ANTI-SEMITISM, EH?
How a Jewish boy in North York learned about hate.
The little girl was Adolf Hitler’s favourite.
They shared the same birthday, April 20. She called him Uncle Hitler and was known as “the Führer’s child.” She was so adored by the Nazi leader that his personal photographer frequently snapped pictures of the two them holding hands, exchanging kisses on the cheek, or just smiling at each other. Hitler refused to cut off contact with her even after he was told she had a Jewish grandmother.
On Tuesday, Alexander Historical Auctions, based in Chesapeake City, Md., sold one of those photographs for $11,520. The small black-and-white image, taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, shows a smiling Hitler embracing the young blond girl, Rosa Bernile Nienau, about 6 years old, in 1933 at his mountainside retreat, the Berghof, in the Bavarian region of Germany.
Hitler’s face is turned to his right, dipping to the top of her head, while she’s looking directly at the camera, her mouth open, eyes lit up, and grinning widely. Most notably perhaps, the photograph is inscribed by Hitler himself in dark blue ink.
“The dear and (considerate?) Rosa Nienau Adolf Hitler Munich, the 16th June 1933,” the inscription says in German, referring to the location where he actually signed the photograph. Nine edelweiss flowers and a four-leaf clover — applied by Bernile, as she was known — adorn the photograph.
Andreas Kornfeld, Alexander Historical Auctions’ vice president of sales, said he was stunned by the photograph’s backstory.
“It’s probably one of the most unique items I’ve seen in my time with the auction house,” said Kornfeld, who is of German descent. “Being German, I’d never heard the story, and I’ve seen the picture many times, but it would never have occurred to me the story behind the picture, which is mind blowing.”
Like so many of Hoffman’s images, the photo was deployed as propaganda. The photos of Bernile and Hitler were meant to portray the German leader as a child-loving person, “a man truly in touch with the young,” according to James Wilson’s book, Hitler’s Alpine Headquarters.
Eventually, though, a high-ranking leader intervened because of Bernile’s Jewish roots and permanently halted Hitler’s correspondence with the child in 1938. Five years later, on Oct. 5, 1943, Bernile died of polio at the age of 17 in a Munich hospital.
By then, millions of Jews had perished in the Holocaust.