Biography on hitlers childhood facts
Early Life
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.
Not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.
After his mother, Klara, died in 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he pieced together a living painting scenery and monuments and selling the images. Lonely, isolated and a voracious reader, Hitler became interested in politics during his years in Vienna, and developed many of the ideas that would shape Nazi ideology.
Military Career of Adolf Hitler
In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, in the German state of Bavaria. When World War I broke out the following summer, he successfully petitioned the Bavarian king to be allowed to volunteer in a reserve infantry regiment.
Deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, Hitler served throughout the Great War and won two decorations for bravery, including the rare Iron Cross First Class, which he wore to the end of his life.
Hitler was wounded twice during the conflict: He was hit in the leg during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and temporarily blinded by a British gas attack near Ypres in 1918. A month later, he was recuperating in a hospital at Pasewalk, northeast of Berlin, when news arrived of the armistice and Germany’s defeat in World War I.
Like many Germans, Hitler came to believe the country’s devastating defeat could be attributed not to the Allies, but to insufficiently patriotic “traitors” at home—a myth that would undermine the post-war Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler’s rise.
Nazi Party
After Hitler returned to Munich in late 1918, he joined the small German Workers
In 1895, at age six, two important events happened in the life of young Adolf Hitler. First, the unrestrained, carefree days he had enjoyed up to now came to an end as he entered primary school. Secondly, his father retired on a pension from the Austrian civil service.
This meant a double dose of supervision, discipline and regimentation under the watchful eyes of teachers at school and his strict father at home. His father, now 58, had spent most of his life working his way up through the civil service ranks. He was used to giving orders and having them obeyed and also expected this from his children. The Hitler family lived on a small farm outside of Linz, Austria. The children had farm chores to perform along with their school work.
Hitler's mother was now preoccupied with caring for her new son, Edmund. In 1896, she gave birth to a girl, Paula. The Hitler household now consisted of Adolf, little brother Edmund, little sister Paula, older half-brother Alois Jr., older half-sister Angela and two parents who were home all the time. It was a crowded, noisy little farm house that seems to have gotten on the nerves on Hitler's father who found retirement after 40 years of work to be difficult.
The oldest boy, Alois Jr., 13, bore the brunt of his father's discontent, including harsh words and occasional beatings. A year later, at age 14, young Alois had enough of this treatment and ran away from home, never to see his father again. This put young Adolf, age 7, next in line for the same treatment.
Also at this time, the family moved off the farm to the town of Lambach, Austria, halfway between Linz and Salzburg. This was the first of several moves the family would make during the restless retirement of Hitler's father.
For young Adolf, the move to Lambach meant an end to farm chores and more time to play. There was an old Catholic Benedictine monastery in the town. The ancient monastery was decorated with carved stones and woodwork that included several swas Few names from history inspire such immediate and emphatic revulsion as that of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. His hands are stained with the blood of millions killed in the devastation of the Second World War and the horror of the Holocaust. But Hitler was not born a brutal tyrant, he became one. Explore Hitler's life and discover the road that led to destruction. Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April in the small Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, in Upper Austria on the Austrian-German border. His father, Alois, was a customs official while his mother, Klara, came from a poor peasant family. Life was financially comfortable for the Hitler family but Alois was a domineering character and young Adolf frequently found himself on the wrong side of his father's short temper. At primary school Hitler was a clever, popular child. At secondary school he withdrew psychologically, preferring to re-enact battles from the Boer War than study. He left school with no qualifications at 16. Hitler dreamt of a career as an artist. His father had rejected the idea but after he died in 1903 Hitler would try to make his dream a reality. He applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts but was promptly rejected in October 1907. Shortly after, Hitler's beloved mother died. He moved to Vienna and scratched out a precarious bohemian existence sleeping in hostels and painting postcards. Here he began to develop many of the views which would later characterise his ideology and desire to unite Germany and Austria. The anti-Semitic politics of Vienna's mayor, Karl Lueger, were particularly influential. Hitler hated the multi-ethnic composition of Austria's ruling Habsburg Empire. Determined to avoid military service, he moved to Munich in 1913. Hitler was keen to prove his loyalty to Germany. In August 1914 Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was born on April 20, 1889, in the Upper Austrian border town Braunau am Inn, located approximately 65 miles east of Munich and nearly 30 miles north of Salzburg. He was baptized a Catholic. His father, Alois Hitler (1837–1903), was a mid-level customs official. Born out of wedlock to Maria Anna Schickelgruber in 1837, Alois Schickelgruber had changed his name in 1876 to Hitler, the Christian name of the man who married his mother five years after his birth. Alois Hitler's illegitimacy would cause speculation as early as the 1920s—and still present in popular culture today—that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Credible evidence to support the notion of Hitler's Jewish descent has never turned up. The two most likely candidates to have been Hitler's grandfather are the man who married his grandmother and that man's brother. In 1898, the Hitler family moved to Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Hitler wanted a career in the visual arts. He fought bitterly with his father, who wanted him to enter the Habsburg civil service. After his father's death, Hitler eventually persuaded his mother, Klara Hitler, née Pölzl, to permit him to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. As Klara was dying of breast cancer in the autumn of 1907, Hitler took the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of the Arts. He failed to gain acceptance. In early 1908, some weeks after Klara's death in December 1907, Hitler moved to Vienna, ostensibly in the hope of renewing efforts to enter the Academy of Arts. Hitler lived in Vienna between February 1908 and May 1913. He had grown up in a middle-class family, with relatively few contacts with Jewish people, in a region of the Habsburg state in which many German nationalists had been disappointed that the German Empire founded in 1871 had not included the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. Yet the legacy of
Age of extremes
Apr 1889
Birth and childhood
Feb 1908
Down and out in Vienna
Aug 1914
Fighting for the Fatherland
Adolf Hitler: Early Years, 1889–1913
Linz
Vienna