William Shirer

was only during the 1930s that enterprising journalists in Vienna, delving into the parish archives, discovered the facts about Hitler’s ancestry and, disregarding old Johann Georg Hiedler’s belated attempt to do right by a bastard son, tried to fasten on the Nazi leader the name of Adolf Schicklgruber.

When I recall my teachers at school, I realize that half of them were abnormal…. We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! … I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages—though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him.—August 29, 1942.22

Our teachers were absolute tyrants. They had no sympathy with youth; their one object was to stuff our brains and turn us into erudite apes like themselves. If any pupil showed the slightest trace of originality, they persecuted him relentlessly, and the only model pupils whom I have ever got to know have all been failures in after-life.—September 7, 1942.23