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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. 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 scholars have questioned its accuracy, although others have cited portions of it. For example, Kubizek wrote that Hitler had a great love for a girl named Stefanie and wrote her love poems but never sent them. Hitler biographer John Toland noted that years later, when Stefanie learned she had been the object of Hitler's affection, she was stunned.

William L. Shirer, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich cites a letter dated August 4, 1933, six months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, in which he wrote his boyhood friend, "I should be very glad . . . to revive once more with you those memories of the best years of my life."

They subsequently met on several occassions. Kubizek saw Hitler for the last time on July 23, 1940. In the epilogue of his book Kubizek revealed he joined the NSDAP in 1942. He also wrote, "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."

Lothar Machtan

It has been speculated by German author and history professor Lothar Machtan that Kubizek carried out a homosexual relationship with Hitler but this claim is wholly unsupported and is widely dismissed by mainstream scholarship. Machtan himself admits that the evidence for this is merely "circumstantial."

See Also

Adolf Hitler's sexual orientation

Reference

• 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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