Paula Hitler, also known as Paula Wolff and Paula Hitler-Wolff, died on this day in 1960. She was the younger sister of Adolf Hitler, and his only full sister.
She was six years old when her father, a retired customs official, died, and eleven when she lost her mother Klara to breast cancer, after which the Austrian government provided a small pension to Paula and Adolf. However, the amount was relatively meager and Hitler, who was by then old enough to support himself, agreed to sign his share over to her.
Paula later moved to Vienna. In the early 1920s, she was hired as a housekeeper at a dormitory for Jewish university students. For the most part, she had little contact with her brother during his early years. She was delighted to meet him again in Vienna during the early 1930s.
Paula used the surname "Hiedler", the original spelling of "Hitler". By her own account, after losing a job with the Austrian State Insurance Company on 2 August 1930 when her employers found out who she was, Paula received financial support of 250 schillings a month from her brother, and lived under the assumed surname of "Wolff" at Hitler's request. "Wolf" was a childhood nickname of his which he had also used during the 1920s for security purposes.
Hitler appears to have had a low opinion of Paula's intelligence, referring to both Paula and their half-sister Angela as "stupid geese".
Paula did recall as a child that when all the children played Cowboys and Indians, Adolf always led the activities.
On 14 April 1945, during the closing days of the war, at the age of 49, she was driven by two SS men to Berchtesgaden, Germany – the location of Hitler's summer home, the Berghof – apparently on the orders of Martin Bormann. She and her half-sister, Angela were each given 100,000 marks on Hitler's orders.
"Following the war, Paula Hitler was arrested by U.S. intelligence officers and held for questioning. She explained that though she loved her brother and received financial support from him, she had only seen him once or twice a year for the past decade, and actually had fairly little contact with him. She also claimed to only have met Eva Braun, her brother’s ill-fated bride, once during those 10 years. She was eventually released from U.S. custody and moved back to Vienna, where she lived for some time off of her savings. When the money she’d gotten from her brother ran out, she took a job at a local craft shop. In 1952, she moved to Berchtesgaden, Germany in the mountains just outside of Salzburg, and changed her name to Paula Wolff."
Through most of her life Paula kept to herself and lived a quiet unassuming life. When she died she ended the immediate Hitler family line.
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