Hitler's Youth
1889-1914

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn in Austria. The Austrians were a branch of Germanic people and they spoke German. Many of these people, Hitler in particular, thought of themselves to be German. Though born an Austrian, Hitler believed that he was as good a German as those who lived in Germany.

Adolf and His Parents

Adolf was raised rather well by his parents. He respected his father but did not get along with him most of the time. Adolf’s father, Alois Hitler, was a short-tempered retired customs official in Austria. He insisted that Adolf follow in his footsteps when he grew up. However, the young Adolf wanted to be an artist, and such an idea left his father dumbfounded and angry.

Adolf and his father argued frequently about his aspirations. “No! Never as long as I live!” was often Alois’ reaction. Adolf would constantly refuse becoming a government official like his father. The very thought of sitting in an office and filling out forms, he said, made him sick to his stomach.

Alois Hitler was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schichlgruber. The father’s name, however, was never recorded on the birth certificate. Adolf’s father, Alois, was conceived while his mother worked for the Frankenberger family in Graz, Syria. She continued to receive payments from them for many years after leaving that job. This may suggest that Adolf’s grandfather was ironically an Austrian Jew.

When Maria remarried in 1842 to Johann Georg Hiedler, a local priest illegally added Johann’s name to the certificate. The priest misspelled his last name as “Hitler.”

Adolf’s mother, Klara Polzl, was a gentle woman who was devoted to her family. Klara was Alois’s third wife and Adolf had half-brothers and sisters from earlier marriages or liaisons. There were six children altogether in Adolf’s family, but only he and his sister, Paula, lived beyond early childhood.

School Years

For a time, Adolf was a choirboy while attending elementary school at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach. There he often dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest.

Throughout elementary his grades were rather good, but he later lost interest in getting good marks. Adolf blamed his lack of concern on his constant quarreling with his father. From the sixth grade on his grades became worse. When Adolf was sixteen he dropped out of school for good. Despite this decision, Adolf did admire one of his teachers, Leopold Poetsch. Adolf was bored by every subject except for Poetsch’s history class, where Adolf developed a passion for history.

Hitler's Happiest Days

The days after he quit school, Adolf recalled, were the happiest days of his life. His father had died in that time, leaving his mother with little money to hold together the family. Adolf did not find a job, like most boys who dropped out of school. Regular employment disgusted him and would continue to disgust him until he later became ruler of Germany. Adolf much rather preferred to lounge around the streets of Linz, Austria. There he would often dream of his future as an artist and attend operas.

He also read a great amount during this time of his life. Adolf would read German history and mythology for hours. He could not afford these books of course, so he borrowed them from libraries, which then charged a small fee. Reading the books made him concerned with the afflictions of rest of the world. He did not take anything lightly anymore, and although he appeared as a pale, sickly boy, he would burst into sudden fits of anger at anyone who would disagree with him.

Hitler's Saddest Days

Soon Adolf’s life began to turn for the worst. At the age of eighteen, Hitler failed the entrance examination at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. His dreams were proverbially crushed by those who he considered “stupid” teachers. The following year included another hardship for Hitler as his mother died of cancer just four days before Christmas.

From 1909 to 1913, Hitler spent these four years miserably in Vienna. He later called these years “the saddest period of my life.” He preferred odd jobs like shoveling snow, beating carpets, and carrying bags outside a railroad station over regular employment. Relying on minimal pay, Hitler was now a filthy bum. He did make some money while satisfying his artistsic ambitions by painting some watercolor pictures for advertisements too.

Life on the Streets of Vienna

“It was truly a meager living which never sufficed to appease even my daily hunger,” Hitler later wrote, referring to his vagabond days. “Hunger was then my faithful bodyguard; he never left me for a moment and partook of all I had.” And despite his struggle in Vienna, he never drank nor smoked, and he constantly read books.

During this time, he taught himself a philosophy on which he later built his totalitarian acts. First, Hitler learned to honor war and conquest. He decided that peace was bad for mankind, as it corrupted men and made them soft. Hitler found that life, he said, was meant to be hard and cruel.

Secondly, Hitler convinced himself that Germans were a superior race of people. He found Germans to be more skillful, intelligent, and stronger than all other races. While he found Germans to be the master race, he was certain that all other people were meant to be their slaves. Ironically, let us not forget that Adolf Hitler himself is Austrian and not German.

Hitler also noted that any successful political party had to have the knowledge of how to attract millions of people. This meant propaganda, and, as Hitler would comprehend it, lying. He also said that bigger lies are better because it was easier to believe a big lie than a small one. Terror was also an advantage for a political party according to Hitler, even to the extreme of killing political opponents.

Hitler's First Encounter with Jews

Hiter also became more exposed to the cultures of Vienna while living on the streets. His eyes were opened to two different “menaces to German existence,” one being Jews.

“Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?” Hitler later went on, noting that after searching endlessly through numerous Social Democratic pamphlets, he finally realized that “the Jews was no German,” and from then on he hated them deeply.

Hitler let his idea of Jews plague his mind until his death, finding them to be disgusting and intolerable.

Hitler's Second Chance in Life

In the spring of 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, Germany for a few reasons. One reason for this change, he said, was that he could not stand the mixture of races in Vienna. He says his heart had always been in Germany. However, the most important reason he left Vienna was because he wanted to escape militray service. For the previous three years of his life he had dodged the service, but in 1913 he finally moved to get away from any possibilities of serving “in the ranks of the Jews.”

At the age of twenty-five and the begining of World War I in 1914, Adolf Hitler knew a break was coming for him. He asked King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to serve in a Bavarian regiment. This wish was granted and brought Hitler a new life. He served four years in the First Company of the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment on the Western front in France as a dispatch runner. Hitler was wounded twice and twice he recieved an Iron Cross for bravery.