only once his mother was dead. Jetzinger’s interpretation was for long preferred by most historians. But Kubizek’s version, though not without factual errors, nevertheless has the backing of two crucial witnesses: Hitler’s sister, Paula, and his mother’s Jewish physician, Dr Eduard Bloch. On this important point, Kubizek’s account is preferable to Jetzinger’s interpretation. Kubizek is here an important source.