Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn on the 20th of April 1889, to Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl, who was Alois’ second cousin and was young enough to be his daughter. He was born in a region of Austria-Hungary, now Austria, that considered themselves to be German, making him a German Nationalist.
His father, being an Austrian politician, did not agree with the boy’s political views. He was the 4th child out of six, but he was the first to not die in infancy. As such, his mother spoiled him rotten. His father was not the same however and beat the young Hitler when he did wrong, while his mother protected him from this.
When he was 4 years old, he was spotted struggling in a river by another boy around the same age. The boy ended up diving in to save the young Hitler, who was eventually pulled to shore alive. This is Hitler’s first, and certainly not last, close call with death.
He was a very outgoing, confident young man who liked playing war games with his friends and had high grades at school. He enjoyed reading, specifically books about cowboys and Indians. That was until 1900 when his younger brother, Edmund, passed away from measles. Adolf was very close to Edmund, and his death affected the young boy deeply. He could sometimes be spotted by his neighbours lying on the top of the cemetery wall where his brother was buried, while his grades began to decline.
He became a depressed and detached person who often argued with his father and the teachers at his school. He instead spent his spare time reading and drawing, the latter of which he was very talented at.
His father passed away of a lung haemorrhage on the 3rd of January 1903 and he only just passed his final term of school but didn’t sit his final exam and instead dropped out. The 16-year-old was now unemployed and spent most of his time at the opera with his only friend, August Kubisek, who noted he was passionate about many topics, thought he was superior to others his age, had a short temper and was an incredible speaker.
When he was 18, he said a very sad goodbye with his mother and moved to Vienna to take the entrance exam for art school. Not liking Hitler’s more traditionalist style, he was rejected from the school. He had to return home because his mother was very sick with breast cancer, and she passed away at the age of 47. The family doctor for the Hitlers said he had never seen someone so overwhelmed with grief as Adolf was.
Having nowhere to go since his parents were dead, he ended up becoming homeless and spent his early twenties in and out of homeless shelters, making just enough money to get by, selling his paintings of Vienna’s sights. It is believed he was first exposed to his racist ideologies while in Vienna. The Mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, was anti-Semitic and the idea of German Nationalism was widespread in the area that Hitler lived in.
In May 1913, Hitler was given the final part of his father’s land and was conscripted for the Austrian Armed Forces. After an assessment of his health in Salzburg, he was deemed unfit for service and let go, moving to Munich. Later in life, he said he didn’t want to anyway, because the mix of races in the Austrian army would lead to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In July of that year, World War 1 began.