HAPPY 420!!!

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

Why do we celebrate April 20th?

image: Waldo Finds Himself.

According to wikipedia, the origins for the numerological celebration of the time-code "4:20" and the date, "4-20" (April 20th), stem from a group called the "Waldos."

""A group of people in San Rafael, California, calling themselves the Waldos because "their chosen hang-out spot was a wall outside the school", used the term in connection with a fall 1971 plan to search for an abandoned cannabis crop that they had learned about. The Waldos designated the Louis Pasteur statue on the grounds of San Rafael High School as their meeting place, and 4:20 p.m. as their meeting time. The Waldos referred to this plan with the phrase "4:20 Louis".""

- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_(cannabis_culture)

Because no connection is mentioned to the police-code for marijuana being 420 on wikipedia, and the general premise of this ever having been the case (at least in LA and NY police codes) is "debunked" on the website snopes dot com, the origins for this number's significance in "cannabis culture" are (at present) directly and solely related to the 1971 "Waldos" group. There are, as snopes does admit, other (and earlier) "coincidental" occurrences of this number in history, such as the fact that Albert Hofmann took the first deliberate LSD trip at 4:20 on 19 April 1943. (cf. http://www.snopes.com/language/stories/420.asp )

One of the most significant, "coincidental" occurrences of April 20th being celebrated prior to the 1971 "Waldos" group, however, ties their veneration of this digit to the veneration of the same date by the Aryan Nation and Neo-Nazis. You see, Adolf Hitler, the "fuhrer" of NAZIism, was (supposedly) born on April 20th, 1889. So, for a half century before it was venerated by "cannabis culture" as an arbitrary, numerological event, April 20th was celebrated for being the birthday of Adolf Hitler.

image: Adolf Hitler Practicing Theatrical Public Speaking.

""Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP); National Socialist German Workers Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and Führer (leader) of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. As effective dictator of Nazi Germany, Hitler was at the centre of World War II in Europe, and the Holocaust.""

- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler

Of course, there are conflicting claims about not only the exact date of Hitler's death (wikipedia claims it as April 30th, although the earliest reports surfaced on May 1st, cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZICBPh0wc May 1st US radio announcement as opposed to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6GgXa23yLo April 30th German radio announcement that "Hitler has fallen"), due most likely to the exact time of his death (and even IF it occurred as reported) remaining conflicting, but also the means of his death (if it was by poisoning followed by self-inclicted gun-shot wound to the head, as the official story has come down, or if by some other means, or even if it transpired at that time at all). So, it should not surprise us to find there could be conflicting information about the date of his birth as well. Despite the modern mythological significance to history of this man, and despite his own party's efforts to provide one, no certain genealogy for him can be provided prior to his own father, who was, by all accounts, born out of wedlock. What we can say of Hitler's genealogy now is entirely handed down to us from "official accounts" doctored by various interested parties at the time, and hearsay from contemporaries whose motives ran contrary to those who doctored the official documents. We, therefore, have NO legitimate records indicating Hitler's peerage that date back to before his own father.

image: Adolf Hitler's Official Family Tree.

The Paternal Peerage of Adolf Hitler

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_family )

""After the war Hitler's former lawyer, Hans Frank, claimed that Hitler told him in 1930 that one of his relatives was trying to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his alleged Jewish ancestry. Hitler asked Frank to find out the facts. Frank says he determined that at the time Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to Alois she was working as a household cook in the town of Graz, her employers were a Jewish family named Frankenberger, and that her child might have been conceived out of wedlock with the family's 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger. However, all Jews had been expelled from the province of Styria (which includes Graz) in the 15th century and were not allowed to return until the 1860s when Alois was around 30.""

- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler

So, who was the father of Alois Hitler, Sr. (born Alois Schicklgruber; 7 June 1837 – 3 January 1903)? There are 3 known candidates seriously considered by modern scholars, even though one of them is only substantiated to exist based on the claims of Hans Frank, whom remained loyal to Hitler unto death. If we can rule this candidate out as "official" hearsay, then we can also rule out the other two for the same reason, both being based on claims made years following the events by uninvolved parties without direct knowledge.

""1. Johann Georg Hiedler, whose name was added to Alois's birth certificate later in his life and who was officially accepted as the father of Alois (i.e. as the paternal grandfather of Adolf Hitler) by the Third Reich.

2. Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, Georg's brother and Alois's step-uncle, who raised Alois through adolescence and later willed him a considerable portion of his life savings but who, if he was the real father of Alois, never found it expedient to admit it publicly.

3. And a Jew named Leopold Frankenberger, as reported by ex-Nazi Hans Frank during the Nuremberg Trials. Historians dismiss the Frankenberger hypothesis (which had only Frank's speculation to support it) as baseless.""

- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Schicklgruber

If we had to find an answer, we would have to have asked Hitler's father's mother who sired Alois (Hitler's father) on her. Hitler's father's mother's name was Maria Anna Schicklgruber.

""Maria Anna Schicklgruber (15 April 1795 – 7 January 1847) was Adolf Hitler's paternal grandmother.

Maria was born in the village of Strones in the Waldviertel region of Archduchy of Austria. She was the daughter of Theresia Pfeisinger (7 September 1769 – 11 November 1821), and farmer Johannes Schicklgruber (29 May 1764 – 12 November 1847). Maria was a Catholic; what is known about her is based on church and other public records.

Maria died during the sixth year of her marriage, at the age of 51 in Klein-Motten where she was living with her husband in the home of kin, the Sillip family. She died of "consumption resulting from pectoral (thoracic) dropsy" in 1847.""

- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Schicklgruber

Because she died before Adolf Hitler was born, it was simply never important to her who the father of her bastard son, Alois, was. She had married a man named Johann Georg Hiedler, and when Alois later applied for an amendment to his birth certificate (in 1876), he proposed his step-father had, indeed, been his own paternal lineage. However, because Johann Georg had never made this claim himself on Alois behalf (also due to his having died in 1857), although there are claims he did transfer his wealth as inheritance to Alois on his deathbed, it remains uncertain whether Johann Georg himself, or Johann Nepomuk, Johann Georg's brother and Alois' du jour uncle, whom testified on Alois' behalf when he petitioned to amend his birth-certificate, who was Alois actual, biological father.

So, what we do know for certain about the conception of Alois Hitler, Adolf Hitler's father, was the time and place at which it occurred. The participants, besides Adolf's grand-mother Anna-Maria, remain open to speculation. However, the facts the conception occurred in 1836, and that it occurred in or near the hamlet of Strones (although Hans Frank specifically claimed, knowing it was a falsehood, that Alois had been born in Graz).

""Alois Schicklgruber was born in the hamlet of Strones, parish of Döllersheim, in the Waldviertel, an area in northwest Lower Austria, to a 42-year-old unmarried peasant, Maria Schicklgruber, whose family had lived in the area for generations. At his baptism in Döllersheim, the space for his father's name on the baptismal certificate was left blank and the priest wrote "illegitimate".""

- source; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler

While historians of today are quick to use Hans Frank's false claim about WHERE Alois was born to discredit Frank's claims as to WHOM he was biologically the offspring, there remains the mystery of WHY Frank would knowingly make the false claim about where Alois was born being Graz. If it was because Alois was conceived in Graz, but was born in Strones, this would be in line with his other claims about his investigation into the documentation regarding Hitler's peerage.

""The third possibility is that Adolf Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Rumours to that effect circulated in Munich cafes in the early 1920s, and were fostered by sensationalist journalism of the foreign press during the 1930s. It was suggested that the name `Huttler' was Jewish, `revealed' that he could be traced to a Jewish family called Hitler in Bucharest, and even claimed that his father had been sired by Baron Rothschild, in whose house in Vienna his grandmother had allegedly spent some time as a servant. But the most serious speculation about Hitler's supposed Jewish background has occurred since the Second World War, and is directly traceable to the memoirs of the leading Nazi lawyer and Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank, dictated in his Nuremberg cell while awaiting the hangman.

    Frank claimed that he had been called in by Hitler towards the end of 1930 and shown a letter from his nephew William Patrick Hitler (the son of his half-brother Alois, who had been briefly married to an Irish woman) threatening, in connection with the press stories circulating about Hitler's background, to expose the fact that Hitler had Jewish blood flowing in his veins. Allegedly commissioned by Hitler to look into his family history, Frank reportedly discovered that Maria Anna Schicklgruber had given birth to her child while serving as a cook in the home of a Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz. Not only that: Frankenberger senior had reputedly paid regular instalments to support the child on behalf of his son, around nineteen years old at the birth, until the child's fourteenth birthday. Letters were allegedly exchanged for years between Maria Anna Schicklgruber and the Frankenbergers. According to Frank, Hitler declared that he knew, from what his father and grandmother had said, that his grandfather was not the Jew from Graz, but because his grandmother and her subsequent husband were so poor they had conned the Jew into believing he was the father and into paying for the boy's support.

    Frank's story gained wide circulation in the 1950s. But it simply does not stand up. There was no Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz during the 1830s. In fact, there were no Jews at all in the whole of Styria at the time, since Jews were not permitted in that part of Austria until the 1860s. A family named Frankenreiter did live there, but was not Jewish. There is no evidence that Maria Anna was ever in Graz, let alone was employed by the butcher Leopold Frankenreiter. No correspondence between Maria Anna and a family called Frankenberg or Frankenreiter has ever turned up. The son of Leopold Frankenreiter and alleged father of the baby (according to Frank's story and accepting that he had merely confused names) for whom Frankenreiter was seemingly prepared to pay child support for thirteen years was ten years old at the time of Alois's birth. The Frankenreiter family had moreover hit upon such hard times that payment of any support to Maria Anna Schicklgruber would have been inconceivable. Equally lacking in credibility is Frank's comment that Hitler had learnt from his grandmother that there was no truth in the Graz story: his grandmother had been dead for over forty years at the time of Hitler's birth. And whether in fact Hitler received a blackmail letter from his nephew in 1930 is also doubtful. If such was the case, then Patrick -- who repeatedly made a nuisance of himself by scrounging from his famous uncle -- was lucky to survive the next few years which he spent for the most part in Germany, and to be able to leave the country for good in December 1938. His `revelations', when they came in a Paris journal in August 1939, contained nothing about the Graz story. Nor did a number of different Gestapo inquiries into Hitler's family background in the 1930s and 1940s contain any reference to the alleged Graz background. Indeed they discovered no new skeletons in the cupboard. Hans Frank's memoirs, dictated at a time when he was waiting for the hangman and plainly undergoing a psychological crisis, are full of inaccuracies and have to be used with caution. With regard to the story of Hitler's alleged Jewish grandfather, they are valueless. Hitler's grandfather, whoever he was, was not a Jew from Graz.""

- source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kershaw-hitler.html

So, again, if Frank's claims about Graz and his elaborate story of the Frankenberger family were all only a lie, WHY did he make these claims? The reason, although obvious, is discarded by the majority of modern historians. Frank's story was a thinly-veiled attempt to communicate a shocking truth: Hitler was the grand-son of a Jewish family; this much was true, according to Frank's own research conducted during Hitler's own lifetime; but because the true father of Alois Hiedler, Jewish or not, was held in such immense social esteem, there could never be any proof offered from them to legitimize Frank's findings. So, who could this man have been, that Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer, had called Frankenberger, a Jewish citizen of the town of Graz? Although we are told there were "no Jewish citizens" living in that area at that time, this is not exactly true. There was only ONE Jewish family that had been, by that time, naturalized as Austrian citizens.

""Salomon Mayer von Rothschild (September 9, 1774 – July 28, 1855) was a German-born banker in the Austrian Empire and the founder of the Austrian branch of the prominent Mayer Amschel Rothschild family.

He was born at Frankfurt-am-Main the third child and second son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812) and Gutlé Schnapper (1753–1849). In 1800, he married Caroline Stern (1782–1854). They had the following children:

1. Anselm Salomon (1803–1874)

2. Betty Salomon (1805–1886) - married her uncle James Mayer de Rothschild in 1824.

In recognition of his services, in 1822 Salomon Mayer Rothschild was made part of the Austrian nobility when Emperor Francis I awarded him the hereditary title "Freiherr" (Baron). In 1843, he became the first Jew to ever be given honorary Austrian citizenship.

Salomon von Rothschild's personal wealth was enormous and he acquired extensive properties and made investments in art and antiquities. Despite the fact that he made substantial contributions to philanthropic causes, the concentration of vast wealth by the few members of the Austrian elite resulted in a growing civil unrest in the country. By the time of the revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas, anti-Rothschild sentiments were frequently being voiced and written about in broadsheets such as Ein offener Brief an Rothschild. With the fall of Metternich, Salomon von Rothschild lost some of his political clout and his bank a considerable amount of money. Under pressure, the 74-year-old handed over the reins of the bank to his son Anselm but it was not without rancor. He left Vienna and retired in Paris where he died in 1855.""

- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Mayer_von_Rothschild

In 1836, when Alois was conceived, Salomon Mayer would have been 62 years old, most probably too old to have sired Alois on his maid, assuming Frau Schiklgruber had worked in such a capacity for him. His son, however, would have been 33, and could be considered a prime candidate, based on the testimony of Hans Frank, for the paternal grandfather of Adolf Hitler.

""Anselm Salomon von Rothschild, baron (January 29, 1803 – July 27, 1874) was born in the Imperial City of Frankfurt, the son of Freiherr Salomon Mayer von Rothschild (1774–1855), ancestor of the family's Austrian branch, and his wife Caroline Stern (1782–1854). He had a younger sister Betty (1805–1874), who married her French uncle James Mayer de Rothschild.

According to the testament left by progenitor Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the children of the Rothschild family were obliged to enter into matrimony with their first and second cousins. Anselm Salomon did so in 1826 by marrying Charlotte Nathan Rothschild (1807–1859), daughter of his uncle Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836) from the London branch of the family; together they had eight children:

• Mayer Anselm Leon (1827–1828)

• Caroline Julie Anselm (1830–1907), "Julie", married Adolph Carl von Rothschild (1823–1900), son of Carl Mayer von Rothschild at Naples, lived at Rothschild Castle in Pregny-Chambésy near Geneva

• Mathilde Hannah von Rothschild (1832–1924), married Freiherr Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild (1828–1901), banker at Frankfurt

• Sarah Luisa (1834–1924), married Baron Raimondo Franchetti (1829–1905), lived at Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti in Venice

• Nathaniel Anselm (1836–1905), maecenas at Vienna

• Ferdinand James (1839–1898), moved to the United Kingdom, had Waddesdon Manor built from 1874

• Albert Salomon (1844–1911), took over the running of the family's Viennese bank

• Alice Charlotte (1847–1922), lived at Eythrope, UK, near her brother Ferdinand, from whom she inherited Waddeson Manor, and later moved to Grasse, France.

In 1820 Anselm Salomon's father Salomon Mayer had established a bank company at Vienna, financing the building of the Austrian Emperor Ferdinand Northern Railway in the 1830s. He had been a confident of Chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich and also a discreet lender of the Bohemian and Hungarian nobility. Upon his death in 1855, his son and heir Anselm created the k.k. privilegierte Österreichische Credit-Anstalt für Handel und Gewerbe, which evolved to the largest bank of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

Anselm himself gradually retired from the banking business in the 1860s and participated in the Austrian Southern Railway company. He rejected the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and refused to accommodate any side with money. As a philanthropist, he founded the Vienna Rothschild Hospital in 1869. He was also a prominent art collector, honorary citizen, and an appointed member of the Austrian House of Lords from 1861. He died in Vienna.""

- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_von_Rothschild

Anselm Salomon would have been 33 at the time of Alois Schiklgruber's conception, and would have been married to his cousin, Charlotte Nathan, for 10 years as well. Prior to 1836, with the birth also of their son Nathaniel Anselm (born October 26, 1836), the couple had been blessed with 3 daughters, but cursed by the death of their first-born male heir at only one year of age. The mindset of Anselm Salomon around the year 1836 seems to have been a contributing factor in some researchers studies of the topic of Hitler's peerage. If Anselm Salomon had illegitimately sired Alois on their maid in their Vienna house 9 months prior to his birth in Strones, it would have been nearly simultaneous to the birth of his first surviving male heir by marriage to his cousin-wife, Charlotte Nathan. In other words, Nathaniel Anselm was born nearly 9 months to the day before Alois Schiklgruber. This would leave plenty of time for the unfortunate maidservant in the most wealthy Vienna banking household to watch her hopes of being married into the family after conceiving their first male heir be dashed on the rocks of destiny as the first male heir was born into their family by the patriarch's wife instead of by her. It would also have left plenty of time for her to return to her childhood village, and the neighborhood of her still-living parents, to bear Alois to fruition and give birth to him there. But, aside from circumstantial evidence and hearsay conjecture, the only real testimony remains that of Hans Frank during the Nuremberg Trials, and this remains largely falsified by Frank himself, for reasons unknown.

Would Hitler's lawyer have wanted to tell the truth on his deathbed? Would he have been allowed and able to do so? Would anyone have believed him? If his goal was merely to contradict his earlier affirmation of Hitler having "no Jewish blood," as some claim, and not to reveal the information he had been privy to as part of his assigned investigation into the matter, then would Frank have constructed such an elaborate fiction without it having ANY basis in reality? If so, why? If Frank knew the truth, would he not have told it then, as he himself faced down death? Or would the truth only he then knew have been too great in its historical impact for him to have felt it possible to convey it in its fullest extent, and instead merely veiled it thinly behind half-truths?

Until we have stopped celebrating for reasons we do not even fully comprehend, and begun to at least attempt to uncover legitimate sources and evidence for our conjectures, it will not be likely we will discover the truth about ANY past historical event, let alone this one in particular. It remains, as of now, merely a useful thought-experiment, an exercise for the mind.

Jonathan Barlow Gee

Tallahassee Florida USA

April 20, 2015.