William Stuart-Houston

William Patrick Hitler was born in Britain in the Toxteth Park district of Liverpool, the son of Adolf Hitler's half-brother Alois Hitler, Jr. and Irish-born Bridget Dowling. The couple met in Dublin when Alois was living there during 1909; in 1910, they married in Marylebone in London and relocated back north to Liverpool, where William Patrick was born in 1911.[1]

The family lived in a flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, which was destroyed during the last German air raid of the Liverpool Blitz on 10 January 1942. Dowling wrote a manuscript titled My Brother-in-Law Adolf, in which she claimed Adolf had lived in Liverpool with her, remaining from November 1912 to April 1913, in order to avoid conscription in Austria. The book is largely considered a work of fiction.[2] At the time, Adolf was residing in the Meldemannstraße dormitory in Vienna.[3]

In 1914, Alois left Bridget and their son for a gambling tour of Europe. He later returned to Germany. Unable to rejoin them due to the outbreak of World War I, Alois abandoned the family, leaving William to be brought up by his mother. He remarried bigamously, but during the mid-1920s he wrote to Bridget asking her to send William to Germany's Weimar Republic for a visit. She finally agreed in 1929, when William was 18. Alois had had another son, Heinz Hitler, by his German wife. Heinz, in contrast to William, became a committed Nazi, joined the Wehrmacht, and died in 1942 in Soviet captivity.

In 1933, William Patrick Hitler returned to Germany in an attempt to benefit from his uncle's growing power. His uncle Adolf, now chancellor, found him a job at the Reichskreditbank in Berlin, a job that he held for most of the 1930s. Later, William worked at an Opel automobile factory and then as a car salesman that. Dissatisfied with these jobs, William again asked his uncle for a better job writing to him with blackmail threats of selling embarrassing stories about the family to the newspapers unless his "personal circumstances" improved.

In 1938, Adolf asked William to relinquish his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job. Suspecting a trap, William fled Nazi Germany and again tried to blackmail his uncle with threats. This time, William threatened to tell the press that Adolf's alleged paternal grandfather was actually a Jewish merchant. William returned to London, where he wrote an article for Look magazine, "Why I Hate my Uncle".[4]

William allegedly returned to Germany for a brief period in 1938. It is unknown exactly what William's role in late-1930s Germany was.

In January 1939 the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst brought William and his mother to the United States for a lecture tour.[5] He and his mother were stranded when World War II began. After making a special request to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, William was eventually approved to join the United States Navy in 1944; he relocated to Sunnyside, Queens in New York.

William Patrick Hitler was drafted into the United States Navy during World War II as a Pharmacist's Mate (a designation later changed to Hospital Corpsman) until he was discharged in 1947. On reporting for duty, the induction officer asked his name. "Hitler," he replied. Thinking he was joking, the officer replied: "Glad to see you, Hitler. My name's Hess." He was wounded in action during the war and awarded the Purple Heart.[4]

After being discharged from the Navy, William Hitler changed his surname to "Stuart-Houston".

In 1947, Stuart-Houston married Phyllis Jean-Jacques, who had been born in Germany in the mid-1920s.[6] After their relationship began, William and Phyllis, along with Bridget, tried to live a life of anonymity in the United States. They moved to Patchogue, Long Island, where William used his medical training to establish a business that analyzed blood samples for hospitals. His laboratory, which he called Brookhaven Laboratories (no relation to Brookhaven National Laboratory), was located in his home, a two-story clapboard house at 71 Silver Street, Patchogue.[7] The couple had four sons: Alexander Adolf (b. 1949), Louis (b. 1951), Howard Ronald (1957–1989), and Brian William (b. 1965).[4][8] All four of his sons are childless.[9] The third son, Howard Ronald Stuart-Houston, worked as a Special Agent with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service and died in a car accident on September 14, 1989.[10]

William Stuart-Houston died on 14 July 1987, in Patchogue. His remains were buried next to his mother's, at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram, New York.[11] His widow, Phyllis Jean-Jacques Stuart-Houston, died in 2004.[6]

The family's story and Bridget's memoirs were first published by Michael Unger in the Liverpool Daily Post, 1973. Unger also edited Bridget Dowling's memoirs, which were first published as The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler in 1979; a completely updated version, titled The Hitlers of Liverpool, was published in 2011.

Beryl Bainbridge's 1978 novel Young Adolf depicts the alleged 1912–13 visit to his Liverpool relatives by a 23-year-old Adolf Hitler. Bainbridge adapted the story into a play as The Journal of Bridget Hitler with director Philip Saville,[12] which was broadcast as a Playhouse (BBC 2) in 1981.[13]

Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's 1989 comic book The New Adventures of Hitler is likewise based on the alleged Liverpool visit.

In October 2005, The History Channel broadcast a one-hour documentary titled Hitler's Family, in which William Patrick Hitler is described along with other relatives of Adolf Hitler.

Netflix aired a documentary titled The Pact: Le serment des Hitler (2014), directed by Emmanuel Amara, which was billed as a retracing of the life of Hitler, and an exploration of "what became of the Hitler family line.[14]

William Patrick Hitler was portrayed in the sketch "Willy Hitler Fights the Germans" in the 19 June 2018 episode of the American Comedy Central television series Drunk History, which aired as the eighth episode of that show's eighth season.[15]

• Hitler family
• Meet the Hitlers

• Getting to know the Hitlers from The Daily Telegraph
• Author talks about 'the Last of the Hitlers' CNN interview.
• The Diocese of Rockville Centre – Holy Sepulchre Cemetery
• Kilgannon, Corey. "Three Quiet Brothers on Long Island, All of Them Related to Hitler", The New York Times, 24 April 2006