Bridget Dowling - Emigration and Claims

Emigration and Claims

In 1939, she joined her son on a tour of the United States where he was invited to lecture on his infamous uncle. They decided to stay and Bridget wrote a manuscript, My Brother-in-Law Adolf, in which she claimed that her famous brother-in-law had moved to Liverpool to live with Bridget and Alois from November 1912 to April 1913 in order to dodge conscription in his native Austria. She claims that she introduced Adolf to astrology, and that she advised him to trim off the edges of his moustache.

She was unable to sell the manuscript and most historians dismiss the work as being a fabrication written in an attempt to cash in on her famous relation. Brigitte Hamann and Hans Mommsen say that records prove that Hitler was in Vienna during this period.

There is no corroborating evidence Hitler ever visited his relatives in Liverpool. Professor Robert Waite refutes her claims that Adolf Hitler had stayed with her as well as most of the rest of her book in the appendix to his book The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. According to David Gardiner, Bridget's daughter-in-law has said Bridget admitted to her that the book was fanciful. The story of Adolf Hitler's visit to Liverpool has remained popular, however, and was the subject of Beryl Bainbridge's 1978 novel Young Adolf and Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's notorious 1989 comic The New Adventures of Hitler.