A00899 - Anton Joachimsthaler, German Historian Known For Hitler Biography

*Anton Joachimsthaler, a German historian best known for his research on the early life of Adolf Hitler, was born in Hohenelbe, Sudetenland.

Anton Joachimsthaler (b. 1930, Hohenelbe, Sudetenland) is particularly noted for his research on the early life of the German dictator Adolf Hitler, in his book Korrektur einer Biografie ("Correction of a Biography") and his last days in the book Hitler's Ende ("Hitler's Ende").

Joachimsthaler was born in 1930 in Hohenelbe in the Sudetenland. He studied electrical engineering at the Oskar-von-Miller-Polytechnikum, a predecessor of the Munich University of Applied Sciences.  Afterwards he worked in 1956 for the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Federal Railroad) as a mechanical and electrical engineer in various places, his last position being as a senior service manager in the Munich-Freimann repair station. 

Joachimsthaler produced publications on the history of technology and general history, and contributed to television broadcasts from ZDF Mainz, such as Hitler as a private man. His work Korrektur einer Biografie ("Correction of a Biography"), in which he made many facts about Hitler's early years known to a broader public, was particularly well received, and his book Hitler's Ende ("Hitler's End"), which was published in English as The Last Days of Hitler: Legend, Evidence and Truth, is often cited.

Joachimsthaler is best known for his contributions to the study of the life of Adolf Hitler. With the Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann, he is the researcher who has delivered the most important contributions over the last decades to revision of Hitler's early years of life in Linz, Vienna and Munich.  He helped to shatter the view, expressed by other historians, that the young Hitler was an established anti-semite in the period before the World War I, by highlighting convincing evidence that Hitler developed into a serious anti-semite only during or immediately after the war. This he ascertained from his research in the city archives of Hitler's hometown, Linz. Also, the fact that Stefanie Rabatsch,  with whom Hitler, according to his boyhood friend August Kubizek, had developed a fanatical youthful love, had the maiden name of "Isak". The fact that Hitler had a romantic interest in a girl whom he believed due to her Jewish-sounding name to be Jewish, although in fact she was not, made a serious anti-Semitic attitude of the later dictator highly unlikely at that time.