HITLER’S YOUTH

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20070, 17 October 1939, Page 5

HITLER’S YOUTH

SCHOOLMATE'S VISIT A BRITISH SEAFARER EARLY DAYS IN AUSTRIA There was in Auckland this week a man who claims the distinction of having been a schoolmate of Hitler in Austria some 35 years ago, and of having played with the future German Fuehrer when they were boys together. Although most willing to tell what lie remembered of his boyhood days this man, who is a member of the crew of an overseas vessel, asked that his name be not published, lest harm might befall his mother and other relatives in Austria and Germany. A British subject of many years' standing, he fought through the Great War in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and later took to the sea, serving under the Union Jack in almost every part of the world except in Far Eastern waters. He produced a British passport showing his nationality and bearing visas for visits to -Austria one year and two years ago, made while on leave from his ship in England. The Fuehrer’s Father “I must say that I do not remember very much about Adolf Hitler, except his name,” he admitted. “We went to the same school at Linz, in Upper Austria, and he was just one of a number of boys with whom I used to play. He was .in a higher class than I and left the school and the town before I left in 1911. “On the other hand, I well recollect Adolf's father. He was an elderly man, with a very long grey moustache, and earned his living as a small Government official. I recollect that he sometimes used to come down on us boys when we were rowdy in the street. I doubt if I ever saw his wife. She was a woman who kept very much to her home and hardly ever went out. Interest In History.“When I was in Linz some time ago I went to the school and looked up the records. The only thing that seemed to be remembered about Adolf Hitler as a boy there was that he was tremendously interested in history and absorbed all he could of it. I know that he had the very best religious instruction, for the same , priest taught me, and I always think of him with affection. Several ol the masters were strongly Prussian in politics. and it is possible that they influenced Hitler’s putlook. • The French master, I remember, came from Alsace-Lorraine, and his affections seemed to be divided between Germany and France —he hardly knew where he stood." Two years ago, the informant continued, he took part in a family gathering, which included his three brothers. One was by nationality an Austrian, another a Czech and the third a German, while ho himself was British. The Austrian brother and he had fought on opposite sides in the Great War. “What a tragedy it is that war should again divide us,” he added, as he showed a number of snapshots of his brothers and their families, taken in the beautiful Austrian countryside. “The greatest tragedy of all is that the German people, who want peace, should be in the " hands of a few utterly unprincipled men.”