Back Story Of Iconic Birthday Photo Of Hitler With Young Girl — She Was Jewish And He Didn’t Care
(BBC.com) Many have seen this iconic photo of Adolf Hitler affectionately embracing a young girl who expressed her admiration of him — it often can be found on many pro-Hitler websites — but few realize that not only was the girl in the photo actually Jewish, when Hitler was made aware of this fact, he had the photos distributed anyway — and he continued to maintain an affectionate correspondence with the girl long after the photo was taken:
At first glance, the picture of the man hugging the beaming young girl appears to show a scene of great happiness.
But a closer look reveals a far darker tale: this is Adolf Hitler, the man behind the murder of six million Jews, and the little girl is Jewish.
Despite this, Hitler would go on to build a friendship with Rosa Bernile Nienau, which only ended when top Nazi officials intervened five years later.
And now this rare, signed image from 1933 is going up for auction in the US.
Alexander Historical Auctions, in Maryland, estimates the picture, taken by photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, could fetch as much as $10,000 (£7,500) when it goes on sale on Tuesday.
“The signed version is a never-before publicly seen piece,” auctioneer Bill Panagopulos told MailOnline.
“Hitler was very often photographed with children for propaganda purposes. The shocking thing about this piece is it seems he had a genuine affinity for the young girl.
“I was simply stunned.”
It was a shared birthday which brought a little girl and the Nazi leader together.
According to the auction website, Rosa and her mother had joined the crowds outside Hitler’s Alpine retreat Berghof in 1933 on his birthday.
It is thought that when he discovered Rosa had the same birthday, he invited Rosa and her mother Karoline up to the house – where these photographs were taken.
Not long afterwards, it was discovered that Karoline’s mother had been Jewish, making Rosa Jewish in the eyes of the Nazi state.
But this did not dissuade Hitler from carrying on his friendship with girl, to whom he had sent a signed copy of the photograph.
“The dear and [considerate?] Rosa Nienau Adolf Hitler Munich, the 16th June 1933,” he wrote.
Rosa, it appears, later added her own stamp to the photo, drawing flowers onto the black-and-white image.
She would write to Hitler and his aide Wilhelm Bruckner on at least 17 occasions between 1935 and 1938, until she and her mother, a widow, were told to cut off contact by the Nazi leader’s private secretary, Martin Bormann.
Hitler was unimpressed by the order, Hoffmann would later say.
“There are people who have a true talent for spoiling my every joy,” Hoffmann recalls the Nazi leader telling him in his book, “Hitler Was My Friend.”
The photographer includes a different picture of the two in his 1955 book, captioned: “Hitler’s Sweetheart – it delighted him to see her at the Berghof until some busybody found she was not of pure Aryan descent.”
The year after Bormann cut off contact, World War Two began. By the time it ended, six years later, six million Jews would be dead.
Rosa did not survive the war, either. She died of polio, aged 17, in a hospital in Munich in 1943, a decade after her first meeting with Hitler.
To suggest that Hitler took pictures with children merely for cynical propaganda reasons is preposterous — by all accounts Hitler had great and sincere affection for children who were the living hope of the new Germany.
And he made it clear why he never married (until the end in the Berlin Bunker) or had a family of his own — he felt he was “married” to the German Volk — and that any private marriage would distract him from what he needed to accomplish for the nation.
The fact of the matter is, however, that Adolf Hitler expressed admiration and affection for many individual Jews — such as Edourd Bloch, the Jewish doctor who treated his mother for cancer — and Emil Maurice, his personal chauffeur, and the Austrian Jewish philosopher, Otto Weininger — and privately, Hitler said that his favorite film was “Metropolis” directed by the Jew, Fritz Lang.
That said, Hitler had no love for Jews as a whole — he rightly felt they were a corrosive and subversive element in the German nation — that their worldview was irreconcilable to the German spirit — and they needed to be removed in order to preserve the health and future of the German Volk.
Like many Jews in Germany at that time, Rosa Nienau was a mischling — her father was German while her mother was Jewish — and because of that, her family was left alone to live openly in Berlin throughout the entire war — as thousands of other Jews did — hardly what we’d expect from “evil Nazis” hellbent on “exterminating” every last Jew in Europe — if not the entire world.
While many in the NS — including Josef Goebbels — wanted Hitler to immediately address and resolve the status of these mischlings and mixed marriages, Hitler refused — he insisted that it was a complicated distraction from winning the war — and that he would address the issue only after the war ended — again proving that Hitler had no plans to rid the world of every last Jew in Gas Chambers™.
Ironically, this photo of Hitler and Rosa Nienau was taken on their shared birthday — April 20th — a date that many of Hitler’s admirers still celebrate to this day — completely unaware that the girl in the photo isn’t at all the image of Aryan youth that they belief it is.
If anything, the photo is an image of Hitler’s humanity — rather than a cynical caricature of a genocidal monster — or an uncompromising “Jew baiter.”
(Republished from Christians For truth by permission of author or representative)
