Maria Schicklgruber
Maria Anna Schicklgruber (April 15, 1795 – January 7, 1847) was Adolf Hitler's paternal grandmother.
Born in the tiny village of Strones, Austria, she was the daughter of Theresia Pfeisinger (? - November 11, 1821) and farmer Johannes Schicklgruber (May 29, 1764 - November 12, 1847) Like her family, Maria was Catholic, and what little historians know about her is based on church and other public records.
Maria inherited 74.25 gulden after her mother died in 1821. She left this money invested in the Orphans' Fund until 1838, by which time it had more than doubled, increasing to 165 gulden. For comparison, at that time, a breeding pig cost four gulden, a cow could be purchased for ten to twelve gulden, and an entire inn could be purchased for around 500 gulden. Maser(1973)1 remarks that she was a "thrifty, reserved, and exceptionally shrewd peasantwoman."
Other than her saving her inheritance, which proves she was not destitute but financially able to save money, nothing is known about her life until she was over forty. Historian Bradley F. Smith of the Hoover Institute speculates that it is possible Maria went off to a city and took a job as a maid. He also states that on the other hand, it is possible she stayed in her home village of Strones and found casual employment. In short, history simply has no record of her life until she did something that would get documented in those days: she had a child.
In 1837 she was 42 years old, still single, when her first and only child was born, a boy, Aloys. Maser states that she refused to reveal who the child's father was, so the priest had no choice but to baptize him "Aloys Schicklgruber" and enter "illegitimate" in place of the father's name on the baptismal register. She had no husband, but she was not destitute, as she had her Orphan's Fund money.
Five years later, on May 10, 1842 at a ceremony in the nearby village of Dollersheim, she married Johann Georg Hiedler, a journeyman miller. Maser asserts that if Hiedler had been the biological father of Maria's son Aloys, the couple would have acknowledged it once they were married. There was a church procedure for such things, and Maria's son Aloys later used it, both for himself, and to legitimise a son he later fathered out of wedlock. But Maria and Johann did not have the Church legitimize Maria's son Aloys, and he remained officially illegimate during their lifetimes. It cannot even be asserted that Maria herself knew who her son's father was, as there is no evidence that she did or did not know. Because of all this, Maser concludes Johann Georg Hiedler was not Aloys' biological father, and hence not Adolf Hitler's grandfather, as later was claimed. The question became important after Hitler began to seek power, as one of Nazism's principles was that no one could be considered a German who could not document their ancestry.
Maria had only five years of marriage, then she passed away at the age of 52 in Klein-Motten, Austria, where she was living with her husband in the home of their relations, the Sillip family. Her son had not accompanied her to Klein-Motten, but sometime between the time she had married, and her move to Klein-Motten, he had been sent to live in Spital on the farm of her husband's brother.
The Dollersheim parish record states that Maria died of "consumption resulting from pectoral(thoracic) dropsy."
Footnotes
1See list of references.
References
- Maser, Werner Hitler: Legend, Myth and Reality Penguin Books Ltd 1973 ISBN 0-06-012831-3