Hitler’s Nephew, Stalin’s Daughter and Other Famous Defectors

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Hitler’s Nephew, Stalin’s Daughter and Other Famous Defectors
by Rob Lammle - September 5, 2011 - 8:34 PM





Here are four defectors whose stories you won’t soon forget.
1. Hitler’s Nephew


© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
William Patrick Hitler was born in England to a German father, Alois Hitler, and an Irish mother, Bridget Dowling. When William was still a boy, his father moved back to Germany, but his mother refused to go, raising her son alone in England. Alois kept in touch with the family and so, when his famous Uncle Adolf rose to power, young William moved to Germany in the hopes that he would be given a high-profile job. After hounding him for months, Uncle Adolf agreed to give William a cushy position as long as he renounced his British citizenship and promised never to return home. Sensing something wasn’t right, William went back to England and capitalized on his famous family by writing an article for Look Magazine called, “Why I Hate My Uncle.”
The popularity of the story gave William and his mother (pictured above) the opportunity to travel to America as part of a lecture tour. While there, World War II broke out, and the two were essentially stranded in the United States.
Hoping to do his part in the war effort, Hitler asked for and received special permission from President Roosevelt to enlist in the U.S. Navy in 1944. According to a newspaper story printed at the time, when he introduced himself at the draft office, the recruiter thought he was joking and responded with, “Glad to see you, Hitler. My name’s Hess.” a reference to Nazi leader Rudolf Hess.
William Hitler served valiantly in the war and received an honorable discharge in 1947. Then, he simply disappeared.
In 1998, author David Gardner went looking for Hitler’s lost nephew and found that, after the war, William and his mother had become U.S. citizens and changed their name to Stuart-Houston. William started a successful medical laboratory business, got married, moved to Long Island, had four boys, and died in 1987. At one point during the interview, William’s wife claimed that her sons made a pact never to have children—so the Hitler bloodline would end with them. The oldest son, Alexander Adolf Stuart-Houston, has denied that such a pact exists, though the men never married or had children.

3. Stalin’s Daughter


Svetlana Alliluyeva was born in 1926 to Nadezhda Alliluyeva and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. She was the youngest of Stalin’s three children and his only daughter. Her mother died under suspicious circumstances when Svetlana was only six years old, leaving her in the care of nannies for much of her childhood, and only receiving occasional visits from her busy father.
While the two were never close, Stalin still had a forceful hand in his daughter’s life, especially her love life. Although it wasn’t the official reason, it’s believed that Svetlana’s first love was sent into exile because of their relationship. She later married another man, but even after the couple had a son and named him after Stalin, the Premier refused to meet his son-in-law.
She married again two years later, to Yuri Zhadanov, son of Stalin’s second-in-command, Andrei Zhdanov, but the marriage didn’t last. She met her next love, Brajesh Singh, in 1963, 10 years after her father’s death. Although the two were never allowed to marry, they often referred to each other as husband and wife. Singh died three years later due to complications from various ailments, and Alliluyeva was allowed to take Singh’s ashes to his family in New Delhi, India. With her first taste of freedom, Svetlana went to the United States Embassy and asked for political asylum.
After moving to America, she wrote her autobiography, Twenty Letters to a Friend, denouncing her father’s regime and the Communist way of life. While here, she married William Wesley Peters, a top apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the couple had a daughter. After this marriage also ended in divorce, Svetlana and her daughter moved to the UK, then later back to the Soviet Union, where they were both, surprisingly, granted citizenship. However, they left again and bounced between the UK and the US throughout the 1980s and 90s.
She lived in obscurity until 2007, when filmmaker Lana Parshina tracked her down to record a series of interviews, resulting in the 2008 film, Svetlana About Svetlana. As of 2010, Joseph Stalin’s only daughter lives in a retirement home in southern Wisconsin.

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