Volume II – The Seeds of Hate
Chapter 7 - The Birth of a Storm
On the evening of April 20, 1889, in a modest house in the Austrian border town of Braunau am Inn, a child entered the world. His name was Adolf Hitler.
The Inn River flowed past Braunau, a natural frontier between Austria and Germany. Villagers spoke of little beyond farming, trade, and customs work. Yet, in that ordinary town, in that ordinary house, the cries of an infant broke into history like the first rumble of distant thunder.
His father, Alois Hitler, was a stern customs officer; hard, ambitious, quick to anger. His mother, Klara, tender and devout, adored her children with a devotion bordering on worship. She would hover over young Adolf with anxious care, fearful always of losing him as she had lost others.
No neighbor peering into that home could have guessed that this frail child would one day hurl the world into fire. Yet already the world outside his cradle was trembling, already shadows lengthened across Europe.
The Europe of His Birth
To be born in 1889 was to be born into a continent divided. Nationalism surged across empires; ethnic groups vied for power and recognition. But for one people; the Jews; life remained precarious.
In the Russian Empire, Jewish communities were confined to the Pale of Settlement, where poverty and violence were daily companions. Pogroms, state-sanctioned riots, erupted with terrifying regularity. In 1881, mobs stormed Jewish homes in Kiev, Odessa, and Warsaw. They looted shops, beat men in the streets, raped women, and left synagogues smoldering in ashes.
The assassinated Tsar's ministers blamed Jews for unrest, and with official indifference, the violence spread. By the time Adolf Hitler was a child, pogroms had become the seasonal rhythm of Jewish life in the East, like storms that came without warning, leaving death in their wake.
The Pogroms of the 1890s
The year 1891 saw thousands of Jews expelled from Moscow. Entire families trudged through mud and snow, their belongings piled on wagons, driven from a city where they had lived for generations. In 1899, further riots tore through Polish towns. And in 1903, when Hitler was fourteen, the Kishinev pogrom would sear itself into history with brutal clarity, dozens killed, women violated, children orphaned, Torah scrolls desecrated.
The Jews of Europe understood: assimilation was no guarantee of safety. No matter how many degrees they earned, how loyally they served, how ardently they embraced the language and culture of their neighbors, they remained outsiders; targets when mobs needed scapegoats.
The Keller Household
While Jews endured terror in Russia and Poland, in Bavaria the Keller family absorbed these events through newspapers and rumor.
Johann Keller was gone, but Karl Keller now presided over the household with the same narrow faith and suspicion. Over beer and bread, he would spread papers on the table for his son, Friedrich, to read.
"See here, boy," he said, stabbing a finger at a headline about unrest in Russia. "Even there, among their own kind, the Jews cannot live in peace. Always the trouble begins with them. Always they bring ruin."
Friedrich listened and learned. He was still young, but the lesson etched deep: Jews were not victims, they were instigators. Pogroms were not tragedies, they were confirmations.
Thus, in a quiet Bavarian home, prejudice became inheritance, waiting for the day it would find its echo in Adolf Hitler himself.
Adolf's Early World
Meanwhile, in Braunau and later in Linz, young Adolf's world was taking shape. He was a solitary child, often sick, often lost in his imagination. His father's sternness frightened him; his mother's love sheltered him.
He showed an early fascination with history, with tales of German heroes, with Wagner's operas that thundered with myths of destiny. Even as a boy, he drifted into grand visions of nations, purity, and struggle.
The newspapers Alois read, the street conversations Adolf overheard, were thick with the prejudices of the age. Jews were caricatured as grasping financiers or foreign meddlers. These whispers and caricatures sank into Adolf's mind, unnoticed, unchallenged.
He was a child of Austria, but more than that, he was a child of his time; a Europe in which Jews were never simply neighbors, but symbols of distrust, resentment, and fear.
The Covenant Endures
Far to the east, in Warsaw, Kiev, and Odessa, Jewish families lit candles on Friday nights as pogroms raged outside. Fathers chanted ancient blessings; mothers prepared Sabbath meals even in the shadow of broken windows and looted shops.
"The Lord is our keeper," whispered Isaac Abramovich as he gathered his children close after a night of rioting. "They may scatter us, they may beat us, but they cannot break us."
The covenant, the bond of Abraham with his God, remained unbroken. To outsiders, Jewish distinctiveness was proof of conspiracy; to Jews, it was the source of survival. In that tension lay the eternal misunderstanding that fueled hatred—and the eternal strength that kept them alive.
The Parallel Paths
Thus, two paths unfolded side by side.
On one, Jewish children grew up clutching the Torah while hearing mobs pound on their doors. They learned resilience not from textbooks but from exile and prayer. They were raised to believe that their survival itself was testimony to God's faithfulness.
On the other, Adolf Hitler was raised in a home of discipline and longing, exposed to the whispers of antisemitism that soaked Austrian and German life. He was not yet the man who would roar before crowds, but already the soil of his soul was being seeded with suspicion, resentment, and restless ambition.
And in Bavaria, Friedrich Keller was being groomed to see Jews as eternal enemies, inheriting a hatred that would one day bind his fate to Adolf's.
The Birth of a Storm
It was impossible to know in 1889. Impossible to know that the frail infant in Klara Hitler's arms would grow into a man who carried the poison of his age to its most destructive extreme. Impossible to know that the pogroms in Russia, the prejudice in Austria, the mutterings in Bavarian homes, all would converge in him, like streams meeting in a raging river.
History rarely announces its storms. They begin with small clouds, with whispers, with ordinary lives shaped by extraordinary hatred. So it was with Adolf Hitler.The Jews carried their covenant into another century of exile, prepared once again to endure. The Kellers passed down their prejudice like a family heirloom, preparing their son for a future steeped in suspicion. And in Braunau am Inn, Adolf Hitler; the storm; had been born.
The pogroms of the East were more than riots; they were signs of a Europe unable to shed its oldest hatred. For Jews, they were reminders that their covenantal identity came at a cost. For the Kellers, they were proof of Jewish guilt. For Adolf Hitler, they were the backdrop of his childhood, the atmosphere he would one day breathe in and give back to the world in fire.