Hitler’s Parents’ Gravestone To Be Removed
Vienna, Austria – Neo-Nazi’s are going to have to find a new place to make a pilgrimage to these days. The tombstone at the head of Adolf Hitler’s parent’s grave is being taken down. A relative of the Hitlers requested that the tombstone be removed and the grave site sold to someone else.
Walter Brunner, mayor of Leonding village, said the stone with the photos of Alois and Klara Hitler was taken down Wednesday. Village priest Kurt Pitterschatscher said the rented grave was available for a new lease.
Austrian graves are usually leased for periods of 10 years. The lease is always renewable and usually passed on to friends and relatives.
Pitterschatscher was asked if people might be a little bit freaked out letting their loved ones share a grave with one of history’s worst dictators parents, Pitterschatscher said, “I really haven’t thought about it.”
Pitterschatscher said the stone and black marble marker, topped by a granite cross, was removed without ceremony by a stonemason hired an elderly female descendant of Alois Hitler’s first wife, Anna. He did not know the woman personally nor did he feel comfortable releasing her name but the relative had said she was too old to care for the grave anymore and she was tired of it “being used for manifestations of sympathy” for Hitler.
Hitler’s roots are in Braunau, near Leonding, which is commonly identified as his hometown. Leonding itself first assumed cult status for his followers after Hitler visited his parents’ grave and the nearby family house following the 1938 annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
Brunner, the mayor pf Leonding, said he was “happy with the decision,” to remove the tombstone and Eiter said most Leonding residents also supported it.
The Soviets discovered part of Hitler’s body after he had committed suicide in Berlin. The fall of the Iron Curtain allowed archives with the body’s location to be opened. While the skull and jaw of Hitler was kept n a Soviet lab, the body was buried along a Soviet Parade Route in East Germany. His remains were exhumed in the 1970s and incinerated. The ashes were flushed into the city’s sewage system.
