PASSAU, GERMANY - A boy named Johann Kuehberger was said to have saved a 4-year old boy's life by rescuing him from drowning in icy water. A newspaper report chronicling how the boy was saved surfaced in the archives.
The boy was believed to be Adolf Hitler.
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| Adolf Hitler when he was a child (undated photo). |
The 4-year-old Adolf Hitler was living in Kapuzinerstrasse in Passau, Germany, a place close to the border of Austria, his native country, when the incident happened. According to Max Tremmel, a priest who went on to become one of Europe's most famous organists, knew Johann Kuehberger, saying he was his predecessor.
Tremmel told the story before his death in 1980 of how Father Kuehberger as a child (who was around Hitler's age) saw a boy struggling in the icy waters of River Inn and dived to rescue him. The boy, according to Tremmel, was Hitler. The story remained unverified until recently a small cutting from an 1894 issue of the Donauzeitung-Danube, a local newspaper, was found in Passau.
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| Father Johan Kuehberger was said to have saved Hitler from drowning. |
It describes how a "young fellow" fell through the thin ice of the river in January of that year, and described how a "determined comrade" went into the freezing water to save the child. The name of the child though was not mentioned.
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| Hitler was believed to have fell in the icy waters of River Inn in Passau, Germany. |
The claim that the child rescued from death was Hitler was taken up by a book called
Out of Passau, Leaving a City Hitler Called Home, written by Anna Elisabeth Rosmus, a German author and researcher, native of Passau, who fled to the United States in August 1994, after harassment and death threats over her historical research into Passau's Nazi links.
Rosmus wrote that the banks of River Inn was the place where children played.
"In 1894, while playing tag with a group of other children, the way many children do in Passau to this day, Adolf fell into the river. The current was very strong and the water ice cold, flowing as it did straight from the mountains. Luckily for young Adolf, the son of the owner of the house where he lived was able to pull him out in time and so saved his life."
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| Anna Rosmus wrote a book that tells the boy who was saved from drowning was indeed Hitler. |
But Hitler never admitted the near-drowning accident in his life. As a young man and later among his generals, he told stories of how he played cowboys and Indians on the banks of the river but he never once related the tale.
"In Passau, however, everyone knew the story. Some of the other stories told about him were that he never learned to swim and needed glasses."
Later this month, Bavarian Radio will be running a news feature program about the incident.
Called "If Hitler had drowned. The legend of a fatal lifesaving", it will feature several elderly Passau residents confirming that they heard the story of Hitler's near-brush with death as they grew up in the city.
Hitler's supremacist and racially motivated policies resulted in the deaths of eleven to fourteen million people, including an estimated six million Jews.
