Sticky salt water taffy


https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/09/23/how-does-dissolving-a-salt-molecule-in-water-make-its-atoms-ionize/

 

How does dissolving a salt molecule in water make its atoms ionize?

Category: Chemistry      Published: September 23, 2013

salt shaker
Public Domain Image, source: Christopher S. Baird.

Dissolving a salt molecule in water does not make its atoms ionize. The atoms in solid salts are already ionized long before touching water.

Electrons in an atom can only take on specific wave states, and only one electron can occupy one wave state at a time. As a result, electrons in an atom take different states, starting from the lowest energy state and going upwards in energy until the electrons have all found distinct states. For various reasons that are not worth mentioning here, electron states in atoms tend to form various groups, with the states in the same group having very similar energies and states. Chemists call these groups of electron states "shells", even though they have nothing to do with literal shells.

The interesting thing is that an atom with completely filled shells is very stable (all the available states in each group are occupied by electrons). On the other hand, an atom with its outermost shell only partially filled has a strong tendency to steal, lose, or share electrons from other atoms in order to fill its outermost shell and become stable. Such atoms are therefore chemically reactive. A well-known salt is sodium chloride (table salt), so let's use it as an example. A single neutral sodium atom has eleven electrons. Ten of these electrons fill states such that they form complete shells. The eleventh electron of sodium, however, is alone in the outermost, partially filled shell. Electrons are bound in atoms because their negative electric charge experiences electric attraction to the positive charge of the atom's nucleus. But for sodium, the negatively-charged electrons in the inner, completed shells do a good job of blocking, or screening, the attractive force of the nucleus on the eleventh electron. As a result, the eleventh electron of sodium is loosely bound to the atom and is ripe for being stolen by a more powerful atom.

In contrast, chlorine (17 electrons) has all of its shells filled with electrons except for its outermost shell which is one electron short of being complete. There is a very strong attraction by the chlorine atom on an outside electron which is needed to complete its shell. Sodium and chlorine are therefore a perfect match. Sodium has one electron it is not holding onto very strongly, and chlorine is looking for one more electron to steal to fill its shell. As a result, a pure sample of sodium reacts strongly with a pure sample of chlorine and the end product is table salt. Each chlorine atom steals an electron from the sodium atom. Each sodium atom now has 11 positive protons and 10 negative electrons, for a net charge of +1. Each chlorine atom now has 17 positive protons and 18 negative electrons for a net charge of -1. The atoms have therefore been ionized by the reaction that forms solid table salt, all without the presence of water. Both the sodium and the chlorine ions now have completely filled shells and are therefore stable. This is a good example of an atom that naturally has an unequal number of electron and protons.

The net positive sodium ion is now attracted to the net negative chlorine ion and this attraction forms what we call an "ionic bond". But, in reality, we don't have just one sodium ion sticking to ion chlorine ion. Instead, a lattice of many sodium ions ionically bonds to a lattice of chlorine ions, and we end up with a crystalline solid. Each sodium ion in the crystalline lattice of table salt is bound to the 6 nearest chlorine ions, and the same goes for each chlorine ion. The atoms in table salt are therefore already in the ionized state.

Adding water does not ionize the atoms in salt, because they are already ionized. Instead, the water molecules stick to the already formed ions in the salt. The textbook titled Cell and Molecular Biology: Concepts and Experiments by Gerald Karp states, "A crystal of table salt is held together by an electrostatic attraction between positively charged Na+ and negatively charged Cl ions. This type of attraction between fully charged components is called an ionic bond (or a salt bridge). Ionic bonds within a salt crystal may be quite strong. However, if a crystal of salt is dissolved in water, each of the individual ions becomes surrounded by water molecules, which inhibit oppositely charged ions from approaching one another closely enough to form ionic bonds." Each water molecule has a permanent dipole, meaning that one end is always slightly positively charged and the other end is always slightly negatively charged. The charged ends of the water molecules are so strongly attracted to the charged ions in the salt crystal that the water destroys the solid lattice structure of the salt and each sodium and chlorine ion becomes surrounded by a layer of sticky water molecules. In chemistry, we say the salt has been dissolved by the water. It's like a rock band exiting the limousine into a crowd of fans and becoming separated as each band member gets surrounded by his own circle of fans. If the atoms in solid salt were not ionized to begin with, the water would not do such a good job dissolving the salt.

Topics: atomatomsdissolveelectronionizeionssaltsolutionwater


Category: Chemistry      Published: September 23, 2013

salt shaker
Public Domain Image, source: Christopher S. Baird.

Dissolving a salt molecule in water does not make its atoms ionize. The atoms in solid salts are already ionized long before touching water.

Electrons in an atom can only take on specific wave states, and only one electron can occupy one wave state at a time. As a result, electrons in an atom take different states, starting from the lowest energy state and going upwards in energy until the electrons have all found distinct states. For various reasons that are not worth mentioning here, electron states in atoms tend to form various groups, with the states in the same group having very similar energies and states. Chemists call these groups of electron states "shells", even though they have nothing to do with literal shells.


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whence whence was whey

The Scarlet Letter

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Scarlet Letter
Title page for The Scarlet Letter.jpg
Title page, first edition, 1850
AuthorNathaniel Hawthorne
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreRomanticHistorical| Thriller|Supernatural
PublisherTicknor, Reed & Fields
Publication date
1850
813.3
TextScarlet Letter at Wikisource

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850.[1] Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalismsin, and guilt.

The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced books in the United States. It was popular when first published[2] and is considered a classic work of American literature.[1] The novel has inspired numerous film, television, and stage adaptations. Critics have described The Scarlet Letter as a masterwork,[3] and novelist D. H. Lawrence called it a "perfect work of the American imagination".[4]

Plot[edit source]

In this painting, The Scarlet Letter by Hugues Merle (1861), Hester Prynne and Pearl are in the foreground and Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth are in the background.

In Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, a crowd gathers to witness the punishment of Hester Prynne, a young woman who has given birth to a baby of unknown paternity. Her sentence requires her to stand on the scaffold for three hours, exposed to public humiliation, and to wear a scarlet "A" for the rest of her life. As Hester approaches the scaffold, many of the women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity. When commanded and cajoled to name the father of her child, Hester refuses.

As Hester looks out over the crowd, she notices a small, misshapen man and recognizes him as her long-lost husband, who had been presumed lost at sea. When the husband sees Hester's shame, he asks a man in the crowd about her and is told the story of his wife's pregnancy. He angrily exclaims that the child's father should also be punished for his immoral act and vows to find the man. He chooses a new name, Roger Chillingworth, to aid him in his plan.

The Reverend John Wilson and the minister of Hester's church, Arthur Dimmesdale, question her, but she refuses to name her lover. After she returns to her prison cell, the jailer brings in Chillingworth, now a physician, to calm Hester and her child with his roots and herbs. He and Hester have an open conversation regarding their marriage and the fact that they were both in the wrong. Chillingworth demands to know who fathered Hester's child, but Hester refuses to divulge that information. He accepts Hester's refusal, stating that he will find out the man's identity anyway. Chillingworth threatens to destroy the father of Hester's child if Hester ever reveals the fact that Chillingworth is her husband. Hester agrees to Chillingworth's terms, although she suspects she will regret it.

Following her release from prison, Hester settles in a cottage at the edge of town and earns a meager living with her needlework, which is of extraordinary quality. She lives a quiet, somber life with her daughter, Pearl, and performs acts of charity for the poor. She is troubled by her daughter's unusual fascination with the scarlet "A". The shunning of Hester also extends to Pearl, who has no playmates or friends except her mother. As she grows older, Pearl becomes capricious and unruly. Her conduct starts rumors, and, not surprisingly, the church members suggest Pearl be taken away from Hester. Hester, hearing rumors that she may lose Pearl, goes to speak to Governor Bellingham and ministers Wilson and Dimmesdale. Hester appeals to Dimmesdale in desperation, and the minister persuades the governor to let Pearl remain in Hester's care.

Because Dimmesdale's health has begun to fail, the townspeople are happy to have Chillingworth, the newly arrived physician, take up lodgings with their beloved minister. Being in close contact with Dimmesdale, Chillingworth begins to suspect that the minister's illness is the result of unconfessed guilt. He applies psychological pressure to the minister because he suspects Dimmesdale is Pearl's father. One evening, pulling the sleeping Dimmesdale's vestment aside, Chillingworth sees a symbol that represents his shame on the minister's pale chest.

Tormented by his guilty conscience, Dimmesdale goes to the square where Hester was punished years earlier. Climbing the scaffold in the dead of night, he admits his guilt but cannot find the courage to do so publicly in the light of day. Hester, shocked by Dimmesdale's deterioration, decides to obtain a release from her vow of silence to her husband.

Several days later, Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest and tells him of her husband and his desire for revenge. She convinces Dimmesdale to leave Boston in secret on a ship to Europe where they can start life anew. Inspired by this plan, the minister seems to gain new energy.

On Election Day, Dimmesdale gives one of his most inspired sermons. As the procession leaves the church, however, Dimmesdale climbs upon the scaffold, confesses his sin, and dies in Hester's arms. Later, most witnesses swear that they saw a stigma in the form of a scarlet "A" upon his chest, although some deny this statement. Chillingworth, losing his will for revenge, dies shortly thereafter and leaves Pearl a substantial inheritance.

After several years, Hester returns to her cottage and resumes wearing the scarlet letter. When she dies, she is buried near the grave of Dimmesdale, and they share a simple slate tombstone engraved with an escutcheon described as: "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules" ("A red letter A written on a black background").


Different ending same story

Klara Hitler

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  (Redirected from Klara Pölzl)
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Klara Hitler
Klara Hitler.jpg
Klara Hitler in the 1870s
Born
Klara Pölzl

12 August 1860
Died21 December 1907 (aged 47)
LinzAustria-Hungary (now Austria)
Resting placeTown Cemetery, Leonding
NationalityAustro-Hungarian
Known forMother of Adolf Hitler
Spouse(s)
(m. 1885; died 1903)
Children
Parent(s)
  • Johann Baptist Pölzl
  • Johanna Hiedler
RelativesJohann Nepomuk Hiedler (maternal grandfather)

Klara Hitler (née Pölzl; 12 August 1860 – 21 December 1907) was the mother of Adolf Hitlerdictator of Nazi Germany.

Family background and marriage[edit source]

Born in the Austrian village of Spital, WeitraWaldviertelAustrian Empire, her father was Johann Baptist Pölzl and her mother was Johanna Hiedler. Klara came from old peasant stock, was hard-working, energetic, pious, and conscientious. According to the family physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch, she was a very quiet, sweet, and affectionate woman.[1]

In 1876, 16-year-old Klara was hired as a household servant by her relative Alois Hitler, three years after his first marriage to Anna Glasl-Hörer. Although Alois' biological father is unknown, after his mother, Maria Schicklgruber, married Johann Georg Hiedler, Alois was officially designated as Hiedler's son. Klara's mother was Hiedler's niece Johanna Hiedler, who married Johann Baptist Pölzl, making Klara and Alois first cousins once removed.

Alois Hitler

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Alois Hitler
Alois Hitler in his last years.jpg
Hitler in 1901
Born
Alois Schicklgruber

7 June 1837
Died3 January 1903 (aged 65)
Gasthaus Wiesinger, LeondingUpper AustriaAustria-Hungary
Resting placeLeonding's town cemetery
OccupationCustoms officer
Spouse(s)
  • Anna Glasl-Hörer
    (m. 1873; died 1883)
  • Franziska Matzelsberger
    (m. 1883; died 1884)
  • (m. 1885)
Children9, including Alois Jr.AngelaAdolf and Paula
Parent(s)
RelativesHitler family

Alois Hitler (born Alois Schicklgruber;[1] 7 June 1837 – 3 January 1903) was an Austrian civil servant in the customs service, and the father of Adolf Hitlerdictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945.

Alois Schicklgruber was born out of wedlock. His mother was Maria Schicklgruber, but his biological father remains unknown. This uncertain parentage has led to claims that Alois's third wife, Klara (Adolf's mother), may have also been either Alois's first cousin once removed or his half-niece. Since Alois's father was unknown, Adolf Hitler could not prove the identity of his paternal grandfather and thus could not prove his own "Aryan descent" in accordance with Nazi racial doctrine.

Alois married his first wife, Anna, in 1873. In 1876, Alois convinced the Austrian local authorities to acknowledge his deceased stepfather Johann Georg Hiedler as his biological father. This meant that Klara legally became Alois's first cousin once removed.[2] Alois then legally changed his last name to that of his deceased stepfather Johann, but the authorities misspelled the last name as "Hitler" for unknown reasons.

Also in 1876, while Alois was still married to his second wife Franziska, he hired his relative Klara as a household servant, and began an affair with Klara. Their relationship continued in secrecy until Alois's second wife died and Klara became pregnant, which prompted Alois to marry her in 1885. According to a close friend, Alois was "awfully rough" with his wife Klara and "hardly ever spoke a word to her at home". Alois treated his children with similar contempt and often beat them.[3][4]

Early life[edit source]

Alois Hitler was born Alois Schicklgruber in the hamlet of Strones, a parish of Döllersheim in the Waldviertel of northwest Lower Austria; his mother was the 41-year-old unmarried peasant Maria Schicklgruber, whose family had lived in the area for generations. At his baptism in Döllersheim, the space for his father's name on the baptismal certificate was left blank and the priest wrote "illegitimate".[5][6][7] His mother cared for Alois in a house she shared with her elderly father, Johannes Schicklgruber.

Home of Johann Nepomuk Hiedler

Sometime later, a man named Johann Georg Hiedler moved in with the Schicklgrubers. He married Maria when Alois was five, and Maria died when Alois was nine. By the age of 10, Alois had been sent to live with Johann Georg Hiedler's younger brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who owned a farm in the nearby village of Spital (south of Weitra). Alois attended elementary school and took lessons in shoemaking from a local cobbler. Growing up in the same household with Alois was Johanna, the mother of his future wife Klara.[8]

At the age of 13, Alois left Johann Nepomuk Hiedler's farm in Spital and went to Vienna as an apprentice cobbler, working there for about five years. In response to a recruitment drive by the Austrian government offering employment in the civil service to people from rural areas, Alois joined the frontier guards (customs service) of the Austrian Finance Ministry in 1855 at the age of 18.

Uncertain identity of biological father[edit source]

Historians have proposed various candidates as Alois's biological father: Johann Georg Hiedler, his younger brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler (or Hüttler), and Leopold Frankenberger (a purportedly Jewish man, whose existence has never been found to be documented).[9] Johann Georg Hiedler became the stepfather of five-year-old Alois and many years later was posthumously declared the legal birth father of Alois.[10]

According to historian Frank McDonough, the most plausible theory is that Johann Georg Hiedler was actually the birth father. But the birth father may alternatively have been his younger brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. Regardless of how Nepomuk was related to Alois, if at all, Nepomuk was certainly the maternal grandfather of Alois’s third wife (Adolf Hitler’s mother) Klara.

Historian Werner Maser suggests that Alois's biological father was not Johann Georg Hiedler, but rather Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, who raised Alois through adolescence and later willed to Alois a considerable portion of his life savings, although he never publicly admitted to being Alois's natural father. According to Maser, Nepomuk was a married farmer who had an affair with Maria Schicklgruber and then arranged to have his single brother Johann Georg Hiedler marry Alois's mother Maria to provide a cover for Nepomuk's desire to assist and care for Alois without upsetting his wife.[11] If the theory is true, then Alois's third wife Klara was also Alois's half-niece, but Adolf Hitler biographer Joachim Fest believes that any attempts to pin down whether Johann Georg Hiedler or Johann Nepomuk Hiedler was Alois's father will "peter out in the obscurity of confused relationships marked by meanness, dullness, and rustic bigotry."[12]

In 1931 Adolf Hitler ordered the Schutzstaffel (SS) to investigate the rumors regarding his ancestry, and they found no evidence of any Jewish ancestors.[13] After the Nuremberg Laws came into effect in Nazi Germany, Hitler ordered the genealogist Rudolf Koppensteiner to publish a large illustrated genealogical tree showing his ancestry. This was published in the book Die Ahnentafel des Führers ("The Pedigree of the Leader") in 1937 and purported to show that Hitler's family were all Austrian Germans with no Jewish ancestry and that Hitler had an unblemished "Aryan" pedigree.[14][15] Alois himself had claimed Johann Georg Hiedler was his biological father, and a priest accordingly amended Alois's birth certificate in 1876, which was considered certified proof for Hitler's ancestry; thus Hitler was considered a "pure" Aryan.[14] 1876 was also the year when Alois hired 16-year-old Klara as a household servant.

Although Johann Georg Hiedler was considered the officially accepted paternal grandfather of Adolf Hitler by the Third Reich, the question of who his grandfather really was has caused much speculation, and the answer remains unknown.[16][17] As German historian Joachim Fest wrote:

The indulgence normally accorded to a man's origins is out of place in the case of Adolf Hitler, who made documentary proof of Aryan ancestry a matter of life and death for millions of people but himself possessed no such document. He did not know who his grandfather was. Intensive research into his origins, accounts of which have been distorted by propagandist legends and which are in any case confused and murky, has failed so far to produce a clear picture. National Socialist versions skimmed over the facts and emphasised, for example, that the population of the so-called Waldviertel, from which Hitler came, had been 'tribally German since the Migration of the Peoples', or more generally, that Hitler had 'absorbed the powerful forces of this German granite landscape into his blood through his father'.[18]

Following the war, Adolf Hitler's former lawyer, Hans Frank, claimed that Hitler told him in 1930 that one of his relatives was trying to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his alleged Jewish ancestry.[19] Adolf Hitler asked Frank to find out the facts. Frank says he determined that at the time Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to Alois, she was working as a household cook in the town of Graz, that her employers were a Jewish family named Frankenberger, and that her child might have been conceived out of wedlock with the family's 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger.[20]

Opponents of the Frankenberger hypothesis have asserted that all Jews had been expelled from the province of Styria – which includes Graz – in the 15th century, and that they were not officially allowed to return until the 1860s, when Alois was around 30. Also, there is no evidence of a Frankenberger family living in Graz at that time. Scholars such as Ian Kershaw and Brigitte Hamann dismiss the Frankenberger hypothesis, which had only Frank's speculation to support it, as baseless.[21][22][23][24]

Kershaw cites several stories circulating in the 1920s about Hitler's alleged Jewish ancestry, including one about a "Baron Rothschild" in Vienna in whose household Maria Schicklgruber had worked for some time as a servant.[8] Kershaw discusses and also lists Hitler's family tree in his biography of Adolf Hitler and gives no support to the Frankenberger tale, saying "The fact that Adolf Hitler had no Jewish blood in his veins, seems, from what has been his whole manner, so blatant to me that it needs no further word".[25][26] Further, Frank's story contains several inaccuracies and contradictions, such as the statement Frank had made that Maria Schicklgruber came from "Leonding near Linz", when in fact she came from the hamlet of Strones, near the village of Döllersheim.[27]

In 2019, gender psychologist Leonard Sax published a paper titled "Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler's paternal grandfather".[28] Sax claims that Hamann, Kershaw, and other leading historians relied, either directly or indirectly, on a single source for the claim that no Jews were living in Graz prior to 1856: that source was the Austrian historian Nikolaus von Preradovich, who Sax showed was a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler. Sax cited primary Austrian sources from the 1800s to demonstrate that there was in fact "eine kleine, nun angesiedelte Gemeinde" – "a small, now settled community" – of Jews living in Graz prior to 1856. Sax's article has been picked up by a number of news outlets[29] and Sax was interviewed by Eric Metaxas on this topic, on Metaxas' TV show.[30] Sax argued that one factor in Hitler's extreme antisemitism was "his intense need to prove" that he was not Jewish.[31] British historian Richard J. Evans dismissed Sax's arguments and claims and stated: "Even if there were Jews living in Graz in the 1830s, at the time when Adolf Hitler’s father Alois was born, this does not prove anything at all about the identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather."[31] Evans argued that speculation about Hitler's ancestry persists "because some people have found his deep and murderous anti-Semitism hard to explain unless there were personal motives behind it... This seems to be the motivation for Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychiatrist, not a historian, making his claims".[31]

Ron Rosenbaum suggests that Frank, who had turned against Nazism after 1945 but remained an anti-Semitic fanatic, made the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry as a way of proving that Hitler was a Jew and not an Aryan.[32]

genetic study that collected DNA of 38 living relatives of Hitler concluded that, with high probability, Hitler had E1b1b DNA haplogroup.[33] An author of the study stated:

I never wrote that [Adolf] Hitler was a Jew, or that he had a Jewish grandfather. I only wrote that Hitler's haplogroup is E1b1b, being more common among Afroasiatic speakers than among overall Germans.[34]

Following the death of Alois's second wife Franziska Matzelsberger in 1884, Klara and Alois married on 7 January 1885 in a brief ceremony held early in the morning at Hitler's rented rooms on the top floor of the Pommer Inn in Braunau am Inn.[2][3] Alois then went to work for the day at his job as a customs official.

Their first son, Gustav, was born four months later, on 17 May 1885. Ida followed on 23 September 1886. Both infants died of diphtheria during the winter of 1887–88. A third child, Otto, was born and died in 1887. A fourth son, Adolf, was born 20 April 1889.[4]

In 1892, Klara Hitler and her family took the train to Passau, where they settled down for the next two years.[5] Edmund was born there on 24 March 1894. Paula followed on 21 January 1896. Edmund died of measles on 28 February 1900, at the age of five.[6] Of her six children with Alois, only Adolf and Paula survived to adulthood.

Klara Hitler's adult life was spent keeping house and raising children, for whom, according to Smith, Alois had little understanding or interest. She was very devoted to her children and, according to William Patrick Hitler, was a typical stepmother to her stepchildren, Alois, Jr. and Angela.[1]

She was a devout Roman Catholic and attended church regularly with her children.[7]

Later life and death[edit source]

Klara Hitler, c. 1880s

When Alois died in 1903, he left a government pension. Klara sold the house in Leonding and moved with young Adolf and Paula to an apartment in Linz, where they lived frugally.

In 1906, Klara Hitler discovered a lump in her breast but initially ignored it. After experiencing chest pains that were keeping her awake at night, she finally consulted the family doctor, Eduard Bloch, in January 1907. She had been busy with her household, she said, so had neglected to seek medical aid. Bloch chose not to inform Klara that she had breast cancer and left it to her son Adolf to inform her. Bloch told Adolf that his mother had a small chance of surviving and recommended that she undergo a radical mastectomy. The Hitlers were devastated by the news. According to Bloch, Klara Hitler "accepted the verdict as I was sure she would – with fortitude. Deeply religious, she assumed that her fate was God's will. It would never occur to her to complain."[8] She underwent the mastectomy at Sisters of St. Mercy in Linz whereupon the surgeon, Karl Urban, discovered that the cancer had already metastasized to the pleural tissue in her chest. Bloch informed Klara's children that her condition was terminal. Adolf, who had been in Vienna ostensibly to study art, moved back home to tend to his mother, as did his siblings. By October, Klara Hitler's condition had rapidly declined and her son Adolf begged Bloch to try a new treatment. For the next 46 days (from November to early December), Bloch performed daily treatments of iodoform, a then experimental form of chemotherapy. Klara Hitler's mastectomy incisions were reopened and massive doses of iodoform-soaked gauze were applied directly to the tissue to "burn" the cancer cells. The treatments were incredibly painful and caused Klara's throat to paralyze, leaving her unable to swallow.[8][9]

The treatments proved to be futile and Klara Hitler died at home in Linz from the toxic medical side-effects of iodoform on 21 December 1907.[10] Klara was buried in Leonding near Linz.

Adolf Hitler, who had a close relationship with his mother, was devastated by her death and carried the grief for the rest of his life. Bloch later recalled that, "In all my career, I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler."[11][12] In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he had "honoured my father but loved my mother"[13] and said that his mother's death was a "dreadful blow".[11] Decades later, in 1940, Hitler showed gratitude to Bloch, who was Jewish, for treating his mother, by allowing him to emigrate with his wife from Austria to the United States, a privilege allowed to few other Jews in Austria.[14][15]

In 1941 and 1943, Bloch was interviewed by the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) to gain information about Hitler's childhood. He said that Hitler's most striking feature was his love for his mother:

While Hitler was not a mother's boy in the usual sense, I never witnessed a closer attachment. Their love had been mutual. Klara Hitler adored her son. She allowed him his own way whenever possible. For example, she admired his watercolor paintings and drawings and supported his artistic ambitions in opposition to his father at what cost to herself one may guess.

Bloch expressly denied the claim that Hitler's love for his mother was pathological.[16]

Alois and Klara's gravestone was removed in 2012

Bloch remembered Hitler as the "saddest man I had ever seen" when he was informed about his mother's imminent death. He remembered Klara as a very "pious and kind" woman. "Sie würde sich im Grabe herumdrehen, wenn sie wüsste, was aus ihm geworden ist." ("She would turn in her grave if she knew what became of him.") Office of Strategic Services, Hitler Source BookInterview With Dr. Eduard Bloch 5 March 1943

In 1934, Hitler honored Klara by naming a street in Passau after her.[17]


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