The Last of the Hitlers

Category:

Book Details

AUTHOR

David Gardner

FORMAT

hardback

PUBLISHED

Dec 1 2001

ISBN

0954154401

About The Author

David Gardner

David Gardner worked for 10 years for the Daily Mail as a crime writer and a senior foreign correspondent. He filed dispatches from war-torn Beirut, covered the Gulf War, reporting from Baghdad, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and travelled around the world on assignments for the award-winning newspaper. Leaving London in 1993, he launched a successful news and features agency in New York with clients in Britain, Europe, Australia and the US. For the last four years, he has lived in California, working as a freelance writer for primarily British publications. His first book, a biography of the actor Tom Hanks, was published in January, 2000.

At the end of World War ll, the man Adolf Hitler called “my loathsome nephew” changed his name and disappeared. Despite efforts by
historians and academics anxious to peer into the psyche of the most infamous dictator of the 20th century, the British-born William Patrick Hitler, by then settled in the USA, remained anonymous… until he was found by US-based British journalist David Gardner.
William Patrick’s story so fascinated British journalist David Gardner that he spent years attempting to find the last relative to bear the Hitler name.
Gardner found that William Patrick died before the search started, but that his four sons had established a pact that, in order for Adolf Hitler’s genes to die with them, none of them would have children. He discovered too that the eldest son, Alex, also has a middle name…. Adolf!
And that the family insist Adolf Hitler did visit Liverpool (and Ireland) before the First World War – a trip previously discounted by historians.
The book, which contains previously unpublished FBI files and interviews with the surviving blood relatives, is not just a history of the family, it is also the story of Gardner’s dedicated search.
The late Beryl Bainbridge contributed the foreword.