Passau
In 2013 after returning from a trip to Germany, which included three days in Passau, I wrote a series of posts on this site that described the town's connections with Hitler, who lived there for a few years as a small boy. Legend (with some degree of corroboration) had it that Hitler was saved from drowning in the Inn River by a playmate. This week I consolidated those postings in an article for the Times of Israel (Blogs). If you have not previously read this, it is quite interesting.
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/passaus-curious-nazi-history/
If the story about Hitler in Passau is true, it is fascinating to ask how it might have changed the course of history had Hitler actually drowned as a child. Would there have been a Second World War? Possibly because the Versailles Treaty helped lay the groundwork for the radicalization of Germany. Would there have been a Holocaust? I doubt it. It was Hitler's unique personality combined with the fanatics and criminals that he surrounded himself with that made this happen.
3 comments:
Interesting article!
According to USA Today genealogy is currently the second most popular hobby in the United States. What’s the most popular hobby? That would be gardening.
Genealogy websites are the second most visited category of websites on the internet. What’s the first most visited category of websites? That would be the ones that are “adults only” or “not safe for work”. That type of subject matter seems to consistently garner a lot of fans. It is rather impressive that the genealogy websites are in second place in this unofficial “popularity contest” of internet content.
You can easily get invested in itt, like this story of what probably happened in Passaic.
It is very interesting to me that those on the Right are very interested in the authenticity of the past. We revere the Constitution, and our history, etc. The Left, it seems to me, is more involved in alternate accounts....less authentic and more negative. "the Constitution is a living, changing document, wedropped the atomic bomb and interred the Japanese, the founding fathers were slave owners, etc. They include every wart and scar.
in the USSR they frequently blotted out the figure and all references to someone who had fallen out of favor. There was a joke then that the future utopia was certain but the past was uncertain because of the retroactive changes.
If Hitler had drowned as a child, some German military officers would have seized power shortly after von Hindenburg died, possibly using Von Papen as a figurehead. There would still have been war against Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, but a lot of patriotic German Jewish scientists would have delivered the atom bomb to Germany before the US got its production program in gear.
Very interesting hypothesis.
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