Döllersheim: the Austrian village erased by the Nazis
Given his obsession with the purity of Aryan blood, there’s a certain irony in the fact that Adolf Hitler’s own bloodline was a mystery even to those closest to him. In his memoir, Hitler’s personal attorney Hanz Frank claimed to have uncovered evidence that the Führer’s paternal grandfather was a Jew from Graz, Austria, where he’d lived in the same household the Nazi leader’s grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, had been employed. Academics have since dismissed Frank’s claims, but they wielded enormous influence at the height of Hitler’s power. To quash such rumours, Adolf ordered the complete obliteration of Döllersheim, the Austrian village where Maria’s grave was located. Today, it is little more than a lonely pile of ruins in rural Waldviertel.
It wasn’t just Döllersheim, either. Following the 1939 annexation of Austria, Hitler ordered Zwettl, Spital, Allentsteig, and several other small villages in the northwest of the country to be evacuated to make way for a Wehrmacht training ground. So, why here? Well, in the nearby lakeside town Rastenfield, documents were uncovered mentioning two possible birthplaces of Hitler’s father: Döllersheim and Strones. As early as 1931, Hitler was committed to extinguishing rumours regarding his ancestry, and these locations offered normal Germans too much insight. “People must not know who I am,” he is believed to have said. “They must not know where I come from.”
Determined to prove his pedigree, Hitler ordered Nazi genealogists to prepare a large illustrated family tree indicating that he was, in fact, of pure Aryan descent. Ahnentafel des Fuehrers, or The pedigree of the Leader, was published in 1937 and traces a bloodline stretching back to the 1600s. None of this stopped sceptics from travelling to Döllersheim, where, Hitler feared, they would mind evidence to clarify the still-unproven rumours of his Jewish ancestry.
It was decided: the village had to go. German soldiers needed a place to train anyway, and it wasn’t like Döllersheim offered much in the way of agriculture or industry, its soil being so poor and unyielding. Shortly after the annexation, the people of Döllersheim – all 2000 of them – were forcibly resettled, their houses bombed to dust. The Romanesque buildings that had characterised the parish since the 12th century were replaced by enormous prisoner-of-war camps like Oflag XVII-A, where, in 1943, 76 Allied airmen escaped. In retaliation, 50 of their fellow prisoners were summarily executed.
Following the German surrender of 1945 and the allied occupation of Austria, the training ground encompassing Döllersheim was seized by the Soviet Army and remained a military exclusion zone until the 1980s. At that point, the ruins of the parish church and its surrounding graveyard – the final resting place of Hitler’s grandparents – were opened to the general public. And the original inhabitants? They had to wait until 1955 to receive compensation for their loss. Their ruined homes are an enduring reminder of Hitler’s pursuit of untainted authority, something he was willing to erase 800 years of rural life to secure.