“Secrets of the Fuhrer’s Family: What Hitler’s Relatives Were Really Doing During WWII”
William was first hired by a Berlin bank, and then became a car salesman with Opel Automotive. By 1936, however, he had again fallen out of favour, owing to allegedly name dropping his uncle to help secure car sales! As is a theme, Hitler never appreciated any of his family trying to ride his coat tails and this all resulted in the Fuehrer in a fury, leading to William’s work permit being revoked.
Now, if your future job depended on the mood of a murderous dictator, who also had allegedly killed his niece he was apparently in love with, what would you do? Probably not what William did: resorting to blackmail! After the war, during the Nuremberg trials, Nazi official Hans Frank revealed how William had written to Hitler, threatening to expose his complicated and unusual family history. In other words: confirming the rumours that Hitler’s biological grandfather was a Jewish merchant named Leopold Frankenberger. We’ll get to whether there could be any truth to this in the Bonus Facts later.
But for now, both Adolf and Alois Jr went ballistic, and William wisely fled Germany, returning to England and breaking for good with that side of his family. Back in London, he tried his hand at journalism, most notably publishing the article ‘Why I Hate My Uncle’, and later tried to enlist in the British armed forces.
This attempt was unsuccessful. After this latest debacle, both him and mum Bridget boarded the SS Normandie in February 1939 and relocated to the US as the young Hitler had received an invitation from newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to perform a series of lectures in America about the Nazi Party and life in Germany.
