For decades, the Long Island Hitlers have been living quietly in the New York suburbs. Alexander (whose middle name is Adolf), Louis, and Brian Stuart-Houston—the family name was changed after the war first to Hiller and then to Stuart-Houston—are three of Adolf Hitler’s last surviving relatives, the grandsons of the Nazi dictator’s half-brother Alois Hitler Jr. Their father, William “Willy” Patrick Hitler, was born in Liverpool in 1911 and served in the U.S. Navy against Germany during the Second World War. Willy’s half-brother Heinz, who Alois had sired with his second wife, served in the Wehrmacht and purportedly died while a prisoner of the Soviets in 1942. Until recently, the Führer’s great-nephews have understandably declined to talk to the press.
I have had a mild obsession with the descendants of history’s great villains for years. As someone interested in both my own genealogy and history more generally, I wonder: Do they look like their ancestors? Do they sympathize with them? How do they cope with having a last name synonymous in the minds of millions with breathtaking evil?
Willy Hitler, of course, coped by changing the family’s surname, but he was not initially so reticent. He asked his uncle for work in 1933, and Hitler hooked him up with a bank job. Their relationship soured when Willy did several interviews as ‘Hitler’s English nephew.’ The enraged Führer chewed him out. Willy asked him for a better job and threatened to sell embarrassing family stories to the press if he failed to deliver, and the Führer asked him to give up his British citizenship. Instead, Willy returned to London, wrote an essay for Look magazine titled “Why I Hate My Uncle,” and headed to America in 1939, where William Randolph Hearst put him on the lecture circuit. In 1944, after petitioning President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he served in the U.S. Navy.
None of Hitler’s three great-nephews have had children, leading to speculation by journalist David Gardner in his 2001 book The Last of the Hitlers that a collective pact had been made to end the family bloodline (something Alexander has denied). If true, it wouldn’t be the only such pact—both Bettina Göring and her brother, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring’s great-niece and nephew, chose to be sterilized. “We both did it so there won’t be any more Görings,” she told the BBC. “When my brother had it done, he said to me: ‘I cut the line.’” Bettina hated her family resemblance to Hermann and left Germany for Santa Fe, New Mexico. “It’s easier for me to deal with the past of my family from this great distance,” she explained.
Many descendants of Benito Mussolini, on the other hand, have followed the dictator into politics. Granddaughter Rachele Mussolini won the most votes in Rome’s 2021 council elections; Alessandra Mussolini serves as a Member of the European Parliament for Forza Italia. Alessandra’s son and Il Duce’s great-grandson, referred to as ‘Mussolini Jr.’ by the Italian press, is a professional footballer who, perhaps predictably, plays right midfielder or right-back for Serie C club Pescara. He claims to have no interest in politics. Mussolini’s great-grandson, Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, a former naval officer and defense contractor, ran as a candidate in the European elections for the Brothers of Italy Party in 2019. The Mussolini name has frequently helped as much as hindered.
Stalin’s seed is more scattered. In 2016, the New York Post reported that “Stalin’s granddaughter is an all-American badass.” Chrese Evans, then 44, is a tattooed Buddhist running an antique shop in Portland, Oregon, and the daughter of Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. Svetlana defected to the U.S. from the USSR in 1966; Chrese was originally named Olga but changed it, and she recalls her mother telling her about the crimes of her grandfather. Two of Stalin’s great-grandsons, Vissarion and Jacob Jugashvili (the dictator’s original name before changing it to Stalin, which means ‘like steel’), have gone into the arts. Vissarion is a filmmaker, and Jacob is a well-known artist living in Moscow. He was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, where his father, Yevgeny, moved to escape the family legacy after Stalin’s death.
When I visited the Bucharest residence of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, his wife Elena, and their three children, Nicu, Zoia, and Valentin, from 1965 to 1989, the tour guide took us from the courtyard full of peacocks through the extravagant bedrooms and infamous gold-plated bathroom while regaling us with stories of what it was like to live under the communist regime. After anti-regime demonstrations spiraled out of control in December 1989, Nicolae and Elena were tried by the hastily formed extraordinary military tribunal on Christmas Day. The verdict had been drawn up in advance, and body bags were taken to the proceedings. The couple was shot minutes after sentencing, with the entire show trial and execution recorded by a cameraman.
Zoia was arrested on December 24 for “undermining the Romanian economy,” released eight months later, and had her house confiscated by the new government. Unable to get a job, she died of lung cancer at age 57 in 2006, with newspapers reporting that she’d lapsed into a wild lifestyle. Ceauşescu’s heir apparent, Nicu, was arrested the same day and sentenced to prison in 1990 for misuse of government funds. He was released in 1992 due to alcohol-induced cirrhosis and died in a Vienna hospital in 1996. A friend of Saddam Hussein’s murderous son Uday, an infamous serial rapist, Nicu was also accused of sexual crimes. Valentin, the sole surviving son, was released without charges and works as a physicist. Our tour guide insisted that he is a true Romanian patriot, untainted by his father’s legacy. (In 2009, the Romanian courts ruled that his art collection had been illegally confiscated after the Romanian Revolution and returned it to him.)
Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist dictator who launched the Cultural Revolution that wiped out tens of millions of his own people, has one known surviving grandson. Mao Xinyu was born in 1970 to Mao Anqing, one of the dictator’s ten children. In 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mao Xinyu was introducing his own son and daughter to their grandfather’s legacy through his short stories and poems. When asked if he would discuss their great-grandfather’s ‘mistakes,’ he tactfully told reporters that he would leave that task to the Chinese education system. “At the moment, they know they’re the fourth generation of Mao Zedong. We get them to recite Mao Zedong’s poems and we tell them short stories about Chairman Mao when he was the same age as them. They’re really interested.”
Being the child of a dictator is dangerous. Saddam Hussein’s repulsive sons Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay’s son Mustapha, were killed in a firefight with American forces in July 2003; his three daughters fled to Jordan, where they were granted asylum. Two of the sisters, Rana and Raghad, had been put under house arrest six years before for participating in a plot to assassinate Uday. Three of Muammar Gaddafi’s sons were killed during the Libyan civil war in 2011; one, Muatasem, was killed alongside his father. His daughter Aisha and son Muhammed disappeared and are reportedly in the Sultanate of Oman, with his widow fleeing to Cairo, where she currently lives. Hannibal Gaddafi was kidnapped in Syria by Lebanese security forces, and despite all family attempts to attain his release, he languishes in a Lebanese prison. Two sons remain—Saif al-Islam, who is purportedly still in Libya and wants to run for politics, and Al-Saadi, who lies in exile in Turkey. The family has not met since 2011.
Currently, the greatest amount of public interest is focused on the children of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Despite being in the international spotlight for decades, little is known about Putin’s children. It is generally accepted that he had two daughters with his first wife, flight attendant Lyudmila Shkrebneva, whom he divorced in 2013. The oldest, Maria Vorontsova, works as a medical researcher and endocrinologist and recently gave a rare TV interview. His second daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, is a former acrobatic dancer and works in the math research department at Moscow State University. According to The Moscow Times, “Putin has never publicly acknowledged Vorontsova and her younger sister Katerina Tikhonova as his daughters, while the Kremlin has kept details of their lives a closely guarded secret.”
Nobody knows how many Putin children there actually are. According to a 2023 report from Business Insider, Putin “has a brood of secret young children with his rumored gymnast girlfriend who are being raised in luxury similar to that of Russian Tsars, according to the investigative Russian outlet Proekt.” Proekt claims that Putin and the former Olympian Alina Kabaeva, who is thirty years his junior, have several children under the age of 18, including “at least one daughter,” and that some of them were born in Switzerland. Citing “anonymous sources and publicly available data,” Poekt claims that Putin “built a sprawling, 13,000-square-feet [Sic] wooden mansion for Kabaeva and the children in 2020, which is located only half a mile from his main private ‘golden palace’ residence in the town of Valdai.”
The complex features a “huge spa complex with a solarium, a cryo-chamber, a 25-meter swimming pool, a hamman, a sauna, a mud room, massage baths, cosmetology and dentistry areas.” According to Business Insider, “Since its construction, a boat dock, and a large children’s playground have also been built on the property. In the summers of 2021, and 2022, a small karting track was set also up for the children … The property also has a private and guarded railway station, which Putin and Kabaeva reportedly use to travel inconspicuously across the country. An unnamed source familiar with the operation of the Valdai facility told Proekt that the estate is the children’s main residence.” Other less substantiated reports claim that various affairs may have produced other children.
Many children of historic villains have sought reconciliation for the actions of their family members. Katrin Himmler, the great-niece of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, married an Israeli Jew. Monika Hertwig, the daughter of Nazi death camp commander Amon Goeth (portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List), has spoken out about her father’s crimes. Niklas Frank, the son of Poland’s brutal Nazi governor Hans Frank, gives lectures to young people to warn them of the dangers of neo-Nazism. Ricardo Eichmann, the son of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution kidnapped by the Mossad and executed in 1962 after a public trial, has publicly stated that his father’s hanging was justified.
Of all the stories of those who bear the burden of names tainted by evil, there is one that deserves to be better known: that of Albert Göring, Hermann’s brother. There are several books on his wartime exploits, the best of which is William Hasting Burke’s 2009 Thirty Four: The Key to Goring’s Last Secret. Albert despised the Nazis and worked to secure the release of at least 34 prominent Jews and other political prisoners from concentration camps—likely more. When the Nazis invaded Austria, Hermann was exultant, and Albert recalled that he “allowed everyone a wish. My sister and I asked for the release of the old archduke”—Archduke Joseph Ferdinand of the Habsburg dynasty. Hermann was “very embarrassed” but secured his release. After his 1945 arrest by the Allies, Albert wrote a list of those he had assisted, which included former Chancellor of Austria Kurt Schuschnigg.
The Allies were understandably suspicious of Albert’s claims, but they were soon verified. Kurt Pilzer, a Jew he had helped escape, wrote to the authorities from the U.S. to plead his case. Then, American interrogator Victor Parker, a Jewish refugee himself, discovered that his own aunt was on Albert’s list. Parker contacted her, and she affirmed that Albert had helped them flee Austria. When authorities in Prague accused Albert of being a Nazi collaborator due to his work as export manager at the Czech car company Skoda, members of the Czech resistance testified that Albert had given them information, encouraged sabotage, and even personally driven forced laborers out of the factory to assist their escape. In fact, Albert had even lobbied his brother to release prisoners from Dachau and forged Hermann’s signature on documents to facilitate the escape of Jews and other dissidents.
Despite Albert’s increasingly brazen acts of resistance, his brother protected him out of family loyalty. At one point, the Gestapo and the SS had four warrants out for his arrest, but Hermann prevented Albert’s incarceration. The Luftwaffe chief killed himself in his cell with cyanide in April 1946, the night before his scheduled execution at Nuremberg; his brother Albert was cleared of all crimes by a Czech court in 1947. But by all accounts, Albert remained haunted by his family’s legacy. He drank heavily, divorced four times, and died, unknown, in 1966. His acts of heroism went unrecognized until decades later. His one surviving child, Elizabeth Göring Klasa, lives in Peru. She was tracked down by BBC journalist Gavin Esler several years ago, and she told him what she knew about her father’s heroic and tragic life.
Of all the bearers of names associated with great evil, only Elizabeth can discuss her father with pride. Only she can smile when asked about her father and reply, “Let me tell you the story of the good Göring.”
