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The core of a delusion as a rule contains childhood perceptions which are so deeply embedded in the individual's unconscious under layers of protective rationalizations that reality cannot penetrate to them and bring them to light. This paper is an attempt to unravel the multiple layers of rationalizations encapsulating a paranoid delusion which was maintained by its bearer with obsessional, 'fanatic' tenacity until the end of his life. It is Adolf Hitler's delusion about the Jews.
We cannot understand Hitler without a thorough study of his mother, Klara Pölzl. She was brought, as a 13-year-old domestic, from Vienna to Braunau on the River Inn, which forms the frontier between Austria and Bavaria, by Anna, born Glasel, the wife of the customs official, Alois Schicklgruber. Anna's marriage to Alois did not provide her with the companionship she had expected, because her young husband—he was 37 years old when they married and she was 50—was on duty most of the time or drinking with other customs officers and therefore spent little time with her. In her loneliness she remembered a young girl whom she had seen when Alois introduced her to his foster-family in the village, and she decided to take little Klara into her household in place of a daughter. However, she failed to anticipate that her husband might become sexually involved with the young girl, as indeed happened. Anna even found out that Klara's family, knowing of her own chest ailment, was counting on her early demise and on a second marriage of Alois to Klara. Through gossip she learned of her husband's other infidelities and was so completely disgusted that she obtained a legal separation, divorce being impossible for Roman Catholics under Austrian law.
Now, when Klara could have had her proudly uniformed customs commissar all to herself, suddenly another consort of Alois appeared in the person of a maid at the Streif Inn where Alois, Anna and Klara had been living, 19-year-old Franziska Matzelberger.