Foppish, homoerotic – then homeless: the real story of Hitler’s youth

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Mon, August 28, 2023

Performance: after seeing this 1925 photo shoot, Hitler told photographer Heinrich Hoffmann to destroy the negatives - Heinrich Hoffmann/Keystone Features/Getty Images


On January 3 1903, in the Austrian town of Leonding, 65-year-old Alois Hitler was drinking red wine in a tavern when he suffered a lung haemorrhage, collapsed and died. He was buried in a local cemetery. Soon after, his widow Klara sold the large family house and bought an apartment in the city of Linz, around 30 miles away, to which she moved with their teenage son, Adolf.

Alois’s death, and the subsequent move, came as something of a relief to Adolf, who was free in Linz to pursue his first great dream: to become an artist. The 16-year-old resembled a Bohemian dilettante, with long hair, a moustache, fashionable clothes and a black cane with an ivory handle. During the day, he visited local cafés, art galleries and libraries. In the evening, he went to the opera house. He loved the works of Richard Wagner, the scale of whose work held him spellbound.

In the autumn of 1906, Hitler met a budding classical musician called August Kubizek at the opera. Kubizek, who was a couple of years younger, became Hitler’s only close childhood friend. In The Young Hitler I Knew, an account of their friendship published in 1954, Kubizek described Hitler as “highly strung” and liable to “fly off the handle”, especially when describing schoolteachers and bureaucrats. He poured forth his fantasies of being a painter, playwright and architect, and told Kubizek his greatest ambition was to gain entry to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Hitler had no known friendships with the other sex, but Kubizek did mention a brief “infatuation” with a beautiful middle-class girl called Stefanie Isak. Hitler saw her in the centre of Linz and admired her from afar, even writing several love poems about her. They were never delivered; he never spoke to her.

In September 1907, Hitler went to Vienna, one of Europe’s great cosmopolitan capitals, to sit the entrance exam for the Academy of Fine Arts. He made it past the first round, but failed to go any further; his examiners told him his drawings were “unsatisfactory”. In Mein Kampf, published almost 20 years later, Hitler would describe those examiners as “fossilised bureaucrats devoid of any understanding of young talent”. (In reality, his paintings and drawings show technical competence but no originality; he could render buildings and landscapes, but not people.)


Yet Klara Hitler had had breast cancer for much of 1907, and while Adolf was away in Vienna, her condition deteriorated. He returned to Linz to nurse her, until on the evening of December 21, she died, aged 47, with her distraught son at her bedside. Dr Bloch, the Jewish family doctor, would later say: “In all my career, I have never seen anyone as prostrate with grief.”


Loner: the 10-year-old Adolf, a few years before his father’s death - Hulton Archive/Getty Images

On February 12 1908, Hitler returned to Vienna, where he was to remain for the next five-and-a-half years. With inheritances from his parents and an orphan’s pension, he had enough money to live for at least a year without needing to find a job. In March, he was joined in the single room of a house he was renting by Kubizek, who had gained entry to the prestigious Vienna Academy of Music. Over the next few months, Kubizek saw Hitler read books voraciously, not to learn but to find justification for his own views; Hitler also wrote the outline of a play based on German mythology, and a derivative Wagner-style opera, which he never completed.

Few of Hitler’s biographers have been willing to look more closely at the nature of this pair’s relationship. They dressed alike, and went on long hikes together. After one, they were caught in a thunderstorm and sought refuge in a barn. Kubizek later recalled:

I felt sorry for Adolf as he stood in the doorway in his sodden underclothes, shivering with cold… he could easily have developed pneumonia. So I took one of the big cloths, spread it out on the hay, and told Adolf to remove his wet shirt and underpants and wrap himself in the dry cloth. This he did. He lay down naked in the cloth. I folded the ends together and wrapped him up tightly in it. Then I fetched another cloth and draped it over the top… He was highly amused by the whole venture, whose romantic conclusion pleased him greatly.

In the summer of 1908, however, Kubizek returned to Linz. The two friends, living in one room, had apparently started to annoy each other.

Then, in September, Hitler applied to re-sit the entrance exam for the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but wasn’t judged good enough. This ended his dream of being a renowned artist. He fell into depression, and when, in November, Kubizek returned to Vienna, he found that his friend had disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.

Hitler didn’t look for a mundane job, nor did he undertake his compulsory military training, even though it seems his savings rapidly ran out. He moved from another apartment to a third, much cheaper one, but in September 1909 he vacated that too, probably because he’d failed to pay the rent. He was homeless for about six weeks, mostly sleeping on park benches.

Hitler in a crowd listening to Austria's declaration of war in August 1914

 - Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

But finally, in October, he took up residence in the Meidling, a men’s homeless hostel, which offered a bed, soup and bread every night. There he was befriended by Reinhold Hanisch, a former domestic servant, who described the future Nazi dictator as “shabbily dressed and incapable of organising his own life”. But Hitler finally undertook a few jobs, clearing snow and carrying baggage for tips at the railway station, and in December, he moved to the smarter Männerheim men’s hostel, where he would remain until 1913.

Hitler would describe his Vienna years as the “saddest period of my life”. Those who knew him during this period describe him as a “loner” who held dogmatic opinions on every subject. He disliked Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jesuits; he didn’t drink or smoke; he had no interest in seeking out female companionship. While he lived at the Männerheim, he did complete around 400–600 paintings, drawings, posters and postcards, most of which were of well-known buildings in Vienna, copied from other people’s work then sold in shops, taverns and cafés. By the end of 1910, he was earning 40-60 crowns a month from this, and his income was boosted by a gift of 3,800 crowns from his aunt, Johanna.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler would claim that he’d been keenly interested in political developments in Vienna. Yet he joined no political party, and merely read newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets. Nor, surprisingly, is there much evidence to suggest that he was preoccupied by anti-Semitism. Again, in that memoir, he would claim that he was a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan” when he arrived in Vienna and a “fanatical anti-Semite” when he left, thanks to noticing Jews on the streets (and seeing them as “an alien force”).

It’s true that the city contained the largest Jewish population of any German or Austrian city – in 1910, they made up 8.6 per cent of the population, and were prominent in law, medicine, finance, the press and the arts – but those who’d been around him recalled no pronounced anti-Semitic views. In fact, the Meidling was funded by a wealthy Jewish family, Hitler attended musical evenings at the home of another such family, and most of his closest acquaintances at the Männerheim were Jewish.

On April 20 1913, his 24th birthday, Hitler received the last instalment of his father’s inheritance. With that, he decided to end his period in Vienna and moved to the German city of Munich, where his fatal relationship with Germany and its people began – and would ultimately lead to disaster.

The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933 by Frank McDonough will be published by Head of Zeus on Thursday