The Castle in the Forest Read Free Page A

proved, in fact, fascinating. While it would still be premature to explain how I learned what I did, I can,
    however, offer my conclusions. For now, that must suffice. In time, I hope to have the courage to say more.
     
     
    5

    T
    he Waldviertel, situated north of the Danube, is a land of tall beautiful pines. Indeed Waldviertel can be translated directly as the “wooded quarter,” and the silences of the forests are dark in contrast to the green of an occasional field. The soil, however, does not welcome agriculture. An Austrian hamlet in these backwoods delineated the meaning of dirt-poor. In those years, the Hiedlers (who later became Hitlers) lived in Spital, a village of sorts, and the Schicklgrubers, their cousins, lived nearby in the aforesaid Strones, which was deep in the mud along its one lane, no more than a few dozen huts with roofs of thatch. If Strones was profuse in pig wallows around each dwelling, cow flop was more prominent in the town meadows, and the redolence of horse manure was valued. This was, after all, an area where many a peasant had to pull his own plow through various grades of mud. There was gumbo thick as lava, rivulets of silt, gravel washes, muck and slops, clods, rocks, common clay. For that matter, Strones did not even have a church. The locals had to walk to another hamlet, Dollersheim. There in the parish registry, the name of Maria Anna’s son was inscribed as “Alois Schicklgruber, Catholic, Male,”—and, as we know—”Illegitimate.”
    Maria Anna, born in 1795, was forty-two when Alois was born in 1837. Coming from a family of eleven children of whom five were already dead, she certainly could have cohabited with any one of her several brothers. (Himmler had, of course, no objection to that, since her bastard Alois was, I repeat, Adolf’s father.) In any
    event, despite the abysmal poverty of Maria Anna’s parents, she dwelt with her son for the next five years in one of her father’s two small rooms. The mysterious money that came in small but dependable installments helped to support these Schicklgrubers.
    While we were obviously eager to find a trove of intrafamily copulations, such a desire did not allow us to dismiss the Jew from Graz. Indeed, eight years earlier, in 1930, inquiries had already been made. As Himmler related it, Hitler, on reading his nephew’s letter, had sent it on immediately to a Nazi lawyer, Hans Frank. The Führer, as some may no longer recall, did not become Chancellor until 1933, but Hans Frank was already looking in 1930 to worm his way into the inside circle around the Leader.
    Frank had unhappy news to deliver, therefore, concerning Maria Anna’s pregnancy. The likelihood, he declared, was that the father had been a nineteen-year-old, the son of a prosperous merchant named Frankenberger who was, yes, a Jew. It made sense. In those years, the scion of many a well-to-do family had his first carnal outings with a housemaid. Nor did she have to be anywhere near his age. Such an initiation was accepted by the bourgeois mores of a provincial city like Graz as a reasonable if undiscussed practice. It was seen as a good deal better than allowing a well-to-do lad to consort with whores or settle too early on a sweetheart from a less prosperous family.
    Frank claimed to have seen some conclusive evidence. He told Hitler that he had been shown a letter written by Herr Frankenberger, the father of the young man who had bedded down with Maria Anna. This letter promised regular payments to take care of Alois until he was fourteen years old.
    Our Adolf, however, disagreed with these findings. He told Hans Frank that the true story, imparted to him by his own father, Alois, was that the real grandfather had been Maria Anna’s cousin Johann Georg Hiedler, who had finally come around to marry her five years after Alois’ birth. “All the same,” said Hitler to Hans Frank, “I would like to examine this letter from the Jew to my grandmother.”
    Frank