(Newser) – Back in 1910, when Sigmund Freud was decorating the walls of his Vienna offices, he may have bought a painting from a struggling young artist who was then peddling his work in Vienna: Adolf Hitler. The discovery of a tiny Hitler watercolor marked on the back with the name of Freud's medical practice, and the story told by the American GI who took the painting from Vienna to Italy after the war, suggest that the Jewish psychoanalyst may have even met the future Nazi dictator 100 years ago.



The story is historically plausible: Hitler and Freud were in Vienna at the same time, and the Viennese Jewish community is known to have helped Hitler sell his paintings and sketches, the Daily Telegraph reports. Almost 30 years later, the father of psychoanalysis fled the rising anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany to live the rest of his days in Britain. The painting is now being auctioned in the UK by its Italian owner.

(Read more Sigmund Freud stories.)

