His father, Alois Hitler, was the first to “get sick of Hitler’s shit”, so to speak. Now, granted, most pictures of Alois make him appear to be a man sick of everybody’s shit. But he seemed to have disliked his son Adolf in particular.
His soft-natured, artistically inclined son who preferred to be an artist to a civil servant or military man, was a constant eye-sore to his father. Young Adolf was doted upon by his kind and loving mother, Clara, while his father decided to beat him up and slap him around the house until he would be rid of all “unmanly characteristics”. This only led to his son despising his father, and becoming closer to his mother.
The son did eventually try to become an artist, after his father passed. Perhaps half to spite his old man, and half because he was genuinely passionate about the arts. We’ll never know. Fact remains, young Hitler didn’t fare well in his painting career and he did eventually end up in the army, just as his father had wanted him to. But as long as Alois lived, Adolf remained a ‘pansy’ in eyes and he died seeing him as a useless nancy-boy his belt failed to make into a man.
We can joke about it now, with more than a century having passed, and the horrors of the First and Second World War having become but a distant memory of a faraway past. Fact remains, Adolf Hitler was once a little boy who got abused rather terribly by his father, with his mother standing by silently and comforting afterwards. It damaged him. And he grew into a man who would end up damaging countless others.
Alois Hitler fathered eight children. He wasn’t awfully friendly to any of them but for some reason, Adolf more than any of them “rubbed him the wrong way”. He just looked at his son and, pretty much from day one, went: “That boy ain’t right.” And perhaps it was those beatings that made him not right.