| William P. Stuart-Houston | |
|---|---|
| Nickname | Willy |
| Born | March 12, 1911 Liverpool, United Kingdom |
| Died | July 14, 1987 (aged 76) Patchogue, New York, U.S. |
| Buried at | Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Coram, New York |
| Allegiance | United States of America |
| Service/branch | United States Navy |
| Years of service | 1944 – 1947 |
| Battles/wars | World War II |
| Awards | Purple Heart World War II Victory Medal |
| Relations | Adolf Hitler (uncle) Alois Hitler, Jr. and Bridget Dowling (his parents) Phyllis Jean-Jacques (his wife) |
William Patrick "Willy" Stuart-Houston (né Hitler) (March 12, 1911 – July 14, 1987) was the nephew of Adolf Hitler. Born to Adolf's half-brother Alois Hitler, Jr., and his first wife Bridget Dowling, William later moved to Germany and subsequently escaped, eventually going to the United States where he enlisted to fight in World War II.
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William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool, the son of Alois Hitler Jr., and his Irish-born wife Bridget Dowling. They met in Dublin when Alois was living there in 1909; they were married in Marylebone and moved back north to Liverpool, where William was born in 1911. William was allegedly recalled by elderly former neighbors, and allegedly known in Liverpool folklore as "Billy" or "Paddy" Hitler.
The family lived in a flat at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, which was destroyed in the last German air raid of the Liverpool Blitz on January 10, 1942. Dowling wrote a manuscript called My Brother-in-Law Adolf, in which she says Adolf Hitler moved to Liverpool with her and Alois, remaining from November 1912 to April 1913, in order to dodge conscription in Austria. Most historians dismiss this story as a fiction invented to make the book more appealing to publishers.[1]
In 1914, Alois left Bridget and their son for a gambling tour of Europe. Alois later returned to Germany. Unable to reconnect 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 re-established contact in the mid-1920s when he wrote to Bridget asking her to send William to Weimar Republic Germany for a visit. She finally agreed in 1929, when William was 18. Alois had since had another son by his German wife, Heinz Hitler, who, in contrast to William, became a committed Nazi (and was later tortured to death in Soviet captivity).
In 1933, William Patrick Hitler returned to Nazi Germany in an attempt to benefit from his uncle's rise to power. His uncle found him a job in a bank. Later, William worked at an Opel automobile factory, and later still as a car salesman. Dissatisfied with these jobs, William persisted in asking his uncle for a better job, writing to him with blackmail threats that he would sell embarrassing stories about the family to the newspapers. Among these threats was included the exposition of Alois Jr.'s bigamous marriage.
In 1938, Adolf Hitler asked William to relinquish his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job. Expecting a trap, William decided to flee Nazi Germany; he again tried to blackmail his uncle with threats. This time, William threatened to tell the press that Hitler's alleged paternal grandfather was actually a Jewish merchant. Returning to London he wrote an article for Look magazine titled "Why I Hate my Uncle."[2] However William did return, briefly, to Germany in 1938, possibly as a British agent. William's role in Germany in the late 1930s is unsubstantiated.
William, perhaps thinking his cover was blown, fled Germany in January 1939 with the help of a British agent. Soon after, William and his mother went to the United States on a lecture tour[2] at the invitation of the publisher William Randolph Hearst. William and his mother were stranded there when World War II broke out. After making a special request to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, William was cleared to join the U.S. Navy in 1944, and moved to Sunnyside, Queens in New York.
According to a story circulating after his enlistment, when he went to the draft office and introduced himself, the recruiting officer supposedly replied, "Glad to see you, Hitler. My name's Hess."[2]
William Patrick Hitler served in the U.S. Navy as a Pharmacist's Mate (a designation later changed to Hospital Corpsman) until he was discharged in 1947. He had been wounded in service during the course of World War II.[2]
After leaving the Navy, William changed his last name to Stuart-Houston, married, and moved to Patchogue, Long Island, where he and his wife had four sons. Stuart-Houston built upon his medical training to establish a business that analyzed blood samples for hospitals. His laboratory, which he called Brookhaven Laboratories, was located in his home, a two-story clapboard house at 71 Silver Street, Patchogue.[3]
Stuart-Houston was married to Phyllis Jean-Jacques, who was born in Germany sometime in the mid-1920s (she died in 2004).[4] After their relationship had begun, William, Phyllis, and Bridget tried for some anonymity in the United States. William and Phyllis married in 1947, and they had their first son, Alexander Adolf, in 1949. They had three more sons: Louis (b. 1951), Howard Ronald (b. 1957, d. 1989), and Brian William (b. 1965).[2][5]
William died on July 14, 1987 in Patchogue, New York, and his remains were buried alongside those of his mother, Bridget, at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram, New York.[6] Phyllis died on November 2, 2004.
Howard Ronald Stuart-Houston, a Special Agent with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service, died in an automobile accident on September 14, 1989[7] having fathered no children. Howard Ronald is buried in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram, New York.
Though none of the brothers has children, Alexander, now a social worker, has said that he knows of no sort of pact to intentionally end the Hitler bloodline.[2][8] This is addressed due to speculation that such an agreement had been made.
The family's story and Bridget's memoirs were first published by Michael Unger in the Liverpool Daily Post, 1973.
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 and Phillip Saville also wrote a BBC Play for Today based on her book (and based in part on Unger's work), broadcast in 1979.
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.
Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's 1989 comic book "The New Adventures of Hitler" is likewise based on the Liverpool visit. It sparked controversy in the early 1990s and has not been reprinted.
In October 2005, The History Channel aired a one-hour documentary entitled "Hitler's Family", in which William Patrick Hitler is prominently profiled along with other relatives of Adolf Hitler.
In April 2006, "Little Willy", a play by Mark Kassen examining the life of William Patrick Hitler, opened at the Ohio Theater in New York before moving on to the West End in London.[9]
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