True Stories #422 - William's Tell

William Patrick moved to Nazi Germany to make some money in the world of business...and blackmail.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. Well, it's been a few episodes since
I've talked about World War Two, but I'm going to
do another one because it is a great piece of history.
It's the story of William Patrick. He was born in Liverpool, England.

(00:26):
He would grow up to become a member of the
Allied Forces fighting the Nazis in World War Two. His
mother had seen the rise of German power and influence
during the thirties. Rather than warn her son about growing
authoritarianism and the Nazi threat, she instead encouraged William to
go back to earlier family roots, to move to Germany

(00:50):
and make money, which he did. He was an opportunist.
He got a job at the Reichsbank in Berlin. He
stayed there for most of them nineteen thirties. Then he
segued into sales. He worked for the opal automobile industry,
and he was pretty much living it up. He capitalized
on his success while so many others were suffering. He

(01:14):
shifted his weight to get what he wanted. He fooled
around with who knows how many women. He was living
the life, and yet he would become so noticeable, and
not in a positive way, that the power players in
Berlin became concerned. Adolf Hitler himself ordered spies to surveil him,

(01:34):
and William would soon find himself under arrest. He was
arrested in a German cafe and sent to leak to
Felder prison. Only pressure from the British embassy got William released,
but even then the German government turned up the heats.
They gave intense pressure for William to renounce his British

(01:55):
citizenship and become a Nazi Party member, and he refused,
but not for the noblest of reasons. I'm afraid his
plan was to try and blackmail the governments, and I'm
coming to that. In just a second January of nineteen
thirty nine, the newspaper Magnet William Randolph Hurst brought William

(02:17):
and his mother to the US to lecture on Germany
and its dictator. Then World War II began and William
and his mom were stranded in the United States. A
special request was made to President Roosevelt to give William
and his mother safe haven, and William was eventually approved
to join the United States Navy in nineteen forty four,

(02:40):
where he would serve out the rest of the war
as a military corman. There was not much that is
known about his service beyond a rumor that he was
wounded somewhere and received a purple heart after an honorable discharge.
William Patrick then changed his name. He became known in
the United States as Stuart Houston. He got married, moved

(03:05):
to New York, and he used his medical training to
start a business analyzing blood samples for hospitals. His office
was his house, which he called Brookhaven Laboratories. The couple
would have four sons, and William would live to the
age of seventy four, passing away on July fourteenth, nineteen

(03:25):
eighty seven. Now I know what you may be thinking.
All of this is relatively unremarkable, right. How many boys
became young men, became business men, became army men. Eighty
million Allied troops were part of the war effort to
defeat Nazi Germany in the nineteen forties, so many returned

(03:46):
home as William did. They found their financial footing, and
they raised their families. They lived for decades and died
in relative anonymity. What in the world would make William
so notable here? Well, that brings me back to one
of the reasons that William Patrick ended up on Adolf

(04:06):
Hitler's radar. You see, William had claimed he had the
goods on Hitler. He could confirm the long suspected rumor
that Hitler's paternal grandfather was a Jew, a Jewish merchant
who had gotten involved in an extramarital affair with Hitler's grandmother,

(04:27):
oh Man. If that information went public, it could be really,
really bad for the tyrant who had wanted all Jews
eradicated because they were subhuman. And then William tried to
blackmail Hitler with that information. He tried to fill his
own pockets through threats of scandal. We can be reasonably

(04:49):
convinced that if William had returned to Nazi Germany from
the US during the time of the Second World War,
he might not have been allowed to live. Instead, he
lived in America, and he served as a Navy corman
for America. He was on the side against Germany, against
the Nazis, against Hitler, a fact made all the more

(05:13):
interesting with the knowledge that William Patrick was born William
Patrick Hitler. William was Adolf Hitler's nephew, and that's a
true Story True Stories podcast dot com