On Easter Saturday, 20 April 1889, in the small Upper Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, where they lived in a rented apartment above a tavern, a child whom they named Adolf was born to Alois and Klara Hitler. The couple had already had two children, a boy, Gustav, and a girl, Ida, both of whom had died very young, bringing their parents immeasurable grief. And so, on her surviving son Klara resolved to devote all her love and maternal care.
It is impossible to imagine Hitler’s rise to power had he retained his father’s original surname of Schicklgruber. The image of hundreds of thousands of Germans raising their right arms and shouting ‘Heil Schicklgruber!’ is not only laughable, it is impossible. Such is the power of a name.
Alois was born in Döllersheim, Lower Austria, in 1837 to an un married farmer’s daughter called Maria (or Marie) Anna Schicklgruber; the identity of his father remains unknown. Five years after Alois’s mysterious birth, Maria Anna married a poor, fifty-year-old miller’s assistant called Johann Georg Hiedler. After her untimely death in 1847, the care of Alois was entrusted to Georg’s wealthy younger brother, a farmer in the nearby village of Spital called Johann Nepomuk, who spelled his surname Hüttler (it was commonplace at the time to find different spellings of the same family name).
In 1876, when Alois was thirty-nine, and with his family’s support, he discarded his unfortunate surname and replaced it with a variant of his foster father’s. He would henceforth be known as Alois ‘Hitler’, a name of fourteenth-century Germanic-Czech origins meaning ‘small-holder’. Alois’s decision had little to do with his career ambitions: to that point, ‘Schicklgruber’ had not hindered his progress as a respected customs official. More likely, he adopted the surname to secure his legitimacy – and thus his inheritance – and to distance himself and his family from their impoverished past. The Schicklgrubers had been poor farmers and his mother and Georg so short of money that they were forced, at times, to sleep in a cattle trough.
In early 1879 Nepomuk and three other witnesses made official the lie that Alois Hitler was the legitimate son of ‘Georg Hitler’, as inscribed in the entry in the parish registry at Döllersheim. And so the greatest impediment to Adolf’s future prospects as a politician was struck from the record and the boy’s father pronounced ‘legitimate’.
The identity of Alois’s true father (and Adolf’s paternal grandfather) remains a mystery. Some believe Alois was the product of a love affair between Maria Anna and Johann Nepomuk, who, just to complicate matters, happened to be Klara’s grandfather. If true, that would have made Hitler’s mother a blood relation to Alois, and Hitler the offspring of an incestuous relationship. Another widespread belief is that Alois’s father was an itinerant Jew who had slept with Maria Anna on his way through town. Despite there being no evidence, Hitler’s ‘Jewish grandfather’ remains a popular myth, wrongly believed to this day.
Alois Hitler, a dutiful government functionary, was among those German-speaking Austrians who tended to feel ‘more German than the Germans’ in the ethnic chaos of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its eleven nationalities, nine different languages and several religions. He was respectable, even charming, in public, but in private he turned into a humourless boor, absorbed in ruling his domestic dictatorship when he wasn’t visiting the local tavern. He was ‘an authoritarian, domineering, overbearing husband,’ writes Kershaw, ‘and a stern, distant, masterful and often irritable father.’1 If he seems a domestic tyrant by today’s standards, however, back then he was fairly typical of his time. He was also a responsible, status-proud provider, with a passion for beekeeping.
Restless and itinerant, Alois was often on the move, changing homes and villages and dragging his family with him. In 1892, when Adolf was three years old, Alois was promoted to Higher Collector of Customs, a position of some prestige, and the family moved to Passau in Bavaria, on the German side of the border, imbuing Adolf’s speech with a German accent. In the same year, the family suffered a further tragedy: another son, Otto, was born, and died after only seven days. Klara, a devoted mother, felt the blow especially hard.
Klara Hitler (née Pölzl) was twenty-three years younger than Alois and his third wife. He had two children from his second marriage, Alois Jr and Angela, who lived with the family in the 1890s after the death of their mother. While Klara did her best to involve them, they felt excluded and neglected as young Adolf received the lion’s share of her affection. In 1943, Alois Jr’s son Patrick complained that Adolf had been ‘spoiled from early in the morning until late at night, and the stepchildren had to listen to endless stories about how wonderful Adolf was.’2 Alois Jr left the family home at fourteen, and Angela married when she was twenty.
Alois and Klara had met when she worked as his housemaid. A modest village girl, she was a soft, put-upon woman, with neatly plaited brown hair, ‘beautifully expressive grey-blue eyes’,3 and a quiet, if ineffectual, persistence. She would try to defend her son from her husband’s rages, and took Adolf’s side when he disobeyed Alois’s edicts, as he would increasingly do as he grew older, provoking occasional beatings and stormy scenes. Much has been made of Hitler’s father’s violence, but there is no evidence that his beatings were any harsher than most little boys received at the time.
In this atmosphere, the mother’s protective love offered a warm and smothering refuge for her son. Hitler himself would recall, in Mein Kampf, being his ‘mother’s darling’ and living in a ‘soft downy bed’.4 He more than reciprocated her love, according to the family’s Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch. ‘Outwardly his love for his mother was his most striking feature,’ Dr Bloch later wrote. ‘I have never witnessed a closer attachment.’5 August Kubizek, the only friend of Hitler’s youth, would similarly observe: ‘Adolf really loved his mother … I remember many occasions when he showed this love for his mother, most deeply and movingly during her last illness; he never spoke of his mother but with deep affection … When we lived together in Vienna he always carried his mother’s portrait with him.’6
In 1894, when Adolf was five, Klara gave birth to another son, Edmund, and in 1896 to a girl, Paula. Deprived of his status as his mother’s favourite, young Adolf grew sullen and resentful. He absorbed himself in the western novels of Karl May. He adored Old Shatterhand, May’s greatest hero, and the American Indian leader Winnetou. He flung himself into games of cowboys and Indians, an activity that he kept up well into adolescence, long after his peers had turned their minds to sport or girls. Bereft of friends his own age, Adolf would recruit younger boys into his ‘tribe’ and impel them to play.
Hitler would invoke the memory of May throughout his life. The popular storyteller was a kind of mentor: ‘[W]hen faced by seemingly hopeless situations,’ Albert Speer later wrote, ‘[the adult Hitler] would still reach for these stories [because] they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.’7
In late 1898 the family moved into a small house next to the cemetery in the village of Leonding, just outside Linz (destined to be a Nazi shrine in years to come). One of his earliest sketches, ‘Our Bedroom’, suggests in its title that the entire family crowded into two single beds. In fact, this was Adolf and Paula’s room, where each morning he dreaded the prospect of his sister kissing him, as their mother had urged her to do. His brother, Edmund, slept with his parents. The boy died of measles in 1900, aged six, restoring Adolf’s status as his mother’s only son.
By the age of twelve Hitler had grown into an emotionally indulged, self-absorbed boy with a marked contempt for authority and the temper of a bully. One witness remembered an ‘imperious’ child, ‘quick to anger’, who ‘wouldn’t listen’ to anyone: ‘He would get the craziest notions and get away with it. If he didn’t have his way he got very angry … [H]e had no friends, took to no one and could be very heartless. He could fly into a rage over any triviality.’8
Hitler’s high-schooling involved two institutions, neither of which was able to help this stubbornly indolent lad who seemed determined to remain impervious to instruction. While he had done well at his Volkschule, or elementary school, in the village of Fischlham near Linz, his happy days there had ended abruptly in 1900 when his father decided to send him to the Realschule in the city, which emphasized technical subjects, rather than to the classically orientated Gymnasium, or grammar school. Here, Hitler failed to perform adequately in any discipline except drawing. Mocked as a country yokel, he neither made friends nor sought any. He dragged himself sullenly to classes. He ridiculed authority. He failed mathematics and natural history, and in 1901–2 had to repeat Year 1.
Hitler admired only one teacher, Dr Leopold Poetsch, a German who taught history and filled the boy’s head with stirring tales of Germany’s heroic past: ‘[Poetsch] penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years,’ Hitler later wrote. ‘When we listened to him we became afire with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.’9 Hitler would later attribute his transformation into a young nationalist ‘revolutionary’ to Poetsch’s lessons, a classic example of retroactively imbuing a past relationship with fateful power. Hitler loaded up Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the then popular leader of the Pan-German movement, with similar influence over his juvenile mind. Yet Schönerer’s thundering German supremacism and anti-Semitism were in far-away Vienna.
Here in Linz, it was Hitler’s schoolboy impressionability and intimacy with Poetsch, whom he fondly recalled as a ‘gray haired, eloquent old gentleman’ and father-figure, that activated his nascent pride in a Greater Germany and seeded the idea of Jews and Slavs as not only undesirable aliens but also as inferior races. Poetsch came from the southern German-language region bordering the South Slavs, where his experience of the racial struggle ‘made him a fanatical German nationalist’, writes William Shirer.10 Certainly Hitler never forgot his favourite teacher. Many years later, on a tour of occupied Austria as Führer in 1938, he visited Poetsch in Klagenfurt and was delighted to find that his childhood mentor had been a member of the underground Nazi SS in Austria, which had been banned in the years before the country capitulated to German occupation.
At school, Hitler’s only real interest was ‘art’, not history as he later claimed, despite failing to achieve ‘Excellent’ for any of his drawings; ‘Good’ was his highest grade in the subject in four years at the Realschule. One of his surviving sketches (presumably not a piece of course work) depicts his then art teacher masturbating, an image that psycho-historians would probably do well to ignore: how many schoolboys, none of them future dictators, have similarly mocked their teachers?11
Despite his inauspicious sallies with a pencil, from a young age Adolf declared that he wanted to be a ‘great artist’. Alois took it as a personal affront, dismissing his son’s dream as preposterous. Furious at the boy’s indolence, he urged Adolf to follow his example and enter the civil service, and in this dispute over his future the threads of Hitler’s tense relationship with his father snapped. ‘It was simply inconceivable to him,’ he would later say of Alois, ‘that I might reject what had become the content of his whole life … Then barely eleven years old, I was forced into opposition for the first time in my life.’ He concluded: ‘I did not want to become a civil servant.’12
When, aged thirteen, Hitler again informed his father of his ambitions, Alois was ‘struck speechless’: ‘Painter? Artist?’ he cried scornfully, Hitler later related. ‘He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard wrong or misunderstood me.’13 The boy’s dreams conjured everything Alois most loathed and feared: the worthless future and chronic poverty of a lazy bohemian – the very opposite of the provincial, respectable civil servant Alois had striven to be. ‘Artist, no, never as long as I live!’ Hitler would remember his father shouting. Father and son would never be reconciled on the point. ‘And thus the situation remained on both sides,’ Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. ‘My father did not depart from his “Never!” And I intensified my “Oh, yes!”’14
Adolf’s defiance was ‘a rejection of everything that his father stood for, and hence a rejection of his father himself.’15 ‘To become a painter would have been the worst possible insult to his father,’ August Kubizek, Hitler’s teenage friend, would recall.16 From that point on, the boy received a ‘sound thrashing every day’, his sister Paula would remember, though in fact the beatings were probably less frequent than that.
In trying to protect her son, Klara hoped to ‘obtain with her kindness’ what his father had failed to achieve with cruelty.17 Hitler’s childhood henceforth oscillated between feelings of deep affection for his mother and fear of, and often hatred for, his father, which helps to explain the insufferable tantrums that began around this time, recurring with terrifying intensity into adulthood.
On the morning of 3 January 1903, sixty-five-year-old Alois collapsed in his chair at his local café in Leonding and was soon pronounced dead, of internal bleeding. Hitler’s immediate reactions were grief and tears at the loss of the father he had probably feared more than hated; certainly Kubizek believed that Hitler grudgingly respected Alois and, much later, in Mein Kampf Hitler himself would write of his respect for his father. However, a measure of relief tempered the family’s mourning. They were now well cared for financially, with Klara’s widow’s pension, and freed from the stifling presence of a man who had exhausted any capacity for love his son might once have felt.
Some boys feel inspired to honour through imitation their father’s memory. Not young Hitler, who, as if in defiance of his late father, continued to fulfil his family’s low expectations of him. If he had hidden talents, as some of his teachers believed, he kept them well disguised under an affectation of careless indifference. Young Adolf was irremediably lazy when it suited him. His sliding academic performance accentuated his moroseness and strong temper, and dulled his self-esteem. In 1903–4, so bad were his Year 3 reports that he was allowed to advance to the fourth form only by leaving the Realschule in Linz and continuing his education at one of the outlying provincial schools. He was being effectively expelled. ‘For the moment only one thing was certain: my obvious lack of success at school,’ Hitler later admitted. ‘What gave me pleasure I learned, especially everything which, in my opinion, I should later need as a painter. What seemed to me un important … or was otherwise unattractive to me, I sabotaged completely.’18 A former teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, would remember him as stubborn, high-handed, dogmatic and hot-tempered, prone to playing pranks on other boys.19
At his new school in Steyr, near Linz, his grades plummeted further, perhaps partly a result of his leaving home for the first time to lodge with a foster family. He missed his mother’s quiet affection, and later admitted that he felt acute homesickness: ‘… he had been filled with yearning and resentment when his mother sent him to Steyr,’ Dr Josef Goebbels would later note.20 In 1904–5 he failed German language and mathematics, subjects that were critical to his advancement.
This time, he avoided the humiliation of the school rejecting him by deciding to abandon formal education altogether. In the summer of 1905, at the age of sixteen, he dropped out. On his last day at Steyr, Hitler went out to celebrate, apparently alone. He later claimed to have lost his final school report, telling his mother that it had blown out of the window of his train. In fact, the school director later discovered it, soiled and crumpled: young Adolf had used his report as toilet paper.
Hitler left the Realschule feeling nothing but hatred for the school, his schoolmates and his teachers. They were to blame for his failure, not him. His loathing of authority also embraced the Catholic Church in which he was raised, probably the result of the fury he felt towards a school priest who had offended him. Of Hitler’s confirmation in Linz Cathedral in 1904, his godfather, Johann Prinz, would recall the most ‘gruff and obstinate’ of boys: ‘I had the impression that he found the whole confirmation disgusting.’21 In 1942 Hitler reflected on his adolescence: ‘At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I no longer believed in anything, certainly none of my friends believed in the so-called communion … [A]t the time I thought everything should be blown up.’22
Whence arose his juvenile rage at the world? Hitler had not had a ‘difficult childhood’. He was not born into poverty, or a loveless or broken family. The answer has eluded the powers of psychiatrists. ‘For all we know,’ Volker Ullrich, Hitler’s most recent biographer, concludes, ‘Hitler seems to have had a fairly normal childhood … [T]here are no obvious indications of an abnormal personality development to which Hitler’s later crimes may be attributed. If Hitler had a problem it was an over-abundance rather than a paucity of motherly love.’23
Hitler justified the decision to end his education by claiming he was sick. He persuaded his mother to hope that, as the only ‘man’ in the family, he would be able to help her around the house. Klara relented, but in both respects he deceived her: he was not ill enough to terminate his education; and in the ensuing two years he would prove a useless ‘man about the house’, given to loafing, drawing, long walks and little housework. Household tasks he thought beneath the dignity of the radical bohemian he aspired to be, and he simply refused to do any.
At this time, the Hitlers were living in a small apartment on the third floor of a tenement building at Humboldtstrasse 31 in Linz. To augment her pension, Klara let out the main bedroom to lodgers, so she and Paula slept in the living room while Adolf occupied the spare room (or closet). His late father’s grim portrait stared down from the walls and several of Alois’s pipes were carefully laid out on the shelves. The ghost of the petty tyrant lived on, distilling a drip of defiance in the mind of his son. Hitler continued to pursue a ‘life of leisure’, as he called it, with painting, writing and reading – chiefly stories from German mythology about the heroic feats of Teutonic tribes – and affecting a dandyish indifference to his future prospects.
Everyone who knew him at the time would recall how the sixteen-year-old threw himself at drawing, usually buildings, museums or bridges, with a manic fervour, late into the night, to the exclusion of any other person or concern. During these creative bursts, Hitler would retreat into a fantasy in which he would redesign Linz and fashion new cities, imagining himself a genius with the power to change the world (thirty-five years later, he would in fact order a new bridge over the Danube based on his youthful designs).24 The slightest knock to this dream-made-real threw him into fits of rage and despair, such as when he failed to win a lottery in which he had convinced himself he was destined to triumph. His winnings were supposed to finance his design of a grand house on the Danube. In Hitler’s mind, bad luck had nothing to do with it. Dark forces were to blame. He denounced the lottery organizers and the government, whom he accused of rigging the outcome against him.25 He raged at the credulity of the poor lottery players, doomed forever to lose their savings. Everyone was to blame for Hitler’s failure to win the jackpot except the angry adolescent whose numbers had not come up.