Stefanie Rabatsch (née Isak; born 28 December 1887) was an Austrian woman of the upper-middle class known for being the unrequited love subject of Adolf Hitler, the future leader of the Nazi Party and dictator of Nazi Germany, when he was a teenager. Her Jewish-sounding maiden name has been subject to much speculation.

Stefanie Rabatsch (née Isak) was the object of Adolf Hitler's love when he was a teenager. August Kubizek, a close childhood friend and later biographer of his childhood experience with Hitler, wrote about this in his memoirs, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (Adolf Hitler, My Childhood Friend; published in English as The Young Hitler I Knew). However, Stefanie Rabatsch stated in interviews that she was unaware of Hitler's feelings.

Background

According to Kubizek, Hitler's passion for Stefanie began in spring 1905, when he was 16 and attending school in Linz, and lasted four years, until he was 20. Kubizek wrote that Hitler often admired Stefanie Isak, as she then was, whom he describes as "a distinguished-looking girl, tall and slim", and would hang about the Landstrasse (country road) near the main street of Urfahr, the suburb where she lived and to which Hitler's mother later moved from Leonding. When Hitler's mother died, the funeral procession went through Urfahr to Leonding and Kubizek remarks that Hitler said he had seen Stefanie at the funeral procession behind her window, stating he had found consolation in that. During the Nazi era, Kubizek's book was heavily cut, especially the details of Hitler's passion for Stefanie.

Interaction with Hitler

According to Kubizek, Hitler never spoke to Stefanie, always saying he would do so "tomorrow", and loathed those who flirted with her, especially the military officers, whom he called "conceited blockheads"; he came to feel an "uncompromising enmity towards the officer class as a whole, and everything military in general. It annoyed him intensely that Stefanie mixed with such idlers who, he insisted, wore corsets and used scent". Since Hitler disliked dancing, once he learnt that Stefanie loved to dance, he said, "Once Stefanie is my wife, she won't have the slightest desire to dance!"

Kubizek further states: "Stefanie had no idea how deeply Adolf was in love with her; she regarded him as a somewhat shy, but nevertheless remarkably tenacious and faithful, admirer. When she responded with a smile to his inquiring glance, he was happy and his mood became unlike anything I had ever observed in him. But when Stefanie, as happened just as often, coldly ignored his gaze, he was crushed and ready to destroy himself and the whole world." He finally planned to kidnap Stefanie and kill both her and himself by jumping off a bridge into the Danube. Instead he moved to Vienna, where an idealised image of Stefanie became his moral touchstone.

Rabatsch stated in later interviews that she was unaware of Hitler at the time, but that she had received an anonymous love letter asking her to wait for him to graduate and then to marry him, which she only realised after being questioned about him, must have been from Hitler. She married an Austrian army officer, and after the Second World War lived in Vienna. She was interviewed and Hitler's love for her dramatised in a 1973 Austro-German television documentary written by Georg Stefan Troller and directed by Axel Corti.

Scholarly reaction

Ian Kershaw, the biographer of Hitler, in whose judgement Kubizek's book had the assistance of a ghostwriter, considers the story of Stefanie exaggerated.