Adolf Hitler was born to Alois and Klara Hitler in the small Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, on the border with Bavaria. An unremarkable, artistically inclined youth who twice failed entry to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, he would go on to found the Nazi movement, seize dictatorial power in Germany, and orchestrate the Holocaust and a war that killed tens of millions.
Braunau am Inn was, and remains, an ordinary Austrian border town, its most famous feature for over a century simply being the birthplace of history's most notorious dictator. Hitler's father Alois was a mid-level Austrian customs official, twice widowed before marrying Klara, a household servant and his own cousin by a prior marriage, a union that required special church dispensation.
Young Adolf was, by most surviving accounts, an unexceptional and moody student who dreamed of becoming a painter, a path closed off when the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts rejected his portfolio not once but twice. He drifted through Vienna in poverty, absorbing the virulent antisemitism and German nationalism circulating in the city's cafes and boarding houses, before enlisting eagerly in the German army during World War I.
The house of his birth became, after 1945, an object of morbid fascination and neo-Nazi pilgrimage, prompting the Austrian government to eventually purchase the property and, in 2023, begin converting it into a police station specifically to strip it of symbolic power. His birthday itself became an ugly recurring flashpoint, invoked by white supremacists and, grimly, chosen deliberately by the Columbine shooters 110 years later for their attack.
Key people: Adolf Hitler