Did you know a woman from Tallaght married Adolf Hitler’s half brother?

Did you know a woman from Tallaght married Adolf Hitler’s half brother?

This article first appeared in the Echo on November 18, 1999 and was written by Donal Bergin.

Adolf Hitler, the monster who tried to wipe out an entire race of people off the face of the earth, had a sister-in-law who was born in Tallaght.

Bridget Elizabeth Dowling, who died on this day 30 years ago, married Hitler’s half-brother Alois in London in 1910.

Mrs Bridget Hitler

He was a waiter and she was a cook in a Dublin hotel where she met him at a staff dance.

Exclusive research by the Echo has uncovered that the Tallaght cottage believed to have been her family’s home still stands today.

We also found that her claim to have met Alois at the Dublin Horse Show was likely to be a myth.

Though an unfortunate accident of marriage, the convent girl became the sister-in-law of the man who would become Nazi Fuehrer of Germany and later bring the world to its knees.

When she was 17, the young cook eloped to London with Alois who was twice jailed for theft.

“Nowadays it is a bit embarrassing to be Mrs Hitler, but the people who know me don’t mind,” Bridget Hitler, who was born in Kilnamanagh, once said.

The devout Catholic later said: “It seems funny for an obscure little Irish girl like I was to get mixed up in all these International affairs.

“I was plain Bridget Dowling of Dublin when I met Alois who was a waiter. I was 17 and had just left a convent, and it was very romantic.

“When I went to the hotel staff dance I met him,” she said long before she claimed to have met the “handsome stranger” at the Dublin Horse Show.

Adolf and Alois shared the same father but had different mothers. Disliked by Adolf, historians state Alois was a hapless good-for-nothing.

Bridget claimed he was a waiter in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, but it is claimed he worked in the old Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street.

“He fairly won my heart with his sugary talk and foreign ways. My father – rest his soul – was a real Irishman. He would not hear or tell of a wedding to a foreigner.

“Alois and I used to meet every afternoon in the museum and plan to elope,” she said in a prewar interview with the Daily Express in London.

Mrs Hitler revealed: “Four months later when Alois had saved enough money, we went to England on the night boat and came to London,

“I wrote to my mother and said I would not return until we got permission to marry. She talked my father around and he gave us his consent.”

Bridget Elizabeth Dowling married Alois Hitler in Marleybone registry office, London on June 3, 1910. She was aged 18 and he was 27.

After the wedding, Bridget recalled she “took him straight back to Dublin to meet the family, and then we went to Liverpool”.

She continued: “He got a job in a restaurant as a waiter and then became an agent for a razor firm. Willie, our only child, was born in March 1911.

“My husband used to talk about his family. He told me of his younger brother, Adolf, who was a dreamy sort of lad and was studying architecture when we were married.”

But Alois left her early in 1914 and returned to the continent. Her parents moved to Liverpool around that time, where her father died.

“I was in a very poor way when he went to the war (and left me) with three-year-old Willie on my hands. My mother and I did the best we could,” she recalled.

In the 1930s, her son, William Patrick, became a car salesman in Nazi Germany after mother and son allegedly tried to blackmail Adolf over his brother’s bigamy.

After Alois deserted Bridget and their three-year-old son, he bigamously remarried. He escaped jail because Bridget agreed to separation.

William Patrick later said his mother felt “very bitter” about many things. He was “sent” to Liverpool to live with his Irish grandparents after Alois left.

While she was born and lived in Tallaght, it is believed Mrs Bridget Hitler-to-be also lived in Clondalkin where her mother’s family lived.

William Dowling, a farm labourer from Kilnamanagh was her father, and her mother was Bridget Reynolds Jnr from Ballymount, and earlier, Kilnamanagh.

Mrs Hitler’s parents were conservative Catholics, she has written, while her brother, Thomas J Dowling served in the RAF from 1923 to 1926.

Bridget’s marriage to Hitler’s brother was unspoken of in the area. “That was hidden. The next generation weren’t told much about it,” said a source.

The Echo has also found that her family probably lived for a few years in a cottage in Cookstown townland, the runis of which still stand today.

The cottage was leased to a man that this reporter believes to have been her father, by Andrew Cullen Tynan, the father of the famous poet Katherine Tynan.

Interestingly, the only Irish person who is named is Bridget Hitler’s distrusted memoirs is a “Mr Tynan”, who was described as a neighbour.

Bridget claimed in 1941 that hanging would have been too good for her brother-in-law, Adolf, but the French had claimed she was in the payroll of the Nazi’s.

According to a 1938 article unearthed by Patrick Maguire, a Dublin historian, a Paris paper claimed the “cook” received 300 marks a month from the Nazi’s.

It claimed nobody wanted a cook who was Hitler’s sister-in-law. She had come a long way since being swept off her feet by the handsome foreigner.

Obviously short of cash, Mrs Hitler made news after she appeared before a London Police court in January 1939 for failing to pay over £9 in rates.

The court accepted her offer to pay within six weeks. She said she was expecting money from Germany, but did not say from whom. The money never appeared.

“So there was nothing for it but to take the divil (sic) by his tail up the hill and go to court,” Mrs Hitler said.

A resident since the early 30s of Priory Gardens, Highgate, London, she then said she took in boarders while her son worked in a Berlin brewery.

Six months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, Mrs Hitler and her son went to America where the authorities quizzed them.

She went to work for the British War Relief Society opposite Tiffany’s jewellers on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1941 where she “proudly” wore an ‘Aid Britain’ brooch.

Bridget’s memoirs were discovered, unfinished and halfway through a sentence, in the manuscript division of the New York Public Library in the 1970s.

They include a claim that Adolf Hitler stayed in Liverpool in 1912 and 1913. Last year, her daughter-in-law said the memoir “was all made up”.

Mrs Hitler’s mother could not write when Bridget Elizabeth Dowling was born and she also called herself Eliza and marked her “X” on the birth cert.

Why she called herself Eliza is a mystery, but there were many other Bridget Dowling namesakes in the nearby districts when she gave birth.

Mrs Hitler was the only Bridget Dowling registered born in 1891 whose father’s name was William, and her birth cert date matches her gravestone date.

Thirty years after her death, Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Arthur Mitchell, is anxious to hear from any surviving relatives.

He said he is co-writing a book on Hitler, and believes relatives may have old personal letters from Mrs Hitler which may be of historical value.

“I have no mention of embarrassing the Dowlings…I imagine some relatives might tell you to go to hell with that,” Prof Mitchell said.

And he added: “If she did have any relatives it wouldn’t’ be unusual if she wrote to letters saying ’I was in Germany and met Adolf Hitler’.”

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