Alois Hitler, Jr., born Alois Matzelberger (January 13, 1882–May 20, 1956), was the illegitimate son of Alois Hitler and Franziska Matzelsberger and the half-brother of Adolf Hitler.

He was born while his father was still married to his first wife. Once she died, he and his mother married, Alois was legitimised and his name was changed to Alois Hitler, Jr. He was was soon joined by a sister, Angela Hitler. When he was two years old, his mother died and his father married Klara Pölzl with whom he had had a long-standing affair while also cheating on his first wife with Franziska.

Alois left home at the age of fourteen due to increasingly violent arguments with his father and poor relations with his step-mother, who resented him and turned his father against him in favour of their son Adolf. After working as an apprentice waiter, he served a five-month sentence in 1900 for theft and an eight-month sentence in 1902 for the same crime. He moved to Dublin, where he got a job as a waiter at the Shelbourne Hotel. In 1909, he met Bridget Dowling at the Dublin Horse Show and led her to believe that he was a wealthy hotelier on a European tour. They eloped to London and married on June 3, 1910. William Dowling, Bridget's father, threatened to have Alois arrested for kidnapping, but Bridget dissuaded him.

The couple settled in Liverpool where, in 1911, their son William Patrick Hitler was born.

Bridget Dowling's memoirs claim that Adolf Hitler lived with them in Liverpool from 1912 to 1913 while he was on the run for dodging the draft in his native Austria, but most historians dismiss this story as a fiction concocted to make Bridget's book more appealing to publishers.

Alois attempted to make money by running a small restaurant in Dale Street, a boarding house on Parliament Street and a hotel on Mount Pleasant, all of which failed.

Finally, he left his family behind in May 1914 when he returned, alone, to Germany to establish himself in the safety-razor business. World War I broke out soon after, stranding Alois in Germany and making it impossible for his wife and son to join him. He married another woman in 1916 and, after the war, had a third party inform Bridget that he was dead.

His ruse was discovered by the German authorities and Alois was prosecuted for bigamy in 1924 but acquitted due to Bridget's intervention on his behalf.

William Patrick stayed with Alois and his new family during his early trips to Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1934 Alois established a restaurant in Berlin which became a popular drinking hole for Stormtroopers. He managed to keep the restaurant open through the duration of World War II. At the end of the war he was arrested by the British but released once it became clear that he had played no role in his brother's regime.

Following the war, Alois was briefly involved with a right-wing political party. In the 1950s he made money by signing photographs of his brother and selling them to tourists.

Alois and Adolf were never close due to the influence of Klara Hitler and Alois' apparent resentment of Adolf's favoured status with their father. He is not mentioned in Hitler's Mein Kampf and they rarely met, if ever, after Adolf's rise to power.

External link

• Hitler: His Irish Relatives http://www.irishrootsmagazine.com/about/HitlerRelatives.htm from Irish Roots magazine.