Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (5 page)

In later years, Hitler liked to imply that he had grown up in humble circumstances, but this was far from the case.
¹⁸
As a senior customs official Alois Hitler earned an annual salary of 2,600 crowns—roughly the same as what a school principal would have made. Even when he retired in 1895 at the age of 59, he received a pension of 2,200 crowns and would not have had to make many cutbacks.
¹⁹
The Hitlers were comfortably middle class. The household consisted of Alois, Klara and Alois’s two children from his second marriage, Alois Jr. and Angela; and of Adolf, his brother Edmund (who was born in 1894 but died in 1900 of rubella) and his sister Paula, who was born in 1896. Also residing in the Hitlers’ apartment was Klara’s younger, unmarried sister Johanna Pölzl, who helped out with the family. Aunt “Hanni” had a hunchback and, apparently, mild learning difficulties.
²⁰

Alois Hitler was a strict, short-tempered patriarch who demanded unquestioning respect and obedience from his children and used the switch whenever his expectations were not met. His oldest son Alois Jr. suffered particularly from his temper and left home at the age of 14. Adolf, who was seven years younger, also came in for the odd beating, but his sister Paula was probably exaggerating when she claimed during an interrogation in 1946 that he had received “a good thrashing” every day.
²¹
The senior customs official was not all that concerned about his children. He devoted most of his free time to his hobby, beekeeping, and enjoyed going to taverns to drink a few glasses of beer and discuss the state of the world with acquaintances.
²²
We should also be sceptical about Hitler’s later claims that his father’s alcohol consumption was excessive and that he had once had to carry him home, drunk, from the tavern.
²³
Hitler tended to depict his father negatively to cast his mother in a more favourable light. After a conversation with the Führer in August 1932, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Hitler endured almost an identical childhood to mine. His father a domestic tyrant, his mother a source of goodness and love.”
²⁴

Klara Hitler was a quiet, modest, obedient woman who patiently bore her husband’s self-important airs and protected her children as best she could from his outbreaks of rage. The early death of her first three children was an enormous loss, and she was all the more determined to shower her fourth child Adolf with maternal care. He was the coddled favourite, while Klara’s stepchildren, Alois and Angela, often felt neglected. “He was spoiled from early morning to late at night,” opined William Patrick Hitler, Alois Jr.’s son, in New York in 1943. “The stepchildren were forced to listen to endless stories about how wonderful Adolf was.”
²⁵
For the young Hitler, maternal affection compensated for excessive paternal strictness. “Without exception he always spoke of his mother with profound love,” August Kubizek recalled.
²⁶
Even late in life, Hitler carried a small photo of Klara in his breast pocket, and an oil portrait of his mother was one of the few personal possessions that he kept in his bedroom right up until his death.

Most psychologists assume that the first years of an individual’s life determine how his personality develops, and few historians (and even fewer psychological historians) have been able to withstand the temptation to find traces of the monster in the young Hitler. The violence he suffered at his father’s hand has often been cited as a source of the murderous policies he pursued as a dictator.
²⁷
But biographers should be careful about drawing far-reaching conclusions from Hitler’s early childhood. Physical punishment was an accepted method of child-rearing in those days, and it was hardly uncommon for turn-of-the-century middle-class families to feature an authoritarian, punitive father on the one hand and a loving mother on the other. From all we know, Hitler seems to have had a fairly normal childhood. In any case there are no obvious indications of an abnormal personality development to which Hitler’s later crimes can be attributed. If Hitler had a problem, it was an overabundance rather than a paucity of motherly love. That may have contributed to his exaggerated self-confidence, his tendency towards being a know-it-all and his disinclination to exert himself in areas he found unpleasant. These characteristics were already evident during Hitler’s schooldays.

In 1895, the year he retired, Alois Hitler acquired a farm in Hafeld, an area of the town of Fischlham. There that May, the 6-year-old Hitler started attending the one-room schoolhouse. “When I was in the first grade, I listened in on the pupils from the second and later the third and the fourth,” Hitler later said.
²⁸
In 1897, Alois sold the farm and rented an apartment in the nearby market town of Lambach, where Hitler continued his schooling and was briefly a member of the boys’ choir at the local Benedictine monastery. In the autumn of 1898, the family moved yet again, this time to the village of Leonding near Linz, where Alois Hitler had purchased a house right next to the town cemetery. It would later become a site for Nazi pilgrimages after the
Anschluss
between Germany and Austria in 1938. “Very small and primitive,” Goebbels remarked after visiting Hitler’s boyhood home in March 1938. “I was led into the room that was his empire…This was where a genius was made. I was overcome by a feeling of solemn significance.”
²⁹

Adolf Hitler was a lively pupil who easily mastered the challenges of the village school and got excellent marks. “The laughably easy task of learning at school left me so much free time that I saw more of the sun than of my room,” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
.
³⁰
He played soldiers with the other village youngsters and enjoyed taking command. “The Boer War was going on,” recalled one of Hitler’s classmates. “The kids from Leonding under Hitler’s leadership were the Boers while the kids from [nearby] Untergamberg were the English. Things often got pretty heated afterwards at the Hitlers’ house as well, because our commander Adolf left his father waiting for so long for the tobacco he was supposed to buy.”
³¹

In the evening, like many boys his age, he devoured the Westerns of novelist Karl May. He read them “by candlelight and, with the help of a magnifying glass, by moonlight,” Hitler recalled in a February 1942 monologue at the Wolfsschanze.
³²
During the Second World War, especially at difficult times, Hitler would frequently take out a book by May and praise the Native American character Winnetou as “the embodiment of a company leader.”
³³
Hitler saw himself as “the leader of a little gang” of his Leonding schoolmates and a class photo supports that idea.
³⁴
The 10-year-old occupies the middle of the top row with his arms crossed and his face slightly overexposed “in a pose of demonstrative superiority.”
³⁵
The young boy was obviously not plagued by self-doubt.

But in September 1900 the transition from a village primary to an urban secondary school in Linz brought an abrupt end to Hitler’s sunny childhood. Hitler, now 11, had to walk an hour to and from school, and he was no longer the indisputable leader of the class. He was just one of many pupils and he also carried the stigma, in the eyes of his well-heeled Linz classmates, of being a country yokel. Hitler had a hard time submitting to a more regimented school routine, and he no longer effortlessly got good grades as he had before. Already in his first year he failed maths and natural science and had to repeat a grade. In the years that followed, he barely progressed. In 1924, his former teacher Eduard Huemer remembered him as a “gaunt, pale youth” who was “definitely talented” but “not diligent.” Considering his “undeniable gifts,” Huemer said, Hitler “should have done far better.” With his teachers, Hitler was “rebellious, independent, dogmatic and hot-tempered,” often reacting to their corrections and admonitions with “scarcely concealed distaste.”
³⁶
As he entered puberty, the lively, curious young boy became an introverted, moody adolescent who positioned himself as an outsider.

In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler characterised his poor school performance as an act of rebellion not so much against his teachers as against his father. His father, he claimed, had wanted to force him down the path towards a career as a civil servant, which ran completely contrary to his nature. “I never wanted to become a civil servant, no, no, no,” Hitler wrote. “The thought of being trapped in an office, of no longer being the master of my own time but rather being compelled to devote my entire life to filling out forms, made me yawningly nauseous.”
³⁷
There are good reasons to doubt Hitler’s depiction, however. If his father had truly intended for him to enter the civil service, he would have sent him to a classical
Gymnasium
and not to a
Realschule
, which steered pupils towards technical and mercantile jobs.
³⁸
Hitler’s talent for drawing was recognised at an early age, and this seems to have been the reason for Alois’s decision. But contrary to what he wrote in
Mein Kampf
, this does not mean that Hitler decided at the age of 12 to devote himself to art rather than become a civil servant. His father’s embittered rejection of Hitler’s artistic ambitions—“Artistic painter, never, over my dead body!”—is most likely the stuff of legend.
³⁹

We can safely assume, though, that the tension between father and son was increasing at this time. Alois Hitler must have sensed that his adolescent son was becoming more independent and rebellious. But what likely angered him most was not some disagreement about his son’s future career, but rather Adolf’s demonstrative unwillingness to put in the work needed to get into a better school. Born out of wedlock in the rural provinces, Alois had laboured hard to climb the social ladder, and he expected his son, who had enjoyed a far better start in life, to be diligent and determined about securing his status in society. In the best of all worlds, his son would have climbed a few rungs in the social hierarchy to a level that Alois’s humble origins and lack of education had put beyond his reach. Instead, the adolescent Adolf was surprisingly lazy and intractable. This no doubt enraged his ambitious father.

But on 3 January 1903, before the conflict could truly come to the boil, Alois Hitler suddenly died at the age of 65 while having a morning drink in the Wiesinger Inn in Leonding. This unexpected event “plunged us all into the deepest sorrow,” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf
.
⁴⁰
In truth, the sudden passing of the patriarchal tyrant probably came as a relief to Alois’s wife and even more so to his children. The family was provided for: Klara Hitler received a widow’s pension sufficient to maintain a comfortable existence.
⁴¹
Usually she spent her summers with Adolf and Paula at her sister’s home in Weitra. His cousins would later recall that Hitler had played with them occasionally but preferred to go off on his own and paint, draw or read one of the books he had brought along.
⁴²

Hitler’s grades did not improve. In 1903–4 he was only promoted after taking a supplementary test and agreeing to transfer to a different school. His mother enrolled him in another
Realschule
in Steyr, eighty kilometres away from Linz, where he lived with foster parents. For the first time Adolf was separated from his mother, and he was apparently quite homesick. Even as Reich chancellor, he still complained about “how he had been filled with yearning and resentment when his mother sent him to Steyr.”
⁴³
One of his teachers there recalled a “medium-sized, somewhat pale pupil” who “acted somewhat shy and cowed, probably because it was the first time he had been away from home.”
⁴⁴
But Hitler did not stay in Steyr very long. In the autumn of 1905, with his grades remaining poor, he faked an illness and convinced his mother to take him out of school. He would retain a deep hatred of schools and teachers for the rest of his life. “Teachers—I can’t stand them,” he once remarked. “The ones who are any good are the exceptions to the rule.”
⁴⁵
Among the few good ones in Hitler’s eyes was his history teacher in Linz, Leopold Poetsch, whom he singled out for praise in
Mein Kampf
. Poetsch, Hitler wrote, had known how “not just to captivate but to motivate when he spoke.”
⁴⁶

By the time the drop-out Hitler returned to his family, Klara had already sold their house in Leonding. In June 1905 she rented an apartment in Humboldtstrasse 31 in Linz. Her stepdaughter Angela had just moved in with her new husband, a civil servant named Leo Raubal, so only four people lived in the apartment: Klara, Adolf, Paula and Hanni. For a while a boarder, a pupil named Wilhelm Hagmüller, also ate lunch with the Hitlers.