Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0005382, Thu, 13 Jul 2000 17:07:21 -0700

Subject
Re: Willie Hitler and Berlin's Russian Emigre Community (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Mark Bennett <mab@straussandasher.com>

Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler contains some anecdotes about
Willie Hitler. I have not yet finished the book so I don't know if Kershaw
discusses Willie's association, if any, with the emigre community, but you
may want to look into it. Given the Nazis' anti-Semitism and
anti-Bolshevism I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some unregenerate
Whites in the emigre community took Willie up. It was a fairly large
community, after all, and not entirely composed of Sirins and Veras . . .



In the most recent New Yorker, there is an article about Adolf Hitler's
family which mostly deals with his nephew, William Patrick Hitler, a son
of Hitler's half brother Alois and his first, Irish, wife. Pretty much out
of the blue, with no explanation or further details, the author, Timothy
W. Ryback, states that when Willie Hitler was living in Berlin in the
early 1930s (and boasting of his link to his uncle to everyone who cared
to listen), he "became a favorite of Berlin's theatre crowd as well as of
the city's large Russian emigre community." Does anyone know more re his
connection to/with the Russian emigre community in Berlin? I realize there
were some Hitler sympathizers in the crowd, but Hitler's nephew, at least
from what we learn of him in the article, does not strike me as someone
who would have had much in common with the Russian emigres in Berlin
regardless of their political and ideological inclinations.

Galya Diment