Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

40 DER FUEHRERhis shiny gold buttons, stamped with the imperial two-headed eagle, hispistol at his belt. The records show a young border patrolman: 'AloisSchicklgruber, surnamed Hitler.' At the age of twenty-seven he was wellenough established to found a family. Eleven days after his promotion,in 1864, he married Anna Glasl-Horer, adoptive daughter of a customscollector — distinctly a higher station in life. She brought him somemoney and was fourteen years his elder — he was twenty-seven, sheforty-one years; the same pattern as with his foster-father (or father?),Johann von Nepomuk Hutler: marriage to a wealthier, much older girl.The woman was sickly and bore him no children; in 1880, after sixteenyears, the marriage was dissolved — in so far as this was possibleaccording to the law of Catholic Austria. Three years later, the womandied of tuberculosis at the age of sixty, when her husband was forty-six.Alois Schicklgruber spent sixteen years of this unfertile and presumablymelancholy marriage as a customs official in Braunau am Inn, a littlecity on the German-Austrian border. According to the accounts ofcontemporaries, he must have been an impressive personality in hisway, 'hungry for education and well versed in words and letters'; hiswife's means, it seems, had procured the ill-paid official the luxury ofbooks and travel.Apparently convinced that he had 'made something of himself,' heresumed, after his marriage, relations with his 'native village.' Johannvon Nepomuk Hutler was still alive. All parties may have reckoned withthe approaching end of Alois Schicklgruber-Hitler's first wife. Johannvon Nepomuk's daughter, Johanna, who was married to a certain Polzl,bore him in 1860 a granddaughter by the name of Klara; for AloisSchicklgruber-Hitler this child was the daughter of a cousin — andconceivably, if rumors are correct, the daughter of a half-sister, hence aniece. His own marriage was childless and so he took Little Klara intohis house in place of a daughter.The developments in the internal relations of this family can only bepresumed; but these presumptions are based upon events which reallytook place — though years later. We can assume that Schickl-gruber'smarriage with the sick woman fourteen years older than himself finallyceased to be a marriage; and that, as he approached