Fritz Thyssen's book, I Paid Hitler, contains some singularly interesting
matter. The steel king was, of course, among Hitler's largest financial supporters in the early days of the Nazi move- ment, but he had to fly from Germany a year or two ago, and after spending some time first in Switzerland and then in France has vanished from common ken. He makes an entertaining addi- tion to the volume of speculation on Hitler's ancestry. That Adolf's father Alois was the illegitimate son of a girl who after- wards became Frau Schicldgruber is a matter of common know- ledge, but it leaves the question of Alois's paternity open. The accepted tale is that the father was a miller named Schicklgruber, whom the girl he seduced subsequently married. Herr Thyssen offers a much more highly coloured explanation. The girl who was Hitler's grandmother came home pregnant, according to Thyssen, from a situation in Vienna. That situation was in the household of one of the Rothschilds. The inference Thyssen draws is, of course, unwarranted, but he comments " this presumed an- cestry of Hitler might give us a psycho-analytical explanation of his anti-Semitism. By persecuting the Jews, the psycho-analysts would say, Hitler is trying to cleanse himself of his Jewish ' taint.'" Thyssen incidentally refers to people in England who " placed particular —trust, it seems, in Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, because he was a member of the Oxford Group and, by implication, a pacifist." This is an explicit statement—but Thyssen's authority does not necessarily make it true. * * * *
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