Young Adolf top right

Paula was six years old when Alois Hitler died in 1903 after suffering a pleural hemorrhage, and Klara brought up Adolf and Paula on her own. Paula later told about Adolf and their childhood during her interrogations after the war:

"My brother was very good in some subjects, and very weak in others. He was the weakest in mathematics and, as far as I can remember, in physics, also. His failures in mathematics worried my mother. He loved music. He preferred Wagner even then. Wagner was always his favorite.

Centre Adolf with
 schoolmates 1900

Since I was so much younger than my brother, he never considered me a playmate. He played a leading role among his early companions. His favorite game was cops and robbers, and that sort of thing. Adolf as a child always came home too late. He got a spanking every night for not coming home on time .. After my brother finished school he went to Vienna. He wanted to go to the Academy and become a painter but nothing came of it. My mother was very sick at the time. She was very attached to Adolf and wanted him to stay home. That's why he stayed. He left the house after her death in 1907 .. "

Paula Hitler

Hitler's only boyhood friend, August Kubizek, later recalled in his biography of Hitler The Young Hitler I Knew, 1953, that Paula was nine when he first met the Hitler family:

"She was a rather pretty girl, quiet and reserved. I never saw her gay. We got on rather well with each other but Adolf was not particularly close to her. This was due perhaps to the difference in age - he always referred to her as the kid."

And Kubizek recalled another incident:

"Going through Paula's exercise books, Adolf had noticed that she was not getting on in school as well as her mother expected. Adolf took her by the hand and led her to their mother's bed and there made her swear always to be a diligent and well-behaved pupil ..."

Years later Paula worked as a secretary for a group of doctors in a military hospital. Each year Hitler sent her a ticket to the impressive Nuremberg Rally. She later recalled:

"From 1929 on I saw him once a year until 1941. We met once in Munich, once in Berlin, and once in Vienna. I met him in Vienna after 1938. His rapid rise in the world worried me. I must honestly confess that I would have preferred it if he had followed his original ambition and become an architect. It would have saved the world a lot of worries .."

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