A Jewish woman in the United Kingdom recently opened up about what it was like to be the neighbor of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in Munich, Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s.
Alice Frank Stock, 101, told the Daily Mail that she lived several doors away from Hitler in an apartment building on Prinzregentplatz in Munich but rarely saw him, usually only when he entered the building.
“I saw him once or twice coming home, too. His car would draw up. Two SS men would jump out and stand on either side, and he would rush up to the house, terrified obviously of someone who would try and kill him,” she recalled. “I never spoke to him.”
Stock remembered seeing a coffin being removed from Hitler’s apartment and thinking it belonged to his niece, Geli Raubal, who lived with him and committed suicide there in 1931. Hitler was reportedly in a relationship with her, the daughter of his half-sister.
“I think a niece of Hitler’s was living there and then she died,” said Stock. “There was speculation of how and when she died. I think there was truth in it that the coffin was carried out and in it was a woman. But there was no confirmation ever, and you couldn’t talk openly” about it.
She also recalled her family’s Catholic and “anti-Hitler” cook once saying that Hitler “should be hanged.”
Stock warned her: “You’ll get us all into a concentration camp.”
Stock went to Switzerland when she was 17 because of the growing threat against Jews in Germany, and then to the United Kingdom, where her parents joined her as they fled persecution in Germany shortly before the start of World War II. The family was forced to sell a 200-year-old violin to secure the funds necessary for a permit to be with Stock.
