Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on April 20, 1889, Hitler was the son of a fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler,
and his third wife, a young peasant girl, Klara Poelzl, both from the
backwoods of lower Austria. The young Hitler was a resentful,
discontented child. Moody, lazy, of unstable temperament, he was deeply
hostile towards his strict, authoritarian father and strongly attached
to his indulgent, hard-working mother, whose death from cancer in
December 1908 was a shattering blow to the adolescent Hitler.
