“Alright Adolf la?”: Did Hitler really live in Liverpool?
Stephen Graham. Steven Gerrard. Jodie Comer. Paul McCartney. Liverpool has given us some genuine gifts in its time.
There seems to be something in the water lapping up the banks of the river Mersey that makes Liverpool an ecosystem all of its own, with its own myth and legend that set it apart from the rest of the UK. Given how many of the people who call Liverpool home subscribe to the old chestnut of “Scouse, not English”, that’s probably just the way they like it. Everything from the Liver bird statues looking out over the city to one of its most popular shopping streets has a story to it that makes it a little bit magical.
Yet, not every story about the streets of Liverpool is a good one. In fact, there are a large number of people who believe that for a period of time just before World War I, one of the world’s most evil men called the city home. What’s more, this was based on a real-life fact that we know to be true. In 1909, a young Austrian man called Alois Hitler Jr left prison. Due to his destructive relationship with his father, he decided not to return home and instead left for Ireland.
After settling in Dublin, he met Bridget Dowling, whom he would marry within a few years before leaving Dublin to settle in England. Together, they moved where many Irish expats had settled and found a house in the Liverpool suburb of Toxteth. Alois found work as a waiter and began raising his family when, according to the story, he got a letter from his half-brother. His father’s other son was saying that he wanted to avoid being conscripted into the Austrian Army and was asking if he could stay with him for a few months.
So the story goes, Alois was more than happy to welcome him into his home and thus, from November 1912 to April 1913, Adolf Hitler was a scouser.
Did Hitler really live in Liverpool?
It’s a compelling story – one that shows a completely different side of one of the world’s worst people, one that completely forsakes the warmongering fascist in favour of a draft-dodging young wastrel leaning on his family for a handout, the more things change, the more they stay the same, eh? The problem is that “a compelling story” is probably all that it’ll ever be. Unlike the other mythical stories of Liverpool, we know exactly what the source of this story is.
The source of this story is a book written by Dowling about the experience of having Adolf Hitler as a brother-in-law, called, creatively enough, My Brother-In-Law Adolf. In the book, Dowling talks of the months Adolf spent living in their house and claims to have introduced the future Führer to astrology. She even claims that she convinced him to shave the sides off his handlebar moustache. Yet, there’s reason to believe that this was a sham.
The books written shortly after Dowling divorced Alois Jr, and thus, the pressure to write something sensational to sell copies was undoubtedly massive. There’s no other source of the time that places Hitler in Liverpool at the time, and while information about his whereabouts before World War I is thin on the ground, what little we do have places him in Vienna, living in and out of youth hostels – he probably did ask his brother for a place to stay, but the likelihood of him actually making it out there is slim.
Probably for the best, right?