Paula Hitler: The Quiet Life of Adolf Hitler's Sister
- Sep 5, 2019
- 5 min read
She spent decades trying to disappear. She changed her name, kept her mouth shut, and lived in a two-room flat in a small Bavarian town, relying on the charity of people who still revered the brother she barely knew. Paula Hitler was the last surviving member of Adolf Hitler's immediate family -- and almost nobody knew she existed until she was dead.
Paula Hitler: The Quiet Life of Adolf's Only Surviving Sister
Paula Hitler was born on 21 January 1896 in Hafeld, Austria, the last child of Alois Hitler and his third wife Klara Polzl. She was seven years younger than Adolf, and the only one of their children together to survive into adulthood -- their brother Edmund died of measles in 1900 when he was just five. From the start, the Hitler household was shaped by loss.
Their father Alois, a retired customs official with a sharp temper and little patience for sentimentality, died when Paula was six. Their mother Klara followed when Paula was eleven, leaving the two siblings in the care of the Austrian state and each other. Adolf, who was old enough to fend for himself in Vienna, signed over his share of the orphan's pension to Paula. It was one of the few genuinely kind things he ever did for her.
Paula relocated to Vienna and took up a position as a housekeeper at a dormitory for Jewish university students in the early 1920s. In 1921, she had a rare visit from her brother Adolf, whom she described as appearing like he had "fallen from heaven." Despite her proximity to Adolf's struggles as a painter in Vienna and later Munich, as well as his military service and early political ventures, they had little contact until their reunion in Vienna during the early 1930s.
The Long Shadow of a Famous Name
Paula moved to Vienna in the early 1920s and found work as a housekeeper at a dormitory for Jewish university students -- an irony that would have been lost on no one, had anyone known who she was at the time. Adolf visited her there in 1921. She later said he appeared as if he had "fallen from heaven." They hadn't seen each other in years.
By 1930, the secret was out. Paula lost her job at a Viennese insurance company when her employers discovered her surname. Adolf stepped in with financial support, which he continued until his death in 1945, and suggested she take the alias Wolff -- a childhood nickname of his that he'd also used in his earlier political years for security reasons. She obliged. It was easier than arguing.
Adolf's view of his sister was not particularly warm. He referred to both Paula and his half-sister Angela as "dumme Gans" -- stupid goose. Paula knew this. She saw him roughly once a year through the 1930s and early 1940s and worked as a secretary in a military hospital during the war. She never joined the Nazi Party.
The Man She Never Got to Marry
One of the lesser-known chapters of Paula's life involves Erwin Jekelius, an Austrian psychiatrist and committed Nazi whom she planned to marry in the early 1940s. Adolf Hitler personally intervened to stop it. Whether he disapproved of Jekelius specifically, objected to the idea of Paula marrying at all, or simply didn't want the distraction is unclear. What is clear is that Jekelius was arrested on Hitler's orders and sent to the Eastern Front, where he later died in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. Paula never married anyone. She had no children.
Paula was apprehended by US counter-intelligence officers on May 26, 1945, and later interviewed on July 12 of the same year. During the interview, she portrayed her childhood relationship with her brother as a mix of constant quarrels and deep affection. Despite the accusations against her brother regarding the Holocaust, Paula expressed disbelief in his involvement. She also disclosed having met Eva Braun only once. Following her interrogation, Paula was released from American custody and returned to Vienna. There, she relied on her savings for a while before finding employment at an arts and crafts shop.
The End of the War and What Came After
In April 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed around him, Adolf sent SS men to escort Paula to Berchtesgaden. She and her half-sister Angela were each given 100,000 marks on his orders. It was the last time she had any direct connection to what her brother had built. He killed himself the following month.
Paula's experience of those final weeks was far more removed from the bunker than the Goebbels family, whose children were brought into the very heart of it and never came out.
Paula was arrested by US counter-intelligence officers on 26 May 1945 and formally interviewed on 12 July. She told her interrogators she couldn't bring herself to believe that Adolf had been responsible for the Holocaust. She said she had met Eva Braun only once. She was released and returned to Vienna, where she worked for a time in an arts and crafts shop, living off her savings and keeping to herself.
The machinery that made the Holocaust possible was documented in extraordinary detail by Rudolf Hoss, the Auschwitz commandant, who left behind a full written account of how it worked.
In 1952 she moved back to Berchtesgaden, settling into a two-room flat under the name Paula Wolff. She was supported in her later years by former SS members and survivors of her brother's inner circle -- people who still revered Adolf Hitler long after the world had condemned him. She seems to have accepted their help without complaint.
The Only Interview
In February 1959, a British documentary producer named Peter Morley persuaded Paula to sit for an interview -- the only one she ever gave on film. It was broadcast as part of a programme called "Tyranny: The Years of Adolf Hitler." She talked mainly about his childhood and refused to be drawn into politics. What she did say was striking:
"His rapid rise in the world worried me. I must honestly confess that I would have preferred it if he had followed his original ambition and become an architect. It would have saved the world a lot of worries."
And later: "He was still my brother, no matter what happened. His end brought unspeakable sorrow to me, as his sister."
The footage was later included in the 2005 documentary "The Hitler Family." The German version of the original interview is lost. The English-dubbed version survives
The End of the Line
Paula Hitler died on 1 June 1960 in Schonau near Berchtesgaden, aged 64, of heart failure. She was buried in the Bergfriedhof cemetery under the name Paula Hitler -- not Wolff, not Hitler-Wolff, but Hitler. Whatever else she'd spent her life running from, she didn't run from that at the end.
Five months after her death, a Federal Court in Berchtesgaden issued a certificate of inheritance awarding her two-thirds of Adolf's estate -- something she had tried to claim during her own lifetime and been denied. The inheritance came too late to matter.
In June 2005, her grave marker was reportedly removed when another burial took place in the same plot, a standard practice in German cemeteries after several decades. It was restored the following year with a hinged panel that conceals her name, displaying instead the names of the more recent occupants. The woman who spent her life trying to disappear behind a different surname ended up with her own name hidden on her grave.
Sources
• "Tyranny: The Years of Adolf Hitler" (1959, Associated-Rediffusion/ITV, dir. Peter Morley)
• "The Hitler Family / Familie Hitler: Im Schatten des Diktators" (2005, dir. Oliver Halmburger and Thomas Staehler)
• US Army Counter Intelligence Corps interrogation transcript, 12 July 1945 (National Archives)
