Adolf Hitler
Birth of Adolf Hitler in Braunau am Inn
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗He was born an Austro-Hungarian subject in a border town, not a German in Germany — and his legal surname was Hitler from birth; the “Schicklgruber” story belongs to his father.
20 April 1889: a birth at the Gasthof zum Pommer
On 20 April 1889, Klara Hitler, née Pölzl, gave birth to a son in Braunau am Inn, a town of Austria-Hungary on the border with the German Empire. The family was living in rented rooms in the Gasthof zum Pommer.
The father, Alois Hitler, was a mid-level customs official in the Austro-Hungarian service, and Klara was his third wife. The parish record gives the birth time as approximately 6:30 p.m.
The fourth child, and the first to survive infancy
Klara had become pregnant in 1888 after she and Alois lost their first three children in quick succession. This child was her fourth.
He survived, unlike the three before him. Two days later, on 22 April, he was baptized a Roman Catholic.
What the register settles
Two persistent errors attach to this date. The infant was an Austrian subject born in Austria-Hungary, not a German citizen born in Germany; and his surname was Hitler from birth, Alois having changed his own name years before.
A third correction concerns his birth order. Older biographies counted Adolf as Klara's third child, because the brief life of an earlier son, Otto, had not been correctly reconstructed; surviving records establish him as her fourth.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 3 audit passes, 1 issue open
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →