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August (Gustl) Kubizek (3 August 1888 Linz – 1956) was a close friend and later room mate in Vienna of Adolf Hitler. After leaving school he apprenticed as an interior decorator in his father's business, but his true passion was for music. Template:Mn (p. 2 & p.31)
Kubizek studied music at the Vienna Conservatory. Hitler broke off the friendship after he was denied entrance into Vienna's art academy. Kubizek then became conductor of the orchestra of the Austrian town of Marburg on the Drau in 1914. This town became Maribor in Slovenia in 1918.
From late 1914-1918 Kubizek served as a reservist of the Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment No. 2. Upon demobilisation in November 1918 Kubizek accepted a position as an official in the municipal council of Eferding in Upper Austria and music became his hobby.
In 1938 the Nazis commissioned Kubizek to write about his youth with Hitler. He produced two short booklets called Reminiscences. In 1953 Kubizek used these as the basis for a book titled Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (English title: Young Hitler, the Story of Our Friendship). Historian Brigitte Hamann claimed parts of the book had been fabricated and some and scholars such and University of Bremen professor and historian Lothar Machtan have also questioned the book's accuracy and called parts of it a whitewash. According to Professor Machtan's book The Hidden Hitler, August Kubizek had a homosexual relationship with Adolf Hitler. Both Brigitte Hamann and Professor Machtan wrote that after meeting Hitler during the latter part of 1905, the two quickly became close friends and lived together, sharing a small room they rented on the Stumpergasse in Vienna. In Young Hitler, the Story of Our Friendship, Kubizek wrote that during their time together Hitler "always rejected the coquettish advances of girls or women. Women and girls took an interest in him in Linz as well as Vienna, but he always evaded their endeavors." Kubizek also wrote that Hitler had a great love for a girl named "Stefanie" and wrote her countless love poems but never sent them. Instead, Kubizek says Hitler read his poem "Hymn to the Beloved" to him. Professor Machtan stated that while the Stefanie girl definitely existed, some of Kubizek's 1953 writing was a deliberate "heterosexualizing" of Hitler in retrospect. (p. 43).
Professor Machtan's book quotes Kubizek's own writings about Hitler. Kubizek wrote that he and Hitler had swiftly "become transformed into a profound, romanceromantically transfigured friendship" and Kubizek also wrote that Hitler watched jealously over him and that Hitler said "because I cannot endure it when you consort and converse with other young people." He could never bear the idea that Kubizek "was interested in other people ..." (p. 37)
Such was the intimacy of Kubizek and Hitler that according to William L. Shirer in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 14), in a letter dated August 4, 1933, six months after he became Chancellor of Germany, Hitler wrote his boyhood friend, August Kubizek: "I should be very glad . . . to revive once more with you those memories of the best years of my life."
Hitler and Kubizek were to meet again after 1933 on several occassions. On the twenty-third of July, 1940, Kubizek saw Hitler for the last time. In the Epilogue of his book, Kubizek revealed that he became a member of the NSDAP in 1942. He also observed that "...Even though I, a fundamentally unpolitical individual, had always kept aloof from the political events of the period which ended forever in 1945, nevertheless no power on earth could compel me to deny my friendship with Adolf Hitler..."
Reference
- Template:Mnb Machtan,Lothar. The Hidden Hitler. 2001. Basic Books. ISBN 0465043089.
- Template:Mnb Hamann, Brigitte Hitler's Vienna : A Dictator's Apprenticeship. 1999. Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195140532
- Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund - August Kubizek (1953) & (2002) ISBN 370200971X - English translation: Young Hitler, the Story of Our Friendship (1955) & (1976)
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William L. Shirer (1960) Simon & Schuster, Inc. ISBN 0671728695 (1990 30th Anniversary edition)
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