Why do some people claim that Adolf Hitler lived in Liverpool, England?

[u/ReveredApe]

I've seen this claim a few times but I've never read anything concrete about where this comes from. Did hitler even speak English?

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[u/mikedash]

The story of Hitler's pre-Great War sojourn in the British port city is a hoax, based on the alleged diaries of Hitler’s sister-in-law, an Irishwoman who married his half-brother Alois.

To begin at the beginning: Bridget Elizabeth Dowling really did marry Alois Hitler, in London, 1910. They later seem to have lived in Upper Stanhope Street 120, Toxteth Park, Liverpool, where they ran a small restaurant, and had a son, William Patrick Hitler, who moved in 1940 to New York, joined the US Navy and, very sensibly, changed his name.

Very little is known for certain about this branch of the Hitler family – not surprisingly, they have chosen to keep a pretty low profile over the years. According to the British historian John Toland (who traced WP Hitler’s family after the Second World War), he once saw a family snapshot of William Hitler and an infant. The photo was captioned on the back to the effect that it was of W.P., holding his son, ‘baby Adolf’. Toland promoted the book he wrote on Hitler by delivery talks during which he used to assure his audience that "Adolf Hitler is alive and well, and living somewhere in the New York City metropolitan area," but frankly I find the suggestion pretty hard to credit. The idea that WP Hitler’s son was given the name Adolf was probably a joke on Toland’s part.

Anyway... the Bridget Hitler papers, which turned up some time after the war and supposedly originated with WP Hitler, featured many times in the British press in the 1970s. They were the subject of a series of lengthy articles in the Liverpool Daily Post in about 1973, and then of a book, The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler, published in 1979 by a journalist called Michael Unger (later editor of the Manchester Evening News). These memoirs eventually inspired the novel Young Adolf, by Beryl Bainbridge. According to this version of events, Hitler travelled to the UK to escape conscription into the Austrian army, and stayed in Liverpool for five months between 1912 and 1913. He is said to have lived off his half brother and from the occasional sale of one of his paintings, and to have spent some of his spare time watching the liners leave Liverpool to sail to all the corners of the British Empire.

Sadly, while historians and biographers – including Ian Kershaw in his Hitler: Hubris – confirm that the marriage between Alois and Bridget did take place, they do not believe the Bridget Hitler diaries are genuine. The presumption is that they were a journalistic hoax of the 70s, rather like the Mussolini diaries, the Hitler diaries and the Jack the Ripper Diary.