We have all learnt about Hitler growing up, whether in history class, from stories our grandparents have told us, a field trip through Germany, or from TV. Everyone knows of the atrocities that he committed on mankind, but there are many facts about Adolf Hitler you probably don’t know. Here are a few of them:

1 Hitler wanted to be a priest when he was a child. 

In Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” he speaks highly about the local abbot, saying “What could be more natural for me than to look upon the Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for”. It turns out Hitler attended a parochial school in Lambach, Austria. He was also a choirboy and altar server at his local church.(source)

2 Hitler’s first crush was a Jewish girl, although he never had the courage to tell her.

When Hitler was 16, he fell head over heels for a Jewish girl by the name of Stefanie Isak. The hypocrisy speaks for itself although what’s disturbing is that he never had the courage to talk to her and expressed fantasies of first kidnapping her and running away, and later on (when she ignored his fond gazes) thought of committing suicide with her.(source)

3 Hitler had a nephew by the name of William Patrick Hitler who joined the U.S. Navy and fought against him.

Hitler’s half-brother Alois Hitler Jr. had a son by the name of William Patrick Hitler who was born in Liverpool, England and moved to Germany in 1933 to work for his powerful uncle. Not appreciating the work given and after writing blackmail letters, Hitler requested that William renounce his British citizenship. Fearing a trap, William left Germany. In 1939 while on a lecture tour in the U.S. with his mother, WW2 broke out. At this point, William decided to write a letter to President Franklin D Roosevelt to be allowed to join the fight as part of the US Navy and was allowed to do so. Imagine the awkward moment when he had to declare any known relatives he would be fighting.(source)

4 Hitler planned to kill all residents in Moscow and replace it with a lake.

As part of the plan to invade and capture Moscow, Hitler planned to open the sluices of the Moscow-Volga Canal and create an artificial lake to permanently submerge it. Unfortunately for the Nazis, their plan to take on Russia was their downfall.(source)

5 The woman who designed Hitler’s bunker had a grandson who went on to design Saddam Hussein’s.

The woman who built Hitler’s bunker had a grandson who went on to design Saddam Hussein’s bunker. He must have been good at his job, because after being fired at by 7 bunker buster bombs and 20 cruise missiles it was pretty much unscratched. It contained a power station, air filtration plant and water treatment, and would have allowed people to live in it for more than 12 months with dried food and fresh supplies in the cold storage rooms.(source)