Adolf
Note: I'll note again, this story is not meant to promote or glorify any historical figures or ideologies. Everyone is simply depicted as a human being.
In the stillness of a starry summer night, magic danced through the air of Germania's smallest concert hall. Young Adolf Hitler stood transfixed in its velvet shadows, watching as enchanted instruments played themselves, each note materializing as a gossamer thread of light before dissolving into the darkness. The violins wept, the brass thundered, and a seven-year-old boy discovered his first true love.
Die Walküre rose around him like a storm, building to heights that made his small chest ache with something beyond emotion. The empty rows of seats seemed to hold invisible audiences, generations of wizards and witches who had sat here before, listening to Wagner's magic unfold. At that moment Adolf felt that the music transformed him into something greater than himself.
His mother's footsteps echoed behind him, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the spectacle. The enchanted conductor's baton carved patterns of light in the air, each gesture bringing forth new colors, new textures of sound.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Klara's voice was hushed with reverence. Here in the concert hall, where in the years to come he would lose himself in the ancient tales of Siegfried and Kriemhild and Heroes and Valkyries, she seemed to shed the weariness that marked her days, transformed by these eternal stories into someone who didn't have to be afraid. Her cleaning supplies lay forgotten by the door. "That's Wagner, my dear. Richard Wagner."
"It's... it's like watching magic be born," Adolf whispered, reaching out as if he could catch the notes in his hands.
The piece reached its thunderous conclusion, and in the silence that followed, Adolf could hear his own heart beating. "Can we stay?" he asked, knowing they shouldn't – knowing his father would be home soon, expecting dinner and his evening drink. "Please, Mother? Just a little longer?"
Klara hesitated, her work-worn hands twisting in her apron. Adolf saw the familiar calculation in her eyes – how much time they had, how angry Alois would be, was it worth the risk? Finally, she drew her wand and touched it to the enchanted orchestral score.
"One more piece," she said, as the first notes of Götterdämmerung filled the air. "But then we must go."
Adolf nodded, already lost in the music again. But part of him remained aware of his mother standing behind him, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder.
Their cottage lay at the edge of what had once been a proud magical village, where crumbling manor houses stood as monuments to faded pure-blood glory. Adolf's bedroom window looked out over overgrown gardens where peacocks no longer strutted, past broken fountains that had once flowed with enchanted water. His mother's family had lived here for generations, though never in the grand houses. They had been the village healers, the wandmakers' apprentices, and in Adolf's mind, the careful keepers of pure blood and ancient traditions, even as poverty entrapped them deeper every generation.
Alois Hitler had come to the village as a minor Ministry official, tasked with managing the slow decline of what had once been a center of Germanic magical culture. His half-blood status should have made him an outsider, but he carried his Ministry authority like a shield, and when he set his sights on the young pure-blood witch who cleaned the village's concert hall, no one dared to object openly. Though there were always whispers.
These thoughts troubled Adolf's mind one morning as he sat at their battered kitchen table, watching his mother prepare breakfast without magic. She always put her wand away when she heard his father's heavy footsteps on the stairs, though she never explained why. The bacon sizzled in its pan, and Adolf counted the seconds until the storm would break.
"Where's my breakfast?" Alois's voice carried from the hall, thick with last night's drinking. "Lazy pure-blood witch, can't even have breakfast ready at a proper time..."
Adolf's hands clenched under the table as his father appeared in the doorway, already dressed in his Ministry robes but with his collar askew. Alois Hitler was not a tall man, but he filled rooms with his presence, sucking the air out from them like a Dementor.
"Good morning, husband," Klara said quietly, sliding a plate of bacon and eggs onto the table. "I'm sorry for the delay. I was just-"
"Just dawdling, as usual." Alois dropped heavily into his chair. "Boy! Stop slouching. Sit up straight when you're at table."
Adolf straightened his spine. Don't react, he told himself. Don't give him a reason. But even as he thought it, he felt the familiar pressure building behind his eyes – the magic that always threatened to burst forth when his father's voice took on that particular tone.
"And where were you two last night?" Alois stabbed his fork into the eggs with unnecessary force. "The concert hall again, I suppose? Wasting time with music when there's real work to be done. That's the trouble with you both - all this dreaming about art when you could be making something of yourselves like I did."
"Wagner isn't nonsense," Adolf said before he could stop himself. "He was a great wizard who-"
The crack of Alois's hand on the table made both Adolf and his mother flinch. "Wagner was a fool who wasted his life on music when he could have been doing real work! Like some others I could name."
The pressure behind Adolf's eyes increased. The water glasses on the table began to vibrate slightly. He could feel it building, the way it always did – the wild magic that wanted to make his father understand what it meant to be afraid...
"Adolf." His mother's voice cut through the roaring in his ears. "Go fetch some eggs from the henhouse, please."
It was her way of protecting him, giving him an escape before things got worse. But some days he didn't want to escape. He wanted to stay, to make his father see, to prove...
"Now, please," Klara said, and something in her tone made him rise from the table. As he left the kitchen, he heard his father's voice rise again, and the sound of something breaking.
The henhouse lay at the far end of their overgrown garden, past the spot where his dog Blondie lay dozing in the morning sun. Adolf's footsteps slowed as he approached, his rage gradually cooling in the fresh air. The hens clucked around his feet as he gathered eggs, and he forced himself to relax. To breathe slowly.
A noise made him look up. Through the weathered slats of the henhouse wall, he could see into the neighboring garden where Joseph Goebbels sat reading, his thin face intense with concentration. Their eyes met through the gap, and something passed between them – a recognition, perhaps, of shared understanding.
That afternoon, after his father had left for the Ministry and his mother had gone to clean at the concert hall, Adolf found himself sitting with Joseph in the shade of an ancient oak tree. The other boy's ever-present journal lay open between them, its pages filled with careful observations about their declining magical community.
"Did you hear about the Death Eater attack in Britain?" Joseph asked, his quill poised over a fresh page. "Father says they're fighting for pure-blood rights, for the old ways."
Adolf studied the boy's earnest face in the dappled shade, noting the complete absence of suspicion in those eager dark eyes. The Goebbels family had lived next door for years, had surely heard the rumours about Alois Hitler's heritage, yet they had chosen silence. Perhaps they saw what they wished to see - a neighbor's son who spoke passionately about pure-blood traditions, who could lose himself in Wagner's music as only a true heir of magical culture could. Or perhaps they simply understood that some things were better left unspoken.
Adolf nodded, thinking of the whispered conversations he sometimes overheard in the village. Voldemort. Death Eaters. Change was coming to old Europe, whether people wanted it or not.
"Some call them terrorists," Joseph continued, watching Adolf carefully. "But I think they understand things that others refuse to see. That our pure and ancient magic is being diluted. Voldemort and the Death Eaters are fighting to preserve true Wizarding culture."
"Wagner would have understood," Adolf said quietly, thinking of the essays he'd discovered in the library, hidden behind the musical scores. "He wrote about it – about how Mudblood influence was weakening our magic when we mixed with them, diluting the old traditions and commodifying our music."
Joseph's quill scratched across the page, recording every word.
The day Alois Hitler died remained etched in Adolf's memory. The Ministry owl arriving during dinner, the scroll bearing the official seal dropping onto their plates. Heart failure, the letter said. Found at his desk. No signs of foul play.
Adolf sat perfectly still at the kitchen table as his mother read the letter twice, three times, her hands trembling slightly. The remains of their dinner grew cold between them - boiled potatoes and cabbage, the same meal they had every Wednesday. He watched a drop of gravy congeal on his plate and felt oddly detached from the moment, as if viewing it through clouded glass.
"Dear one," Klara said finally, her voice strange and distant. "I must go to... there are arrangements..." She trailed off, staring at something beyond the kitchen's worn walls.
That night, alone in his narrow bed, Adolf waited for tears that didn't come. Blondie whined softly from her spot on the floor, sensing his distress, but he couldn't bring himself to reach down and comfort her.
The funeral was held three days later in the village's small cemetery. Mist clung to the ancient headstones, turning the pure-blood family plots into islands in a grey sea. Adolf stood beside his mother, aware of every eye upon them - the whispers, the calculated sympathy, the careful distance maintained by the Ministry officials who had worked with his father.
Joseph came with his parents, standing slightly apart from the main group. Adolf caught his friend scribbling in his journal during the service and felt a sudden, irrational surge of gratitude. Someone was recording this moment, making it real in a way that the official speeches and formal condolences couldn't manage.
It wasn't until much later, when the house had grown quiet and dark, that the tears finally came. They caught him by surprise as he lay in bed, starting as a tight pressure in his chest that erupted into great, wracking sobs. He pressed his face into his pillow, trying to muffle the sound, but his mother must have been listening for just such a moment.
Klara's arms encircled him, pulling him close as she had when he was small. She smelled of cleaning potions and grief, and something in Adolf broke at the familiar scent. "I hated him," he choked out. "But I didn't want... I never meant..."
"Shhh, darling," she murmured, rocking him gently. "It's alright to feel everything you're feeling. All of it. You don't have to choose."
But he did have to choose, didn't he? The world was dividing itself into clear lines. He read about it every day. Pure-blood and mischling, those who would shape the future and those who would be shaped by it. His father's death felt like a door closing between two possible versions of himself, and Adolf knew which side he needed to be on.
The months that followed took on a dreamlike quality. Without Alois's presence darkening their rooms, the cottage seemed to breathe more easily. Klara smiled more often, though sometimes Adolf caught her looking at him with an expression he couldn't quite read.
They still went to the concert hall in the evenings, but now they no longer had to hurry home. Adolf would close his eyes as Wagner's music swirled around them, imagining himself conducting vast magical orchestras, reshaping the world through pure will and power. Joseph often joined them, his quill scratching quietly as he tried to capture the music in words.
These were good months as far as it went. But at night, Adolf would lie awake, his thoughts not leaving him alone. His father's death had left questions unanswered. Who had Alois Hitler really been? What secrets had he carried to his Ministry grave? It didn't really matter. He was impure. And that, Adolf decided, was the cause of his behavior toward him and mother. Hadn't Wagner said in Mudbloods in Music that it took 6 generations to erase the muggle taint once it polluted a bloodline? 6 generations. Adolf thought about that, but not too deeply.
He threw himself into study, devouring every book he could find about magical genealogy and history. Joseph helped, bringing volumes from his family's small library. Together they traced bloodlines and studied the great pure-blood families of Germania, constructing elaborate theories about magical power and its relationship to blood purity.
It was on one of these research expeditions that Adolf discovered a revelation in the Goebbels family library: Grindelwald's War: A New Historical Perspective. Here, finally, was the truth - carefully documented with impeccable references and sources, showing how Grindelwald's opponents had twisted and distorted him beyond recognition. The author had done what no one else dared, gathering evidence that proved how much of what was claimed about Grindelwald's methods had been invented by his enemies.
Adolf found himself returning to it again and again, each reading deepening his understanding. Here was proof that the accepted version of history was built on lies - that those who sought to preserve magical tradition had been deliberately painted as villains by the backstabbers brought to power after the war. Joseph seemed to understand too, and they would spend hours discussing the book.
The morning his Hogwarts letter arrived, Adolf was already awake, watching the sun rise over the yellow-green fields. The tawny owl swooped through his open window just as the first rays touched the broken fountain in their garden. His hands didn't shake as he broke the seal, but something in his chest constricted at the sight of the green ink, the ancient crest, the promise of possibility.
"Mother!" he called, his voice carrying through the quiet house. "It's here!"
Klara appeared in his doorway, still in her dressing gown, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. For a moment, watching her face light up with pride and love, Adolf felt a stab of guilt about the carefully constructed lie he had been building - the pure-blood identity he would claim at Hogwarts. But then he remembered Wagner's essays, the truth about power and blood and destiny, and the guilt subsided.
"My wonderful boy," Klara said, gathering him close. "Of course it came. I never doubted." She pulled back slightly, studying his face. "Perhaps Gryffindor, do you think? You have such courage, such fire..."
"Gryffindor like Father?" The words slipped out before he could stop them, sharp-edged and bitter.
"No," Klara said firmly. "Like yourself. Only yourself."
But they both knew that wasn't quite true. Adolf had spent too many hours studying his reflection, looking for traces of his father in his features. He had his mother's dark hair and her striking blue eyes, thank Merlin, but sometimes he caught expressions crossing his face that reminded him too much of Alois - a certain set to his jaw, a way of looking at the world as if it owed him something.
The morning they were to leave for King's Cross dawned clear and cool. Adolf woke early to find his mother already in the kitchen, pressing his second-hand robes with careful wandwork, making them appear as close to new as possible.
"No one will know," Klara promised, smoothing a wrinkle with gentle fingers. "And it doesn't matter anyway. Your worth isn't in your robes or your..."
"I know, Mother," Adolf cut her off, not unkindly. He didn't want to hear her naive speech about inner worth or the unimportance of appearances again. He knew how the world really worked.
They apparated to King's Cross together, arriving in a designated area away from muggle eyes. The station was already crowded with families saying goodbye, the air thick with steam from the scarlet engine. Adolf spotted Joseph immediately, standing with his parents near the front of the train.
"Write to me tonight," Klara said, straightening his collar one last time. "Let me know... let me know where you end up."
"I will." He hugged her quickly, breathing in her familiar scent, then let Joseph pull him toward the train.
They found a compartment already occupied by two boys - one heavyset but carrying himself with aristocratic ease, the other thin and bespectacled, his wire-rimmed glasses catching the morning light. A copy of the Daily Prophet lay open between them, its headlines showing another Death Eater attack in Yorkshire.
"Fascinating reading," the heavyset boy remarked, looking up as they entered. His robes were clearly new and clearly expensive. "The way they're reshaping our world, don't you think? I'm Hermann Göring, by the way. And this is Heinrich Himmler."
Himmler's eyes narrowed behind his glasses as he studied them with clinical interest. A piece of parchment covered in careful genealogical notations lay partially visible beneath the newspaper. "Pure-bloods?" he asked without preamble.
The question hung in the air for a heartbeat. Adolf felt the familiar lie rise to his lip. "Of course," he said, watching Himmler's expression. Beside him, Joseph nodded eager confirmation.
Something in the compartment seemed to shift. Himmler's posture relaxed slightly as he pulled out more of his genealogical charts, eager to share his research. Göring lounged back in his seat with affected casualness, but his eyes remained sharp and evaluating.
"The problem," Himmler began, his finger tracing lines of descent on his parchment, "is the systematic dilution of our magical heritage. I've been tracking the rise in mixed marriages since the turn of the century." He began to pull out more charts from a notebook. "Look at these genealogies. Even the Sacred Twenty-Eight aren't immune anymore. The Ollivander line, for example, can no longer be classified as pure-blood even by the loosest modern standards..."
Adolf leaned forward despite himself, studying the careful notations. Despite the pedantic tone, there was a strain of genuine despair in Himmler's voice that he recognized.
"It's not just the marriages," Göring added, shifting his bulk forward. "My father says the Ministry's been compromised ever since Blum took power. More Mudbloods in the Wizengamot every other year. Now Eisner's leading them there, obstructing Minister Malfoy at every turn." He gestured at the newspaper. "At least someone's finally taking action."
"Exactly true. The Death Eaters," Joseph breathed, his quill scratching rapidly. "They see what's happening. They understand what needs to be done."
Adolf watched the others carefully. This was somewhat delicate - too much eagerness shown would seem desperate but too little would lose their interest. "Understanding isn't enough," he said quietly. "Lord Voldemort is fighting valiantly, but we need to think about the deeper war."
Himmler looked up from his charts. "What do you mean?"
"We'll be at school now. This is where it starts - where the corruption begins. Under Dumbledore, pure-blood children are taught to forget and despise their own noble heritage." Adolf's voice grew stronger as he saw their attention focus. "We need to preserve our culture here and now. Before it's too late."
"An alliance!" Joseph suggested, looking up from his writing. His eyes shone with his familiar fervor. "A group dedicated to our cause. We could call it Hitler's Heroes! Or maybe the Hitler Youth?"
Adolf's face reddened slightly as he caught Göring's slight grimace, Himmler's raised eyebrow. Even after years of friendship, Joseph's devotion could still be somewhat overwhelming on occasion. "No," he said quietly, but with enough authority to draw all eyes to him. "We need something more meaningful. More ancient."
He paused. "Something that reaches back to the source of pure magic itself." He thought of Wagner and his operas connected to something primordial in Wizard-kind, and the composer's writings on the lands of Ultima Thule where magic had first emerged untainted into the world.
"We'll be..." He let the pause stretch dramatically. "The Thulean Knights."
A moment of silence followed as they considered this. Adolf could see them testing the name in their minds, weighing its implications.
"Knights," Göring mused, nodding slowly. "I like that. Has the right sort of... dignity to it."
"We should call ourselves the Atlantean Knights," Himmler interjected, already pulling out fresh parchment, his eyes gleaming with academic excitement. "All pure wizarding bloodlines can be traced back to Atlantis, you know. The historical evidence gathered by Ignatius Donnelly clearly shows-"
"Thulean Knights has a better ring to it," Göring said with a slight smirk. "And less, ah, theoretical anyway."
"But the historical evidence-" Himmler began again, but Adolf cut him off.
"Thulean Knights," he said with quiet authority. "We can discuss the precise origins of magic another time," he declared solemnly.
Himmler muttered something but agreed. Joseph's quill was flying across the page of his journal as he documented the moment. "Perfect," he breathed. "And you'll lead us, won't you, Adolf? You'll show us the way forward?"
"Yes," Adolf said, his voice building in intensity. "I'll lead us."
He leaned forward then, shadows from the passing countryside dancing across his features. The Daily Prophet's photographs moved beneath his fingers - dark smoke coiling above Yorkshire rooftops, the skull-and-serpent constellation burning against a twilight sky. Something shifted in his expression, the careful mask of control giving way to something deeper, more primal.
"Look at this," Adolf breathed, his words carrying a fervor that made even Göring sit straighter. "While the Ministry debates and dithers, Voldemort acts. The Death Eaters understand what others won't admit - that sometimes the world must be broken before it can be remade. This is how real change begins, through blood and iron and-"
The compartment door slid open.
Two girls stood framed in the entrance - one dark-haired and watchful, the other blonde with eyes like alpine ice. Adolf's voice died in his throat. The blonde girl carried herself with the effortless grace of old blood and ancient magic. But daring to gaze into her eyes for a moment, before quickly looking away, he decided she was more than that. She was a Valkyrie out of the Sagas.
"Oh," the dark-haired girl said, pausing at the threshold. "Sorry - we're looking for a compartment." Her gaze traveled from the newspaper to Hitler's still-raised hand, then to Himmler's genealogical notes and Joseph's ever-present journal.
"Plenty of room," Göring offered with practiced charm, shifting to make space on the seats. Though his tone was welcoming, his eyes kept darting to the Daily Prophet with poorly concealed excitement. "We were just discussing recent events. I'm Hermann Göring, and these are Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and-"
"Adolf Hitler," Adolf managed, his earlier enthusiasm dampened by a sudden, desperate desire to make a different sort of impression. He looked down at his feet.
"Daphne Greengrass," the blonde girl replied with cool courtesy. "And this is Tracey Davis." Her eyes lingered on the Prophet's headlines - another family disappeared, the Dark Mark floating above their home. "You seem... passionate about current events."
"They're reshaping our world," Himmler interjected eagerly, already reaching for his charts. "We've just formed an organization dedicated to-"
"The Thulean Knights," Goebbels added with pride, his quill poised to record this moment for posterity. "Under Adolf's leadership, we'll-"
"I think we'll keep looking," Tracey interrupted, exchanging a pointed look with Daphne. "I believe I saw some empty compartments further down."
Daphne's gaze met Adolf's for a brief moment. He saw in her ice-blue eyes not just dismissal, but something worse: assessment and found wanting. Then she turned away, the movement as elegant as it was absolute. "Indeed. Good day, gentlemen."
As they walked away, their voices carried back faintly down the corridor. "Well, that was something," Tracey remarked. "Hitler and his little knights, swooning over Death Eater attacks..."
"Rather tells you all you need to know, doesn't it?" Daphne replied, her tone suggesting the matter was settled.
Adolf wanted to call after them, to explain that they had misunderstood, that they hadn't heard the full symphony of his ideas, only discordant fragments. But the words wouldn't come. Instead, he watched them disappear down the corridor, Daphne's swift dismissal hanging in the air.
"Well," Göring drawled into the silence that followed, "that could have gone better."
But Adolf barely heard him. His mind was already spinning with possibilities, with ways to prove himself worthy of notice. He would make her see. He would make them all see.
"Greengrass," Himmler supplied, already consulting his notes with scholarly satisfaction. "I took the liberty of investigating as many of our soon to be classmates' bloodlines as I could," he explained. "The blonde one, Greengrass. Pure-blood family, very old line. The other is Davis. Half-blood." He spoke the last word with careful distaste, like a potioneer identifying a contaminated ingredient.
Adolf barely heard him, still staring at the closed compartment door. Something had shifted inside him, some certainty taking root. He would prove himself worthy of notice - more than worthy. He would reshape their world into what it should be.
"Tell me more about the Greengrass family, Himmler," he said finally, turning back to his Knights.
The train rushed onward through the wild British countryside. In their compartment, four boys bent their heads together over Joseph's journal, planning to restore what they saw as fallen greatness, while somewhere ahead of them, Daphne dismissed them from her thoughts entirely.
Adolf smiled slightly, already imagining how that would change. Everything would change. He would make sure of it. He would fight for it. Those who didn't fight in this world of eternal struggle, didn't deserve to live as far as he was concerned.
In his pocket, his mother's last letter pressed against his heart like a warning. But he pushed that thought away. The music in his head was only Wagner now, drowning out softer melodies with its thunder of mythic destiny.