The Jew of Linz is a 1998 book by Australian writer Kimberley Cornish, in which the author alleges that the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound effect on Adolf Hitler when they were both pupils at the Realschule (lower secondary school) in Linz, Austria, in the early 1900s. Cornish also alleges that Wittgenstein was involved in the Cambridge Five Soviet spy ring during the Second World War. Contents Summary The occasion for Adolf Hitler becoming anti-Semitic was a schoolboy interaction in Linz, circa 1904, with Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the 1920s, Wittgenstein joined the Comintern. As a Trinity College don, and a member of the Cambridge Apostles, Wittgenstein recruited fellow Apostles Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, all students at Trinity—as well as Donald Maclean from nearby Trinity Hall—to work for the Soviet Union. Wittgenstein was responsible for the secret of decrypting the German "Enigma" code being passed to Joseph Stalin, which resulted ultimately in the Nazi defeats on the Eastern Front and liberation of the surviving Jews from the camps. Both Hitler's oratory and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language derive from the hermetic tradition, the key to which is Wittgenstein's "no-ownership" theory of mind, described by P. F. Strawson in his book Individuals (1958). Realschule Cornish used a school photograph from the Realschule (lower secondary school) in Linz, Austria, on his book cover. That boy in the top-right corner is undisputedly Hitler (see above right). Cornish alleges that Wittgenstein is the boy on the bottom left; he says the Victoria Police photographic evidence unit in Australia examined the photograph and confirmed that it was "highly probable" the boy is Wittgenstein. German government and U.S. sources date the photograph to 1901, slightly after Hitler's arrival at the school, but two years prior to Wittgenstein's enrollment. Wittgenstein and Hitler both attended the Linz Realschule, a state school of about 300 students, and were there at the same time only from 1903 to 1904, according to Wittgenstein's biographers. While Hitler was just six days older than Wittgenstein, they were two grades apart at the school—Hitler was repeating a year and Wittgenstein had been advanced a year. Cornish's thesis is not only that Hitler knew the young Wittgenstein, but that he hated him, and that Wittgenstein was specifically the one Jewish boy from his school days referred to in Mein Kampf. The last claim referred to the following quote: Cornish argues further that