William Patrick Stuart-Houston

William Patrick Stuart-Houston

William Patrick Stuart-Houston

William Patrick Hitler as member of the U.S. Navy between 1944 and 1947
Birth name William Patrick Hitler
Nickname(s) Willy
Born (1911-03-12)12 March 1911
Liverpool, England
Died 14 July 1987(1987-07-14) (aged 76)
Patchogue, New York, U.S.
Buried at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Coram, New York
Allegiance United States of America
Service/branch United States Navy
Years of service 1944 – 1947
Battles/wars World War II
Awards Purple Heart
World War II Victory Medal
Relations Adolf Hitler (uncle)
Alois Hitler, Jr. and Bridget Dowling (parents)
Phyllis Jean-Jacques (wife)

William Patrick "Willy" Stuart-Houston (name at birth Hitler; 12 March 1911 – 14 July 1987) was a nephew of Adolf Hitler. Born to Adolf's brother, Alois Hitler, Jr. and his first wife, Bridget Dowling, in Liverpool, Lancashire (now in Merseyside), William Hitler later moved to Germany, but subsequently emigrated to the United States where he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II.

Early life

William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, the son of Alois Hitler, Jr. and Irish-born Bridget Dowling. The couple had met in Dublin when Alois was living there in 1909; they married in Marylebone in London and moved back north to Liverpool where William was born in 1911.

The family lived in a flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, which was destroyed in the last German air raid of the Liverpool Blitz on 10 January 1942. Dowling wrote a manuscript called My Brother-in-Law Adolf, in which she says Alois Hitler moved to Liverpool with her, remaining from November 1912 to April 1913, in order to dodge conscription in Austria.[1]

In 1914, Alois left Bridget and their son for a gambling tour of Europe. He later returned to Germany. Unable to reconnect with them due to the outbreak of World War I, Alois abandoned the family, leaving William to be brought up by his mother. He remarried bigamously, but in the mid-1920s he wrote to Bridget asking her to send William to Germany's Weimar Republic for a visit. She finally agreed in 1929, when William was 18. Alois had had another son, Heinz Hitler, by his German wife. Heinz, in contrast to William, became a committed Nazi and in 1942 died in Soviet captivity.

In Nazi Germany

In 1933, William Patrick Hitler returned to Germany in an attempt to benefit from his uncle's rise to power. His uncle found him a job at the Reich Credit Bank in Berlin. Later, William worked at an Opel automobile factory, and later still as a car salesman. Dissatisfied with these jobs, William persisted in asking his uncle for a better job, writing to him with blackmail threats that he would sell embarrassing stories about the family to the newspapers unless his "personal circumstances" improved.

In 1938, Adolf asked William to relinquish his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job. Expecting a trap, William fled Nazi Germany; he again tried to blackmail his uncle with threats. This time, William threatened to tell the press that Hitler's alleged paternal grandfather was actually a Jewish merchant. Returning to London he wrote an article for Look magazine titled "Why I Hate my Uncle."[2] William allegedly did return, briefly, to Germany in 1938. It is unknown what exactly William's role in late-1930s Germany was.

Emigration to the United States

William left Germany in January 1939 and visited the United States with his mother on a lecture tour[2] at the invitation of publisher William Randolph Hearst. He and his mother were stranded in the U.S. when World War II broke out. After making a special request to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, William was eventually cleared to join the U.S. Navy in 1944, and moved to Sunnyside, Queens in New York.

According to a story circulating after his enlistment, when he went to the draft office and introduced himself, the recruiting officer supposedly replied, "Glad to see you, Hitler. My name's Hess."[2][3]

William Patrick Hitler served in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a Pharmacist's Mate (a designation later changed to Hospital Corpsman) until he was discharged in 1947. He was wounded in action during the war and awarded the Purple Heart.[2]

Later life

After being discharged from the Navy, William Hitler changed his surname to Stuart-Houston. Some authors have commented on his new name's similarity to the name of British anti-semitic writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[2]

Stuart-Houston, in 1947, married Phyllis Jean-Jacques, who was born in Germany in the mid-1920s.[4] After their relationship began, William and Phyllis, along with Bridget, tried for anonymity in the United States. They moved to Patchogue, Long Island where William used his medical training to establish a business that analyzed blood samples for hospitals. His laboratory, which he called Brookhaven Laboratories, was located in his home, a two-story clapboard house at 71 Silver Street, Patchogue.[5]The couple had four sons: Alexander Adolf (b. 1949), Louis (b. 1951), Howard Ronald (1957–1989), and Brian William (b. 1965).[2][6]

William Stuart-Houston died on July 14, 1987 in Patchogue, New York, His remains were buried next to his mother's, at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram, New York.[7] His widow, Phyllis Jean-Jacques Stuart-Houston, died in 2004.[4]

Howard Ronald Stuart-Houston, a Special Agent with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service, died in an automobile accident on September 14, 1989[8] leaving behind no children. He is buried in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram, New York.

None of Stuart-Houston's sons have had children. His son Alexander, who became a social worker, said that, contrary to speculation, there was no pact to intentionally end the Hitler bloodline.[2][9]

In the media

The family's story and Bridget's memoirs were first published by Michael Unger in the Liverpool Daily Post, 1973. Unger also edited Bridget Dowling's memoirs, which were first published as The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler in 1979; a completely updated version, titled The Hitlers of Liverpool, was published in 2011.

Beryl Bainbridge's 1978 novel Young Adolf depicts the alleged 1912–13 visit to his Liverpool relatives by a 23-year-old Adolf Hitler. Bainbridge adapted the story into a play as The Journal of Bridget Hitler with director Philip Saville,[10] which was broadcast as a Playhouse (BBC 2) in 1981.[11]

Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's 1989 comic book The New Adventures of Hitler is likewise based on the Liverpool visit.

In October 2005, The History Channel aired a one-hour documentary entitled Hitler's Family, in which William Patrick Hitler is prominently profiled along with other relatives of Adolf Hitler.

In April 2006, Little Willy, a play by Mark Kassen examining the life of William Patrick Hitler, opened at the Ohio Theater in New York.[12]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ McCarthy (1992)
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Brown et al (2006)
  3. ↑ See Rudolf Hess
  4. 1 2 Infobitte.de
  5. ↑ Lehrer (2002)
  6. ↑ Jrbooksonline.com
  7. ↑ findagrave.com, accessed January 24, 2008
  8. ↑ Officer Down Memorial Page, (Retrieved 10 March 2016)
  9. ↑ "Getting to know the Hitlers", The Daily Telegraph, January 20, 2002
  10. ↑ Royden (2004)
  11. ↑ Saville, Philip profile, BFI Screenonline
  12. ↑ Green (2006)

Works cited

External links

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