Adolf Hitler. One of the worst human beings ever to walk the earth. The very existence of a man like Hitler raises a lot of questions about the nature of good and evil. One of the biggest ones being: Are monsters like Hitler born evil, or has something in their life made them that way? That’s why we’re going back to where it all started, and taking a look at Hitler before he became the Fuhrer. Before he even joined the Nazi Party in the first place. Did something happen to this man in his youth that made him the monster he turned out to be? Let’s take a look and find out.
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that Hitler’s father was a terrible guy. Alois Hitler Sr. was born Alois Schicklgruber in 1837 in the small Austrian town of Strones. He was an illegitimate child of a 42-year-old unmarried catholic peasant known as Maria Shicklgruber, which carried a fair bit of social stigma at the time. He wasn’t even given a proper surname on his baptismal certificate, the priest just wrote “Illegitimate” instead. This was likely a major source of insecurity for young Alois. When Alois was five, his mother married a local miller by the name of Johann Georg Hiedler.
It’s strongly believed that Johann could have actually been Alois’ biological father, but nobody can ever really know for certain. Some have speculated that a Jewish man named Leopold Frankenburger was actually Alois’ real biological father, but there isn’t any hard evidence for this whatsoever. It likely just came into popular belief because the idea of Hitler, history’s most famous antisemite, having a Jewish grandfather seemed darkly ironic, but this assumption really doesn’t line up with the facts.
Four years after the marriage, Maria passed away, and Alois was sent away to live with his new uncle, Johann Nepomunk Hielder, with whom he trained to become a cobbler. But that wasn’t the path that Alois ended up taking in life. Instead, he became a civil servant, and joined the semi-military profession of being a customs official. This led to him bouncing around Austria for a number of years, and in 1877, he decided to right the biggest perceived wrong of his life and legitimize himself. With permission from his Church, he asked to change his surname from Schicklgruber to that of his legal father, Johann Georg Hiedler.
For reasons lost to time, the official who filled in Alois’ papers wrote his name as “Alois Hitler” rather than “Alois Hiedler.” It’s crazy to think that, if Alois had never gotten his name changed, we may all have been looking back in fear at the dreaded Adolf Schicklgruber. Doesn’t quite have the same scary ring to it, does it? So, who was Hitler’s mother? She was actually the third wife of Alois. His first wife was the wealthy Anna Glasl-Hörer. But, much like his future son, Alois was a bad guy, and would have affairs frequently, often cheating on her with girls as young as 19 when he was 43.
He next married one of his mistresses, Franziska "Fanni" Matzelsberger, after Anna died, and had two children with her. However, he would soon leave her too for his housekeeper: young Klara Pölzl. But there was one problem: Depending on the truth of Alois’ parentage, Klara may have also been his first cousin, or even his niece. Yes, that’s right, Hitler could have been the product of cousin incest. And things would only get stranger from there, as Alois and Klara started having children together. They had six in total, Hitler included, but the grand majority of them died in their infancy. Gustav, Otto, and Ida died of Diptheria the year before Hitler was born, and another one of his brothers, Edmund, would die of Measles in 1900.
The only surviving children of Alois and Klara were Adolf and his younger sister, Paula. Adolf was born on April 20th of 1889, in the small Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, close to the German border. He lived with his mother and father, his biological siblings, Paula and Edmund, and his two half-siblings from his father’s second marriage, Angela and Alois Jr. While he was close with his mother, conflict with his father and his inability to adapt to school gave young Adolf a troubled childhood. Alois Hitler Sr. was a profoundly cold and cruel man to his immediate family. He was controlling, distant, and would beat his wife and children at the drop of a hat. Some even recounted that he’d make a show of beating the family dog until it wet itself on the carpet.
Adolf was a confident and free-spirited young man, so he received the worst of his father’s physical abuse in their frequent fights. They also moved around a lot during Hitler’s youth, as Alois Sr. retired from his job as a customs official and decided to move to the Austrian town of Hafeld to farm bees. The move made things even worse for Adolf and Alois Sr.’s relationship. Adolf was enrolled in a strict, state-funded elementary school, and found himself at odds with the establishment’s rules and regulations. This led to further violence from Alois, who wanted his son to take a similar career path to himself. While Klara tried to defend her son from his father’s wrath, she often ended up on the receiving end instead. It was a truly toxic home life.
When the bee business failed, the Hitlers continued to move around over the next few years. Hitler, now eight years old, started to take an interest in art and performance. He began painting watercolors, and even taking singing lessons from his school choir. However, his life would take a major hit when his brother Edmund died in 1900. This tragedy shook young Adolf, changing him from a confident, outgoing child to a withdrawn oddball who regularly got into fights with teachers and, of course, his father.
By this point, the seeds of hatred and nationalism were already growing within young Adolf. A frightening but important thing to remember is that Hitler’s views, while obviously scary and extreme to us in the modern day, had its roots in extremely common sentiments for pre-World War One Austria and Germany.
Hitler and his friends, despite being Austrian, were loyal to the German cause, hated growing ethnic diversity in Austria, and would even greet each other with “Heil!” It’s likely that many of the adults in his life expressed similarly hateful views, including his father and school teachers, making it seem extremely normal to believe such things to a growing Hitler. His school performance only got worse as the years went on. Alois wanted Adolf to work at the customs office, and even took him on a tour of one in his early teen years. Hitler felt that this was the moment the differences between him and his father became truly irreconcilable.
He knew by now that he wanted to attend a classical school and develop his painting skills to become a professional artist, but his father instead forced him to attend a technical school. Hitler would later recount in Mein Kampf that he did badly in this school on purpose, hoping that when his father saw how terrible his performance was, he’d allow him to pursue his dream. This was the first of many grave miscalculations in Hitler’s life. But in the end, one event did allow Hitler to drop out of school: The sudden and unexpected death of Alois Sr. in 1903, likely due to a pleural effusion. He was out drinking at a local inn when he suddenly collapsed and died shortly after.
When the 14 year old Hitler saw his father’s corpse, he supposedly began to weep uncontrollably. He and his father may have constantly been at each other’s throats, but losing another family member was just too much. His school performance deteriorated further, until his mother eventually pulled him out of school entirely. After a year to put himself back together, under the doting care of his mother, Hitler returned to school with improved grades and performance. He was never a particularly good student, but he was able to pass his exit exams with two different attempts. He left school with no intentions to continue pursuing a technical career.
With his controlling father dead, and his mother being far more supportive of her son following his dreams, he set off to Cosmopolitan Vienna to develop his artistic skills and hopefully join the Academy of Fine Arts. But by now, we all know how that turned out for the aspiring artist. Hitler was rejected twice by the Academy, finding his artistic abilities subpar. Because Hitler specialised in drawingфs and buildings, they suggested instead that he try his luck at the local Academy of Architecture. However, this is where Hitler’s earlier decisions came back to bite him, because his poor school performance left him without the necessary academic qualifications to enter the architecture college.
Naturally, this left Hitler feeling pretty sour about his time in Vienna, but contrary to popular belief, his rejection from art school wasn’t nearly as important in his development as the ideas and beliefs he was beginning to learn from his new locale. Hitler had always been a nationalist, but in Vienna, it’s believed that he first started developing his hardcore antisemitism. He read local magazines that blamed Jewish people for all the problems that Austria and Germany were experiencing. Some who knew Hitler claimed his antisemitism pre-dated his time in Vienna, but it seemed as though his time in Vienna finally gave him the political and philosophical framework for his irrational hatred of the Jewish people. But amongst all this, one final tragedy would strike the now 18-year-old Adolf.
His mother, Klara, the only surviving member of his family that he was truly close with, had been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer at the age of 47. She was diagnosed and treated by the Hitler family doctor, Dr. Eduard Bloch. He later recounted that Klara took the news with dignity, as a deeply religious woman who believed that everything that happened was part of God’s plan. Adolf was devastated. Dr. Bloch described the closeness of their relationship in later interviews, saying: “While Hitler was not a mother's boy in the usual sense, I never witnessed a closer attachment. Their love had been mutual.
Klara Hitler adored her son. She allowed him his own way whenever possible. For example, she admired his watercolor paintings and drawings and supported his artistic ambitions in opposition to his father at what cost to herself one may guess.” When she finally died from the disease, Hitler was, according to Bloch, the saddest man he’d ever seen. He was utterly broken - his last tether to humanity and decency, cut. It was clear that Dr. Bloch’s good treatment of his mother meant a great deal to Hitler, as he was one of the few Austrian Jews that Hitler allowed to move from Austria to the United States in 1940, as his genocidal plans were beginning to pick up steam.
Later being interviewed, Dr. Bloch described Klara as a kind and decent woman, and said that she would roll in her grave if she ever knew what a monster her beloved son became in the end. So, we return to the big question: Did Hitler’s childhood turn him into a monster? Did Klara and Alois raise him to be a person capable of committing genocide? Was his childhood so tragic that it made him evil?
Well, no. Hitler’s beliefs were the product of popular and toxic philosophies that were rife during his time: Nationalism, Authoritarianism, Anti-Semitism. It might be more comforting to believe that Hitler was some kind of fluke, a supervillain born out of incest and abused into being evil by a controlling father. But even if Adolf Hitler had never joined the Nazi Party, a man like him would have, given how common it was to think like he did back then.
Hitler never could have done what he did alone. It took millions agreeing with him, and millions more simply doing nothing, or being killed while trying to rebel. Bad childhoods don’t cause genocides. A society growing to hate its most vulnerable people does. Now go check out “What If Hitler Never Existed?” and “How Rich Was Hitler (Where Did All His Money Come From)” for more facts about history’s worst monster!
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