Adolf Hitler in Leonding and Linz: Locations, Then and Now
While many WW2 enthusiasts know that Adolf Hitler was born to Alois Hitler (1837-1903) and Klara Pölzl (1860-1907) in a small Austrian town called Braunau am Inn in 1899, not that many are aware that the Hitler family changed several places of residence. A young Adolf spent only three of his childhood years in Braunau until his father, a civil customs servant, got a promotion to the rank of ‘Zollamtoberoffizial’ (Senior Customs Office officer) and the family moved to the larger town of Passau in the Kingdom of Bavaria on the German side of the river Inn, in August 1892. At that time, two of Alois’ children from the previous marriage, Alois Jr. (born 1882), and Angela (born 1883), lived with them. In just two years, in late March 1894, Alois Hitler was transferred to Linz, while leaving his third wife and kids (Klara gave birth to Edmund on March 24, 1894) in Passau for months until on February 4, 1895, finally buying a home with a nine-acre plot (38 000 m2 according to document) of land in a village called Hafeld next to a tiny town called Lambach, about thirty miles from Linz, once again in Upper Austria, and moving the family in April 1895. Alois retired voluntarily on June 25 of the same year at the age of fifty-eight after four decades of service and now lived at the top of local society, getting a pension of 2600 Kronen a year, a sum equal to a school headmaster. In 1896 Alois Junior, who had suffered from his father’s dominance and beatings, left the home for an apprenticeship, and in January Klara gave birth to Paula. Two years after moving, in June or July 1897, Hitler Senior, who appeared to lack talent in farming, sold their house in Hafeld, and for one and a half years the family lived in Lambach, including six months living in front of the local Benedictine monastery. In November 1898 Alois finally bought a house in Leonding, a suburb of the city of Linz.
Adolf Hitler arrived in the area at the age of nine. From February 1899 the family lived in a small two-storey house in Leonding, then a village of three thousand people on the western edge of Linz, with the cemetery directly across the road. His father died in an inn two hundred metres away in January 1903. His mother died in Linz in December 1907. Both are buried in that cemetery, thirty metres from the house — or rather were: the gravestones were removed in 2012.
In between, he attended the village school, failed twice at the Realschule in Linz, was confirmed in the Old Cathedral, discovered Wagner at the Landestheater, met the only friend of his youth there, and spent two years silently watching a girl on a street corner who never learned his name until she read about it in 1953.
Ten locations, all within twenty minutes of each other, and every one of them still standing. This article walks them in order, with the archive photographs and my own pictures taken on the spot in 2017 and 2018. The map with all ten marked is below, and the questions people ask most often — including whether the house can be visited — are at the end.
HITLER’S HOUSE IN LEONDING: MICHAELSBERGSTRASSE 16
Alois Hitler purchased this house in November 1898 for 7700 Kronen and moved his family to Leonding, a village suburb of Linz with 3000 inhabitants, in February 1899. A couple of small rooms with a low ceiling, a tiny kitchen, and a pear garden with a graveyard on the opposite side of the narrow village road. The Hitler family had lived here from February 1899 until June 21, 1905, in strained circumstances. Just a year after moving in, Klara’s child and Adolf’s brother Edmund (born in 1894) died in February 1900.
Hitler’s house in Leonding was in private use as an accommodation for decades, and in 2002 a local funeral service office took a building for permanent use. The building on Michaelsbergstraße 16 in its modern state has two entrances, one main and one added. The second one (on the left side) was added years after Hitler’s family had lived here. One of the early paintings of Adolf Hitler depicts their home in Leonding with only one entrance on the side of the road and a cemetery.
HITLER’S SCHOOL IN LEONDING: HIS THIRD SCHOOL IN FOUR YEARS
After moving to Leonding in February 1899, a nine-year-old Adolf started to attend a local primary school after being admitted to the fourth grade, one of two in the village. This was his third school in life (after Fischlham and Lambach) due to family migration. Decades later, a future Führer of the Third Reich recalls his childhood in this school in Leonding, his wild behavior, and his independent opinion of the surroundings. About this time, Adolf was fascinated by the history of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and by adventure books of Karl May. He finished the fourth grade and transferred to the fifth in May 1900.
This building on Michaelsbergstraße 29 is still there and has changed a little in the last century. The same entrance now leads us not to school, but to the ’ Heimatmuseum’.
GASTHOF WIESINGER: THE INN WHERE ALOIS HITLER DIED, 3 JANUARY 1903
In his mature years, Adolf Hitler characterized his father as a man who had influenced him the most in his early years and depicted his death as a painful personal tragedy. Alois Hitler was a tough, hard-line man who was extremely demanding of his children and especially of his only son Adolf (a six-year-old Edmund passed in 1900). The father did not give money to his son to buy books, even though Adolf was passionate about reading. Then the boy started to ignore education, and his father used to punish the young successor. Years later, ‘’Mein Kampf’’ would reveal and explain that young Adolf did not want to become an Austrian civil servant, a rural bureaucrat like his father had been.
Hans Frank, a lawyer of Adolf Hitler and future Gauleiter of Poland, in an interview after the war, recalled the alleged words of his chief. Hitler once said that the greatest shame of his life was to drag his drunk father Alois home from the local beer pub. Alois Hitler, in fact, was a narrow-minded, cruel old man on retirement, who had spent his time in bars of Leonding and Linz. Those table talks were characterized by Pan-German and nationalist topics. In the early hours of January 3, 1903, Alois Hitler was sitting and drinking wine on his favorite leather sofa in his favorite restaurant called Gasthaus Stiefler (modern: Gasthof Wiesinger). He suddenly felt worse and died in the same spot because of a pulmonary hemorrhage (he choked on the blood in the lungs). Alois Hitler was 65 years old, and a memoir in a local newspaper described him as a progressive-friendly man. He presumably was seeing a local farmer when he felt unwell and went to the restaurant to have a glass of something. Back in December 1901, Alois experienced several weeks in bed due to a cold, and in August 1902 suffered his first minor lung hemorrhage, which was not regarded as dangerous at that time, and Alois felt relatively well up to his death. He was buried in the local cemetery on January 5, 1903, 30 meters next to his house on a cold day in the presence of his family, relatives who came from Spital, former colleagues from the customs service, a mayor of Leonding, and about forty other people, mostly locals.
Gasthof Wiesinger is still a restaurant, and its interior has changed little since 1903 and the death of Alois Hitler. I made my way inside the café to find the sofa and found it on the right side of the entrance in 2017. In fact, the disposition of this sofa is being changed periodically within the premises of the restaurant. It has obviously been renovated a few times, but it still contains a part of history, and the owners even gave it to the museum a few years ago.
THE GRAVES OF ALOIS AND KLARA HITLER IN LEONDING: REMOVED IN 2012
Alois Hitler was buried in a local cemetery in Leonding after he died in 1903. Talking about Klara Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s mother, her state of health had been dramatically changing in her last years of life, with some spots of hope, but usually for the worse. On October 22, 1907, Adolf, who had previously returned from Vienna to Linz to take care of his mother, attended to Doctor Eduard Bloch and found out that the state of health of Klara Hitler was beyond hope. She soon started to spend all her time in bed. Starting from November 6th, 1907, Doctor Bloch attended their house every day to visit the patient and used to give her morphine. Klara Hitler passed at 2 a.m. on December 21, 1907. She was only 47 years old. Adolf made a painting of his mother within her last hours and spent a night at his mother’s bed, waiting for Doctor Bloch, who certified the death.
A coffin with Klara Hitler was kept in the apartment in Linz (Blütenstraße 9) till the day of the funeral on December 23, 1907. Cold, foggy weather and two carriages (Adolf and his sister with her husband) escorted a catafalque to the cemetery of Leonding. Klara Hitler was buried near her husband, 30 meters from their former home on Michaelsbergstraße. A six-year-old Edmund Hitler was buried nearby seven years before. On the next day, December 24, 1907, the family of Hitler visited Bloch’s office in Linz and paid off 300 Kronen for treatment: the total bill was 359, 59 of which had been paid before. The sum was large for the period (especially considering 370 spent for the funeral) but included Doctor Bloch’s seventy-seven sessions with Klara in his office and at her home, including forty-seven medical treatments. Some time after, a young Adolf Hitler made a gift to a Jewish doctor, Bloch. He gave him a few of his own paintings with a great sense of gratitude. Later, young Adolf sent his drawings to Doctor Bloch, and one was from his period in Vienna.
After the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, Adolf Hitler, as a chancellor and Führer, visited Leonding on March 12. History preserved a rare photo of Hitler, who laid flowers on the graves of his parents. These gravestones of Alois and Klara Hitler survived the War and the next 60 years. In 2012, local authorities moved the gravestones in an attempt to reduce the interest in this place among modern admirers of the Nazis and extremists. The cemetery is of small size, so it was not difficult to find the actual site of the graves that are still under the ground. The spot is located near the stone wall, facing Michaelsbergstraße and Hitler’s former home. The only clear spot on the ground attracts even more attention.
WHERE HITLER LIVED IN LINZ: HUMBOLDTSTRASSE AND URFAHR, 1905–1907
Two years after Alois’s death, the family gave up the house in Leonding. In June 1905, Klara Hitler sold it and moved with sixteen-year-old Adolf, her daughter Paula, and her stepdaughter Angela into the city itself. The Leonding years are the ones everybody photographs; the Linz addresses are where he actually spent his adolescence, and they are rarely mentioned.
— Humboldtstrasse 31. The first Linz flat, on the third floor, rented from 1905. This is the address the family gave when Adolf was living at home as, in his own later account, a young man of leisure — no school, no work, drawing and reading on his mother’s pension. It is also the building from which he walked to the Landestheater in the evenings.
— Hauptstraße, Urfahr. A short-lived address across the Danube. Urfahr was a separate town until 1919 and is now a district of Linz.
— Blütenstraße 9, Urfahr. The last family address, taken in 1907, and the flat in which Klara Hitler died on 21 December that year. Her coffin stood here for two days before the funeral in Leonding.
All three buildings are ordinary residential blocks, none is marked, and none can be visited. What makes the Urfahr addresses worth a detour is a different building: Stefanie Isak’s family lived in Urfahr too, which is why an eighteen-year-old with nothing to do spent so much of 1906 and 1907 walking back and forth across the Danube bridge.
THE REALSCHULE IN LINZ: WHERE HITLER FAILED TWICE
After five years of elementary school, with changing addresses of Hitler’s family, on September 17, 1900, Alois Hitler entrusted his only son to the Realschule in Linz, a city of 60,000 citizens at the time (58 778 according to the 1900 census). In contrast to much more basic elementary education in previous schools, the Realschule was a secondary educational institution aimed at training young boys for future technical or commercial careers, without such subjects as philosophy of art. A young boy used to spend an hour every day covering a 4 km distance to his new education facility, which made the transition from primary to secondary education more difficult. On rare occasions, he used a train between Linz and Leonding. After failing to adapt to a provincial school, Adolf Hitler paid less and less attention to his studies, and he was left for another year with two low grades and multiple-order marks. From 1902 through 1903, Adolf was the only child in his class who was excluded from paying annual fees, due to the supposed dire financial condition of the family, which was half true. Most teachers in the Realschule in Linz supported the nationalist sentiments, and the absolute number of pupils was at that time German-speaking. Despite his underachievement, Adolf Hitler finally got access to a big school library. In September 1904, due to his sustained poor study performance (not because of family poverty), young Adolf left the Realschule in Linz, and his mother assigned him to a secondary school in Steyr, which finally gave him basic education at the age of sixteen.
The building of a former Realschule is now painted in peach color and is located within a district with compact planning, just like in the 1900s, when young Hitler attended it. Nowadays, the building on Steingasse 6 has nothing in common with education and contains a Hotel with a pretty lobby, seen through the glass entrance.
In the academic year 1903/04, one other pupil at this school would become world-famous: Ludwig Wittgenstein. He and Hitler were born six days apart, in April 1889. They were never in the same class, or even the same year. Wittgenstein had been moved up a year; Hitler had been held back. Two grades separated them, and there is no evidence that they ever spoke. Hitler spent the following academic year at Steyr, so the overlap lasted twelve months and no more. None of which has stopped the story from growing. The Australian writer Kimberley Cornish built an entire book on it — The Jew of Linz (1998) — arguing that Wittgenstein was the trigger for Hitler’s antisemitism, and reproducing a school photograph in which both are supposedly visible. The photograph has been reliably dated to two years before Wittgenstein arrived.
The school itself has had enough of this. Today it is the BRG Fadingerstrasse — the institution survived, only the building on Steingasse did not — and its published history goes out of its way to correct the record: not only the Wittgenstein claims, but also the widespread American assertion that Ernst Kaltenbrunner studied here, which is simply false, and the idea that Adolf Eichmann was «formed» by this school, when in fact he attended three different schools in Linz.
THE HAUPTZOLLAMT: WHERE ALOIS SHOWED HIS SON HIS FUTURE
One of the passages of ‘Mein Kampf’ tells the story of a visit to the Main Customs Office in Linz, initiated by Alois Hitler for his only son to make a basis for a bureaucratic future. In this building on Zollamtstraße 7, a thirteen-year-old Adolf just intensified a point of view that it was not for him to be a provincial bureaucrat at the table, a kind of bookworm like his father had been before him. During the post-Anschluss visit to Austria, the German Führer visited the building one more time, more than thirty years after his first audience with his father.
DOCTOR EDUARD BLOCH, LANDSTRASSE 12: THE JEWISH DOCTOR HITLER PROTECTED
Doctor Eduard Bloch was a Jew and was born in 1872. After military service and an assignment to Linz, in 1899 Doctor Bloch settled down here. Two years later, in 1901, he managed to initiate his own doctor’s practice on Landstrasse 12 on the first floor of a marvelous building in Baroque style. He had lived here with his family, his wife, and since 1903 with a daughter. Doctor Bloch got respect and could visit his patients even in the middle of the night in case of necessity.
In March 1938, when Germany performed an Anschluss of Austria, Eduard Bloch was 66 years old. On the 1st of October, he was prohibited from continuing his practice, and the practice had to be closed. While his daughter and her husband immigrated to the USA soon after, an old doctor had a hope to get in contact with his former patient. Doctor Bloch had written a few letters, and for the goodwill of faith for him, they reached Adolf Hitler. As an act of exceptional goodwill, Hitler directed the Gestapo to protect Doctor Bloch, his family, and even his belongings in Linz, which were lately sold at a good price. Bloch’s family managed to get things done until the very emigration to the USA in 1940. His Austrian diploma was useless in the United States, and an old man died “unnecessarily” in emigration in 1945. In his later memoir, Doctor Bloch characterized Adolf Hitler as an extremely polite and educated young man, who had loved his mother with all his heart, as she had idolized her only son.
THE ALTER DOM: HITLER’S CONFIRMATION, 22 MAY 1904
In the early years of the XX century, this Cathedral, known as Alter Dom or Ignatiuskirche, was the main Christian church in Linz. At the age of 15, Adolf Hitler underwent a ceremony of Confirmation here and was “anointed with Christ” as a Catholic on Sunday (actually Whit Sunday), May 22, 1904. He had also made a drawing of the Alter Dom, which remains to this day.
THE LANDESTHEATER: WHERE HITLER MET AUGUST KUBIZEK IN 1905
Adolf Hitler had become an admirer of theatre, while constantly living in Linz, on Humboldtstraße 31 with his mother and sister. The local Landestheater at that time had a diverse list of productions, including Mozart, Schiller, Strauss, and Wagner. Standing room tickets were at a low fee, and young Adolf Hitler was able to attend periodic visits. Landestheater’s performances paid significant attention to the oeuvre of Richard Wagner, and the Lohengrin opera gained popularity. Hitler was a passionate admirer of Wagner and this very performance in particular. After some of the performances in the Landestheater, a sixteen-year-old young man marched within his room, singing, full of emotions and ideas. Hitler even made some sketches of his view of the design for the building of the Landestheater. In 1938, the special commission, which compiled the biography of Hitler for the NSDAP archives, ascertained the fact that most of the actors at that period in Landestheater were Jews.
Landestheater is a remarkable place in history, as in November 1905 a young Adolf Hitler met his future friend August Kubizek here, within a standing parquet during some of the performances. They found themselves to be of one age (Kubizek was nine months older) and had much in common with each other. Even Kubizek’s father “approved” a new friend of his son, who was mannerly and gentlemanlike. Between October 1906 and January 1907, Hitler attended the music lessons of a local teacher, Josef Prewratzky. On October 13, 1906, two friends went to Landestheater to watch ‘Die lustige Witwe’ (A Happy Widow), an operetta by Franz Lehar, which became one of Adolf’s favorites. In November 1906, they watched Richard Wagner’s “Rienzi”. Written between July 1838 and November 1840 and first performed at the Saxon State Opera in Dresden on October 20, 1842, it brought the composer his first success and recognition.
Landestheater is still here and still holds opera performances, as it was more than a century ago when it witnessed Adolf Hitler and August Kubizek within its crush room. This lobby gives you the atmosphere of an old theatre.
SCHMIDTORECK: THE CROSSROADS WHERE HITLER WATCHED STEFANIE ISAK
New friends Adolf Hitler and August Kubizek were frequent admirers of opera in Landestheater and usually spent their time after the performances walking alongside the streets of Linz for hours or even all night until sunrise. Young men were passionately discussing stage productions and representations. In this respect, the sites Hitler and Kubizek visited span the whole city center. Therewith, biographers of Hitler and Kubizek himself generally emphasize the Schmidtoreck district. It was and is a crossroad of streets in the heart of Linz. The site was a usual place for Hitler and Kubizek to meet before the theatrical performances at the Landestheater. Sometimes they were silently keeping an eye on Stefanie, a one-way love of young Adolf.
Stefanie Isak (her full name was Stefanie Maria Beata Isak) was one and a half years senior to Hitler (born in December 1887). After finishing school in 1904, she spent two years in Munich and Geneva and came back to Linz (her family lived in Urfahr) as late as November 1906, got engaged in 1908, and married in 1910 in Vienna on October 24, 1910, at the time when Hitler was living in Vienna in the Men’s Hostel. Her husband was a professional officer, Maximilian Rabatsch (1872-1942), who later met the end of the First World War in the rank of a colonel. Stefanie died on July 14, 1942, but outlived her husband for three decades before passing away peacefully on December 22, 1975, at the age of eighty-eight. She was buried in Vienna two weeks later. The story of Hitler’s affection toward a girl from Linz became public in 1953 with the publication of the memories of August Kubizek, and three years later more information emerged in the book called Hitlers Jugend (Hitler’s Youth) by an Austrian lawyer, Franz Jetzinger. It is important to note that even after becoming a solo ruler in Germany, Hitler never openly tried to contact Stefanie Rabatsch; at least such efforts remained unknown. Today the Schmidtoreck is still a busy intersection of Landstraße and Schmidtorstrasse, only a stone’s throw from Doctor Bloch’s office.
THE MAP: ALL TEN HITLER LOCATIONS IN LEONDING AND LINZ
Everything in this article fits into an afternoon. Leonding and central Linz are twenty minutes apart by tram, and within each of them the sites are within a few hundred metres of one another.
Leonding. Three of the four sites are on the same street. The house at Michaelsbergstrasse 16 is a working funeral director’s office — private, and visible only from the road. The school at Michaelsbergstrasse 29, two hundred metres up the hill, is now the local Heimatmuseum. The cemetery is directly opposite the house; the site of the graves is by the stone wall facing the road, and the cleared patch of ground is easier to find than the graves ever were. Gasthof Wiesinger is on the same street.
Linz. The former Realschule at Steingasse 6 is a hotel; the lobby is visible through the glass door. The Hauptzollamt at Zollamtstrasse 7 and Doctor Bloch’s building at Landstrasse 12 are both in use and both unmarked. The Alter Dom is open as a church. The Landestheater still stages opera, and the foyer — the room where a sixteen-year-old met August Kubizek in the standing area — can be seen when the box office is open. The Schmidtoreck is a busy junction on Landstrasse and needs no ticket.
Getting there. Leonding is on the western edge of Linz, reachable by tram and bus from the centre. Linz has a Danube port, an airport and direct trains from Vienna, Salzburg and Munich; if you are staying, the Linz Card covers public transport and the city museums.
Not a single one of these ten places carries a plaque, a sign or an explanation of any kind. That is a deliberate policy in both Leonding and Linz, and it is the reason the removal of the gravestones in 2012 was reported as far away as it was.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Was Hitler born in Linz? No. He was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, on the Austrian side of the river Inn opposite Bavaria. The family left when he was three and lived in Passau, Hafeld, Lambach and finally Leonding, a village outside Linz, from February 1899. He arrived in the Linz area at the age of nine and left for Vienna at eighteen.
Where is Hitler’s childhood home? At Michaelsbergstrasse 16 in Leonding, a two-storey house bought by his father in November 1898 for 7,700 Kronen. The family lived there from February 1899 until June 1905. The building still stands, has been restored, and since 2002 has housed a funeral director’s office. It is private property and cannot be visited.
Where did Hitler live in Linz itself? At three addresses between 1905 and 1907: Humboldtstrasse 31 in the city, and later Hauptstrasse and Blütenstrasse 9 in Urfahr, then a separate town across the Danube. His mother died in the Blütenstrasse flat in December 1907. All three are ordinary residential buildings, and none is marked.
How many schools did Hitler attend? Six in all. The village school at Fischlham (1895), the Benedictine school at Lambach (1897), the village school at Leonding (1899), the Realschule in Linz (1900–1904), the Realschule in Steyr (1904–1905), and briefly a Catholic choir school at Lambach. He left Steyr at sixteen without a leaving certificate.
Where are Hitler’s parents buried? In the village cemetery at Leonding, directly across the road from the house. Alois died in January 1903, Klara in December 1907; their son Edmund, who died at six in 1900, lies nearby. In 2012 the local authorities removed the gravestones to discourage the visitors they had begun to attract. The plot itself is still there, by the stone wall facing the road, and is easy to identify precisely because the ground is bare.
Did Hitler really go to school with Ludwig Wittgenstein? They were at the Realschule in Linz in the same academic year, 1903/04, and were born six days apart — but two grades separated them, they were never in the same class, and there is no evidence they ever met. The section above explains where the story came from.
What happened to Doctor Bloch, the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother? Eduard Bloch was banned from practising in October 1938. He wrote to Hitler, and Hitler ordered the Gestapo to protect him and his property — an exception granted to no other Jew in Linz. Bloch and his wife emigrated to the United States in 1940, where his Austrian qualification was worthless. He died in New York in 1945.
Can any of these places be visited? Some. The Leonding school is now the local heritage museum, the Alter Dom is an open church, the Landestheater still stages opera, and the cemetery is public. The house, the Linz flats, the customs office and Bloch’s building are private or in commercial use and can only be seen from the street. Nothing on the route carries a plaque of any kind.
