On a chilly Saturday evening on April 20, 1889, inside an apartment above a brewery in a tiny Austrian town near the German border, a farmer’s daughter married to her second cousin gave birth to her fourth child. He was the first to survive infant. They named him Adolf.
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Klara Hitler, nee Pozl, was 29. She was a dutiful homemaker to her much older husband Alois - first, years earlier, as his maid, and then later, as his third wife. Tall, with a long face and a gentle smile, Klara was quiet and shy. Alois, a local civil servant, was a stern, bad-tempered, authoritative bully.
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At night, as young Adolf grew up, Klara would stand outside his bedroom door, listening as Alois beat him. Adolf’s younger sister Paula remembered those nights years later, speaking to U.S. Army officials investigating his monstrous acts.
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“He was a scrubby little rogue,” Paula said of her brother, “and all attempts of his father to thrash him for his rudeness…were in vain.” But their mother was always there after the beatings to caress him and bathe him in kindness. “My mother,” Paula said, “was a very soft and tender person, the compensatory element between the almost too harsh father.”
Alois died in 1903 of heart failure while drinking his morning pint. Klara became a single mother, tolerating, seemingly without question, her unruly and headstrong son.
Adolf did not excel at school or almost anything else.
In 1905, when he was 16, he faked an illness “to persuade his mother that he was not fit to continue school and gladly put his schooling behind him for good with no clear future career path mapped out,” the historian Ian Kershaw wrote in “Hitler: A Biography.” “Adolf lived a life of parasitic idleness – funded, provided for, looked after, and cosseted by a doting mother.”
Klara, her sister Johanna, and Paula all enabled Adolf’s slothful existence, looking “after all his needs, to wash, clean, and cook for him,” Kershaw wrote.
Adolf fantasized about becoming a musician and artist. Klara bought him a grand piano. He drew and painted. He wrote poetry. At night, he went to the theater, often with his mother. He bought her a ticket every year for her birthday.