William Stuart Houston
- Category : 1911-births
- Type : MGE
- Profile : 4/6 - Opportunistic / Role Model
- Definition : Split - Small (21,34,57)
- Incarnation Cross : RAX Rulership 1
Biography
English-American half-nephew of Adolf Hitler, born in England to Adolf's half-brother Alois Hitler Jr. and his Irish wife Bridget Dowling. William Hitler later moved to Germany, but subsequently immigrated to the United States, where he served in the United States Navy in World War II. He eventually received American citizenship.
In 1914, Alois left Bridget and their son for a gambling tour of Europe. He later returned to Germany. Unable to reconnect with them due to the outbreak of World War I, Alois abandoned the family, leaving William to be brought up by his mother. He remarried bigamously, but in the mid-1920s he wrote to Bridget asking her to send William to Germany's Weimar Republic for a visit. She finally agreed in 1929, when William was 18. Alois had had another son, Heinz Hitler, by his German wife. Heinz, in contrast to William, became a committed Nazi and in 1942 died in Soviet captivity.
In 1933, William Patrick Hitler returned to Germany in an attempt to benefit from his uncle's rise to power. His uncle, by now Chancellor, found him a job at the Reichskreditbank in Berlin, a position he occupied for much of the 1930s. Later, William worked at an Opel automobile factory, and later still as a car salesman. Dissatisfied with these jobs, William persisted in asking his uncle for a better job, writing to him with blackmail threats that he would sell embarrassing stories about the family to the newspapers unless his "personal circumstances" improved.
In 1938, Adolf asked William to relinquish his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job. Expecting a trap, William fled Nazi Germany; he again tried to blackmail his uncle with threats. This time, William threatened to tell the press that Hitler's alleged paternal grandfather was actually a Jewish merchant. Returning to London he wrote an article for Look magazine titled "Why I Hate my Uncle."
In January 1939 the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst brought him and his mother to the United States for a lecture tour. He and his mother were stranded when World War II broke out. William Hitler was drafted into the United States Navy during World War II as a Pharmacist's Mate (a designation later changed to Hospital Corpsman) until he was discharged in 1947. He was wounded in action during the war and awarded the Purple Heart.
After being discharged from the Navy, William Hitler changed his surname to "Stuart-Houston," a reference to Houston Stewart Chamberlain who had been one of Adolf Hitler's role models.
In 1947, Stuart-Houston married Phyllis Jean-Jacques, who had been born in Germany in the mid-1920s. The couple had four sons: Alexander Adolf (b. 1949), Louis (b. 1951), Howard Ronald (1957–1989), and Brian William (b. 1965). William Stuart-Houston died on 14 July 1987 in Patchogue at age 76.
In April 2006, Little Willy, a play by Mark Kassen examining the life of William Patrick Hitler, opened at the Ohio Theater in New York.