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It's official that Benito Mussolini had several children with both his lawful wife and mistresses. One unmarried mother of Mussolini's children, "Miss" Ida Dalser, was even barred in a mental hospital with his son, Benito Albino Mussolino, in order to silence all dangerous rumours about Il Duce's polygamy. But, now--

Getting to know the Hitlers

by David Gardner

The faint lilt of German folk music floated through the open window of the dark-wood alpine bungalow as I walked down the short path to the front door. The property straddled two small roads on a forested private estate nestling into one of the bays tucked behind slivers of land protecting the New York coastline from the full impact of the Atlantic Ocean.

Neither close enough to New York city to be overrun by urban sprawl nor fashionable enough to compete with the wealthy weekend getaways in the Hamptons, it was a community left largely untouched by the passing of the years.

This was the place where Liverpool-born William Patrick Hitler had chosen to escape from the world.

For more than five decades, scores of historians and academics had been searching in vain for any clues that would solve one of the untold mysteries of the Second World War: whatever happened to the English Hitler?

William Patrick was the son of Adolf Hitler's half-brother, Alois, but there was little family affection: "Uncle Adolf" referred to William Patrick as "my loathsome nephew".

After a difficult childhood in England, a spell in Germany before the war, and a tour of duty as a US seaman fighting with the Allies during the war, the burden of his name simply became too much. William Patrick Hitler adopted a double-barrelled surname and dropped out of sight in 1946, creating a new life for himself a world away from the horror of the Holocaust.

Now I was about to ask his widow the question she had been dreading for 50 years: "Is your real name Mrs Hitler?"

I knew William Patrick would not be answering the door. I had just been to visit his grave, a 20-minute drive away, at the closest Roman Catholic cemetery, where I was given the name and address of his widow, Phyllis.

The music stopped and a tall, elegantly-dressed woman peered from behind the screen and spoke with a distinct German accent. Even from behind the grey mesh I could tell the reason for my visit was already dawning on her. She must have envisaged this very conversation countless times over the years.

"Perhaps we will talk about it when the boys are older," she said. "We were married a long time and my husband never wanted anyone to know who he was. Now my sons don't want anything to do with it. It was all too long ago. There has been enough trouble with this name."

Despite my polite attempts to persuade her to tell me more, she was adamant she did not want to talk about her extraordinary family secret. It was only when I drove slowly away from the house that I realised the implications of what Phyllis had told me; that the Hitler line did not die out with William Patrick Hitler when he died in 1987, aged 76. It lived on through her sons.

From that first, short conversation with William Patrick's widow through subsequent dealings with her family over a period of three years for my book, The Last of the Hitlers, and a Channel 5 documentary, set to be screened on February 4, I have kept a pledge not to reveal the name adopted by the Hitler family in New York, nor the town where they live.

I was to discover that the Hitler bloodline was carried on through William Patrick's four sons - one of whom died in a road accident in 1989 - and that the brothers had decided in a remarkable pact not to have children themselves in order that Adolf Hitler's genes would die with them.

The eldest of these sons holds an even more remarkable secret; he was named after his despotic uncle. So an Adolf Hitler lives on to this day in a forgotten corner of America. Alexander Adolf Hitler understands the enduring fascination with his great-uncle but, like his mother, he doesn't want his life overturned, and possibly endangered, by revealing his true identity.

He told me: "I know that in England there is still a lot of interest in Hitler and it is on the television and in books and newspapers more often than it is here. Just make sure you say good things about my father because he was a good guy. He came to the United States, he served in the US Navy, he had four kids and he had a pretty good life."

Just in case I was in any doubt, Alex wanted to spell it out: "My father was definitely anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler." So why did he name his eldest son Adolf? "I don't know. I wasn't there when that was decided."

The naming of Alexander Adolf is one of the many contradictions in the fascinating saga of a family's attempt to escape from its surname.

As a journalist working in New York, I spent nearly four years trying to unravel the secret of William Patrick's disappearance. I was fascinated and intrigued by what I unearthed - with the help of FBI files, intelligence reports and, eventually, through interviews with his family and friends - about his remarkable life.

The story begins with William Patrick's father, Alois - Adolf Hitler's older half-brother. He was touring Britain studying, he said, the hotel industry and met a farm girl called Brigid Dowling in Dublin in 1909. The couple eloped to London before moving up to Liverpool where Brigid gave birth to their only son, William Patrick, in a flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth, in 1911.

Alois ran in turn a small restaurant in Dale Street, a boarding house on Parliament Street and a hotel on Mount Pleasant, which went bust. Bankrupt, Alois left his wife and young child to fend for themselves and returned to Germany.

When William Patrick grew up he moved to London but by this time his uncle had risen to power in Germany. For the first, but not last, time the curse of his surname struck and he was laid off from the job he had found.

He decided, therefore, to travel to Germany and make full use of the Hitler family connections. His father and uncle helped him find work but the young William Patrick thought that he deserved something better than the book-keeping jobs he was given. He eventually fell foul of his uncle when he suggested that if he wasn't found something more befitting a member of the Fuhrer's family, he would go public with rumours that the Nazi leader's grandfather was an Austrian Jew.

This prompted an ultimatum by Hitler: William Patrick was ordered to renounce his British citizenship and take a senior position in the Third Reich. The young man instead chose to flee from Germany. It was now 1939 and he received a cold welcome in London, so he left England with his mother for a lecture tour of America on the subject of "My Uncle Adolf".

He arrived in New York at the end of March 1939 and "divested himself of a lot of uncomplimentary remarks about uncle Adolf", according to a report in the New York Daily News. His lectures attracted considerable attention at first but once America was forced into the war at the end of 1941 interest began to wane.

In 1942 William Patrick wrote to President Roosevelt asking to be allowed to join the US army. "I have attempted to join the British forces," he wrote. "The British are an insular people and while they are kind and courteous, it is my impression, rightly or wrongly, that they could not in the long run feel overly cordial or sympathetic towards an individual bearing the name I do."

He continued by saying that he and his mother owed a "great debt" to the United States and pleaded: "More than anything else I would like to see active combat as soon as possible and thereby be accepted by my friends and comrades as one of them in this great struggle for liberty."

As a result of the letter William Patrick was investigated by the FBI, who found no evidence of any subversive activities, and he was given hope that he may be allowed to join up. But it wasn't until 1944 that he was finally enlisted into the US navy.

There was one moment of comic coincidence when William Patrick arrived at the draft office and was asked his name by the recruiting officer. "Hitler," he replied.

"Glad to see you Hitler," said the officer, "my name's Hess."

The event was recorded by several newspapers - it was the last time that William Patrick Hitler was seen or heard of in public. Once in uniform he disappeared from public sight for ever.

My inquiries to discover what had happened to him eventually led me to a small cemetery tucked beside a freeway in Long Island, where I found that Brigid and William Patrick shared the same grave. He died in 1987, 18 years after his mother, in the anonymity he craved for much of his life. His family even considered leaving the grave unmarked, but decided instead to bury him under the false name that had brought him peace.

I discovered that William Patrick had first met his wife Phyllis in Germany in the 1930s through her brother. With war looming, the brother had asked William Patrick to look after Phyllis in New York and dispatched the girl - who was 12 years younger than Hitler - into his safekeeping. Romance blossomed and the couple married after the war in 1947.

Their three surviving sons - Alex, 52, Louis, 50, and Brian, 36 - fiercely guard their privacy and their family secret. Alex is a social worker and his brothers run a gardening business.

Their father, they told me, was wounded in action during the war and later set up a blood analysis laboratory in the home he moved to in the countryside to escape from prying eyes.

None of the three sons has married, and there are no children. Alex initially denied that there had been a pact between the brothers to ensure that the Hitler line was not continued. Then he told me: "Maybe my other two brothers did [make a pact], but I never did." It was just one more contradiction to add to the many that already cloud his family history.

--and that's not all, for:

Addams Family Values (D: Barry Sonnenfeld, 1993)

The only thing that Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitch, regretted in his memoirs was that he didn't devote more time to his family. This could have been the end of Disney's "Mary Poppins". They say that you couldn't ask "why" in Auschwitch; "shit just happens", and it can surprise you like "LSD-Lorenzo" surprises everybody on the stage in "The Producers" (D: Mel Brooks, 1968). Above on the right you can see Anni, my maternal foster grandmother, sitting next to her little sister, Aira. Anni and Aira were the secret of the Third Reich: their father was Adolf Hitler himself. Anni was born on the 31st of January, 1925, shortly after Hitler had been let out from prison after NINE-MONTH-LONG imprisonment, and few years later Aira was also born while "a prisoner of love was still on parole". Since Eva Braun was Lady Macbeth, who could have been Mrs Lear? I am not quite sure that who was Anni's and Aira's real mother: the mother could be any woman from an unknown Jewish woman - Jewish Mel Brooks could be Anni's brother, but on the other hand Adolf Hitler himself was probably partly Jewish - to Betty, their official Finnish mother. A devoted worshipper of Wagnerian music like Herr Hitler wouldn't have hesitated to practise incest in order to produce the offspring: Hitler's secret daughters' mother could even be Angela, Hitler's half-sister's young daughter (this kind of cruel affair with half-uncle and the loss of her children would also explain Angela's suicide in 1931), but Paula, Hitler's younger sister, is out of question, because Anni wasn't any degenerate idiot. Most people would imagine that Hitler's daughter was a black-haired and murderous little young savage like Addams Family's "Wednesday" (see her above on the left), but I can assure that Anni, who was seven children's mother, was as kind and loving person as any "Yiddish mama"; she was my true caring nanny when not only I but also my foster mother was still almost a child. A silenced child in my soul again begs attention, and from the bottom of the well he cries out that while Hitler pretended to be a sunny father of all Aryan children of Germany (see below) and distributed his signatures to fans, his two daughters were dumped to Finland, but even possibly partly Jewish girls would also have needed their father.

Hitler's little girls were brought up in a country village called Luikku, Lohtaja, Finland. More anagrams? Luikku--lukki; "lukki" would mean "garden spider" in Finnish. Lohtaja--johtaja; "johtaja" would mean "Führer" in Finnish. Not quite, few letters won't match, but I guess that the swastika does resemble cross spider!

If you spoke Swedish, you would say "Lochteå" in stead of "Lohtaja". Lochteå? Finland is truly the country of over 60 000 lakes! In the middle below you can see "Loch Luikku", and the white blotch on the right below is not the Nessie but a swan of the lake.

The coastline of Lohtaja is almost identical to the coastline of Courland. Once upon a time there was the Dutchy of Courland-Semigallia that was also known as "the Holland of the East". These "eastern Dutch" had several colonies, and even such a thing as "Courlander Gambia", including St.Andrew's Island, existed in the middle of the 17th century. When English occupied St. Andrew's Island, the island was renamed James Island. Well, near Lohtaja, there is a town called "Jakobstad" in Swedish, but for some reason this "Jamestown" is called "Pietarsaari" (St. Peter's Island) in Finnish.

Rüdiger von der Goltz was in command of the German troops in Finland, 1918: he was supposed to secure King Väinö's safety, but after the armistice he had to return to Germany by a ship called "Buenos Aires". General-Count v. d. Goltz was nearly beaten by the street hooligans in his restless native country, but his next war bride already waited for him in Courland, where he operated for nine months (from Jan. to Oct. 1919). After this Baltic campaign he wrote a "Buch" about his adventures; in his book he prophetically says as early as in 1920 that "patriotic socialism" could profit Germany if a single ingenious person was allowed to be a leader without any limitations that would make him only mediocre. What then happened wasn't probably in his mind, and Führer himself was no more a duke of Courland as I am, but one of the mysteries of the Second World War is that why didn't he withdraw German divisions from Courland when there were no more men to defend even Berlin?

They have a marvellous beach in Lohtaja: I didn't see any better beaches in Malibu. But where are all the girls and surfers?

Below you can see the local fishing village of Lohtaja. Somewhere here a fisherman engraved Anni's initials on the wood. That happened 70 years ago, and the waves must have swept away "Anni Muir's" log. All that I was able to find were letters "M-KK" on the bench. Would you like to buy a vowel?

On the left below you can see Väinö and Betty who were Anni's and Aira's foster parents in East Bothnia or Pohjanmaa as they would say in Finnish. Top right Aira is with his husband and their only son, Saul. Do I imagine, or does Saul resembles rather Klaus Kinski than his father?

In 1945 Anni got married and moved to a small farm in Kauhava. Her husband's name was Kalle-Atle or Karl Yli-Pelkonen (Super-Pelguin?) Kauhu, pelko, horror and fear: different words of different languages for same human feelings. The Yli-Pelkonens earned their living from products of the farm and father's job in the local knife factory (left below), where the workers daily took a deep breath of dust from the grindstones. Kalle never talked about the war, but he would think for certain that if you used his knives to butcher a helpless hostage like a sheep in front of a recording video camera as they have done in today's Iraq, you would be nothing more than a coward.

A knife decorates the coat of arms of Kauhava. They have also a beauty shop called "Star" in Kauhava, but no Chinese pimps (yet).

Kalle was tall, strong and dark: a drop of Gypsy-blood probably ran in his veins. On the left below you can see this old couple in the 70s. Between them is Jari, one of their many grandchildren, and what's cooking? Yes, they are not having Kentucky fried chicken but sausages, how German! However, the life of theirs was very much like of those who settled the West and started from nothing without history. On the right below you can see few of these settlers on the way to Kentucky: "Drang nach Westen!"

"Drang nach Osten!", that's what Adolf Hitler preached, but not all expansions towards east have been German enterprises. In July 1240, the Swedes, Norwegians and Finns undertook their joint crusade against Novgorod approved by Pope Gregory IX. It is thought that Catholic Bishop Thomas ("Thomas" originally means "twin") of Finland, was among the crusaders. On July 15, 1240, the Russian troops led by twenty-year-old Prince Alexander gained a shattering victory over the crusaders on the Neva River. In honour of this victory Prince Alexander was called "Nevsky" and "Khrabry" ("the Valiant"). The legend tells that before the battle, a former pagan called Pelkonen or Pelguin, an Ingrian chief whose Christian name was Philip, had a revelation which predicted the Russians' victory.

Kauhava-Havana!? There is also a town called Sancti-Spiritus in Cuba. Anni was a devout Pentecostalist. The Pentecostal Church is blessed by the Holy Spirit but has no clear leader, organization or teachings, and I, as a disciple of these early Christian apostles, was like that lonely and lost "crazy kraut" who has a dovecote in "The Producers". Therefore it should be relatively easy to break my spirit and make me beg for mercy. But what else can we remember about the history of Cuba? Holy Roman Emperor Charles V spoke Spanish to his God, but when Cuba rose in rebellion against mother country in the late 19th century, the Spaniards herded the rural population into what were called reconcentrados. These hutches are often considered the prototype for the 20th century concentration camps. Therefore, should we have declared war on Spain, as Citizen Kane asked!

JULIES! JULIES! JULIES! Julie Andrews, or Red Juan lies w(ell)?!

The Red Tent (D: Mickail K. Kalatozov, 1969)/Alexander Nevsky (D: Sergei Eisenstein, 1938). As you can see in the middle below, Anni was re-baptized by the Pentecostal Church.

In his late sixties Kalle's both legs were amputated. My old foster grandfather didn't survive the loss of limbs: he died in 1983 when I was fourteen years old just like young Adolf Hitler when he lost his father. It seems to me that there is only one way out from the freezing darkness of Narnia. Below on the right you can see the gravestone of Yli-Pelkonens: as you can read from top right, Kalle's mother was a woman called "Marja-Adolfiina"?!

More gloomy details: a road called Hautalantie (Grave Road) passes Anni's and Kalle's home in Kauhava.

Kalle's father, Jaakko, was a son of the wealthy house in the middle of Kauhava, but first Jaakko's father died and his widowed mother got married again. Unfortunately Jaakko's mother died soon after this and his step-father got married again. Stepparents kicked out their stepson, and Jaakko had to start a new life in the backwoods-hamlet of Kauhava. On the left below you can see Jaakko (the tallest man) with his children among other people at the funeral. The dead person could be Chinese, and especially some of women look degenerate owing to internal breeding. I have marked Maija or Mary, Kalle's little sister, with "X": she could be a Gipsy-girl, and evidently she was left to the doorstep of Jaakko's house in the dark night. On the right you can see a little girl called Arya. She was one of Anni's and Kalle's children who died young; not even Dr Beat was able to save this little patient who had a weak heart.

On the right below you can see the curve of the brook in the middle of Yli-Pelkonens' home farm, and on the left Julie jumps over the artificial brook like a rabbit.

On the right below you can see Albert Speer's children who have come to see "Uncle Adolf" and "Mickey Mouse" movies in Obersalzberg, 1942, and on the left Julie Andrews is singing on the top of nearby hill a few years after "der Untergang". Everything seems to be so completely innocent!

If you haven't watched YouTube videos under the headline, you can just imagine a scene from Leo Tolstoi's "War and Peace". The year is 1812, and Hannibal ante portas, the enemy is at the gates. Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov has retreated with his staff to a modest farmhouse near Moscow, and a farmer's young daughter, who lays on the top of warm oven, witnesses how Kutuzov commands the army to withdraw without fight from the capital.

Veni, vidi, verti? Unlike Kutuzov, Hitler didn't want to escape from his burning capital to any remote chalet, and we all know what happened to him when Berlin fell "in spite of general Steiner's efforts" in 1945. Or do we? Maybe a double stepped into his socks at the last moment. Below you can see "Sergeant Steiner" and my docker colleague standing next to me: he wanted to borrow some money from me in order to buy petrol for his car. How fat cheeks I had in 2000!

On the left below you can see an oven in Anni's kitchen. One of Anni's sons is a prison warder, and a serial killer made the iron framework in prison in the 80s, but doesn't the original oven bring to mind the pictures of the crematory ovens of the concentration camps like the one on the right? I can almost smell the burning flesh and petrol by her oven. Didn't ancient Romans worship their deceased ancestors in the front of a fireplace? Anni Muir and the headless ghost of the fireplace or muurinpohja as they would say in Finnish?! Forget Magdeburg, for I think that Hitler's skull is kept in the Kremlin, but his headless skeleton is buried under Anni's, his firstborn daughter's, fireside in the backwoods of Finland. It's ironic that when the end was near Hitler didn't want to leave Berlin in order to land into an insignificant hut in the middle of nowhere. Melior est canis vivus leone mortuo - a living dog is better than a dead lion?

If you tried to cremate several bodies, human grease would quickly block the oven. They say that Germans made soap bars out of Jew prisoners during the Second World War. Jews even had funerals for bars of soap, which they claimed were the remains of Jews killed by their arch-enemy the Nazis. I wonder if they also made chocolate bars out of prisoners'-- Anni was a very skilful hand loom weaver like William McGonagall who also wrote this poem about "Sunlight Soap":

When I was a young boy, we had a cocker spaniel called Albert; see spaniel-Albert between us or with me and the cat a few years earlier in the bottom right-hand corner below. Queen Victoria's Prince Consort Albert - Kaiser Wilhelm's "British" grandfather - seems to be a kind of Adolf Hitler's alter ego in a movie called "The Great McGonagall". McGonagall finds himself in the company of a naked woman in a dungeon in one sequence of this farce. Although the prisoner is not Herr Hitler himself and the prison is not called Landsberg, I dare assume that the author of "Mein Kampf" compromised his virtues in order to redeem his freedom back, and Anni "Muir" was born nine months later as the result of this "shadow-boxing" against the brick wall. To those who haven't read his memoirs, I have to tell again that after the failed attempt of the Munich Beer-Hall Putsch in November 1923, Anni's real father was arrested and sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment as one of the principal participants: Hitler was imprisoned in the Landsberg Fortress, but was released after serving only nine months. Sympathetic guards made his prison term comfortable. He was allowed many visitors, had much reading material and plenty of food. While in prison, just like "the Captain's ghost" Hitler dictated "Mein Kampf" to his friend Rudolf Hess who wrote down everything like "Mrs Muir". Now you must think that you knew all about Eva but nothing about Betty. It takes two to tango but only one to jerk off: Hitler himself said that "the only alternative to acquiring more 'Lebensraum' in the East would be the birth control"!?

On the left below you can see "hard school": a Lithuanian mother is privately teaching her child to read a Lithuanian book, although it was strictly forbidden under the Russian oppression in the latter half of the 19th century. The girl next to Lithuanian secret school is a young Julie Andrews. Praise God that Lithuania got back independence from the Soviet Union under Professor Vytautas Landsbergis's direction.

Annihilate--Anni Hitlea? Well, with bad handwriting you would be able to show that A is actually R. Poor General Patton who believed in reincarnation: he must have come back as a reincarnation of a fur animal, because he wanted to skin the Desert Fox alive? Not quite, for he only read the Fox's book. We have lived in our parents, we shall live in our children, and not any transmigrations of egos but the humanity joins us all together. In the bottom left-hand corner below you can see Marje, my foster mother, on holiday in Greece, 1990. Then she was completely healthy, but now she has fallen ill with the mysterious chronic skin disease: the symptoms are slowly healing skin wounds, and I suspiciously, as usually, try to interpret cryptic public signs like an oracle. But hey presto, Finland's singing champions have finally been victorious in the Eurovision Song Contest, and Marje's live-in-partner has posed for the camera as a Laplander to cap all! The only problem was that the members of Mr Lordi's band didn't only look but also smell like monsters, because they couldn't wash their outfit.

In his movies Tim Burton hasn't only told stories about penguins and transvestites but also about a headless Hessian ghost rider who terrorizes a Dutch village near New York as a night visitor after the American Revolution. One of King Väinö's ancestors actually leased his Hessian army to King George of England, and they say that George Washington would have been lost without his profitable raid on Trenton that brought so many Christmas pres--booty from the Hessian mercenaries on Christmas Day, 1776. If I was really - let's say - King Väinö's great grandson, I would also be Kaiser Wilhelm's great grandnephew and therefore Queen Victoria's great-great-great grandson. However, it seems that some of my readers have limited ability to understand what they read, but I hope that at least you realize that it has been part of my tragedy that they have replaced my true mother with Hitler's granddaughter: I haven't claimed to be the "illegitimate child of Julie Andrews and Adolf Hitler". If you thought so, you haven't either read any further than the headlines, or you don't know what's the difference between foster grandmother and Australian beer; in fact, most four-year-old children I know are smarter than that. I also hope that you understand that Anni, Aira and all their descendants are not responsible for Hitler's wrong choices. What a juntti-mix all this is! Juntti means country bumpkin in Finnish.

What's that below? Obviously we are not on the road to Damascus. Is George Washington crossing River (H)esse on his way to Schlosshotel Kronberg, Hessen? Not quite, those are just two signs from the fields of Swedish-speaking East Bothnia, and you already know the brook.

Does even Julie know who is really his "daddy"? Thomas Mann (middle below) has been regarded as one of the "good Germans" and redeemer of his people after Hitler, but I have got a strange feeling that the author of "Death in Venice" and "Confessions of Felix Krull" is also the father of Hafez al-Assad (left below) and Julie Andrews. So, maybe my mother had also paternal half-brother, although they probably never met?! Well, just like medieval Damascus, Berlin was also between the devils from Mongolia and the western crusaders from the deep blue sea when Julie was still nine years old and Hitler died.

The Real Buddenbrooks?

Christian Buddenbrook - Thomas Mann - An insane dreamer and father of courtesan's illegitimate child.

Tony Buddenbrook - Julie Andrews - Sunny Miss B who becomes a divorced mother of a daughter.

Thomas Buddenbrook - Mikko Jack - The last man of the family who works hard in a harbour office.

Dame Julie Andrews has revealed that she was forced into bed with her alcoholic stepfather when she was nine in her autobiography "Home", published in 2008, which lays bare several family secrets, including that she was born of an illicit affair. Now I shall speculate about my assumed role in this stage of life and therefore nobody shouldn't take offence: was I only supposed to be an invisible mystery father, Mr Doolittle, who gives a life to his daughter and then vanishes? Is somewhere there growing up a new little Julie with a cruel stepfather?

Above Julie Andrews with Ted Wells in 1974. She grew up believing that Mr Wells was her father and a funny farmyard in Finland seems to be far far away in another galaxy. Then her mother married remarried Variety performer ("lumberjack from Canada") Ted Andrews - and she was given his name.

The flag of the Air Force Academy of Kauhava.

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