Angela Hitler - Life

Life

Angela Hitler was born in Braunau, Austria-Hungary, the second child of Alois Hitler and his second wife, Franziska Matzelsberger. Her mother died the following year. She and her brother Alois Hitler, Jr. were raised by their father and his third wife Klara Pölzl. Her half-brother Adolf Hitler was born six years after her, and they grew very close. She is the only one of his siblings mentioned in Mein Kampf.

Angela's father died in 1903 and her stepmother died in 1907, leaving a small inheritance. On 14 September 1903 she married Leo Raubal (11 June 1879 - 10 August 1910), a junior tax inspector, and gave birth to a son, Leo on 12 October 1906. On 4 June 1908 Angela gave birth to Geli and in 1910 to a second daughter, Elfriede (Elfriede Maria Hochegger, 10 January 1910 - 24 September 1993).

According to an OSS profile of the Hitler family, Angela moved to Vienna and after World War I became manager of Mensa Academia Judaica, a boarding house for Jewish students, where she once defended her charges against anti-Semitic rioters.

Angela had heard nothing from Adolf for a decade when he re-established contact with her in 1919. In 1924 Adolf was confined in Landsberg, Angela made the trip from Vienna to visit him. In 1928 she and Geli moved to the Berghof at Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden where she became his housekeeper and was later put in charge of the household at Hitler's expanded retreat.

Some historians believe that Hitler had a sexual relationship with Geli, who committed suicide in 1931. Meanwhile, Angela strongly disapproved of Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun; she eventually left Berchtesgaden as a result and moved to Dresden. Hitler broke off relations with Angela and did not attend her second wedding. On 20 January 1936 she married German architect Professor Martin Hammitzsch (22 May 1878- 12 May 1945), the Director of the State School of Building Construction in Dresden. It seems, however, that Hitler re-established contact with her during World War II, because Angela remained his intermediary to the rest of the family with whom he did not want contact. In 1941, she sold her memoirs of her years with Hitler to the Eher Verlag, which brought her 20,000 Reichsmark.

In spring 1945 — after the destruction of Dresden in the massive bomb attack of February 13/14 — Adolf Hitler moved Angela to Berchtesgaden to avoid her being captured by the Soviets. Also he let her and her younger sister Paula hand over 100,000 Reichsmark. In Hitler's Last Will and Testament, he guaranteed Angela a pension of 1,000 Reichsmark monthly. It is uncertain if she ever received a penny of this amount. Nevertheless, she spoke very highly of him even after the war, and claimed that neither her brother nor she herself had known anything about the Holocaust. She declared that if Adolf had known what was going on in the concentration camps, he would have stopped them.

Her son Leo had a son - Peter (b. 1931), a retired engineer who lives in Linz, Austria. Angela's daughter Elfriede married German lawyer Dr. Ernst Hochegger on 27 June 1937 in Düsseldorf; they had a son, Heiner Hochegger (born in January 1945). Angela died of a stroke.

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