Clara Pölzl

Frau Klara Hitler, née Pölzl, was born on August 12, 1860, in Spittal, a poor village in the Waldviertel. Her father, Johann Baptist Pölzl, was a simple farmer. Her mother's maiden name was Johanna Hüttler.
Klara Pölzl had an unhappy childhood in a poor and miserable home, one of the youngest of twelve children. Various family acquaintances described Hitler's marriage to Klara as a very happy one, evidently due in large part to his wife's submissive and easy-going nature. Once, speaking of her marriage, she told me, "What I had hoped for and dreamed of in a woman was not realized in my marriage," and added resignedly, "But is such a thing possible?"
The rapid birth of children, one after another, took a heavy psychological and physical toll on this fragile woman: in 1885, a son, Gustav; in 1886, a daughter, Ida, who died two years later; in 1887, another son, Otto, who lived only three days; and on April 20, 1889, another son, Adolf. How much pain lies behind these mere numbers! When Adolf was born, three other children had already died. How carefully the terribly tired mother must have cared for this fourth child! She once told me that Adolf was a very weak child and she always lived in fear of losing him too.
Once again, fate cruelly tested a mother's heart. Five years after Adolf's birth, on March 24, 1894, she gave birth to a fifth child, a son, Edmund, who also died as a child on June 29, 1900, in Leonding. While Adolf, of course, couldn't remember the births of his first three children in Braunau or speak to them, he remembered his brother Edmund well, as Adolf was already eleven years old at the time of his death. He once told me that Edmund died of diphtheria. The youngest child, a girl named Paula, born on January 21, 1896, survived.

Thus, Klara Hitler's untimely death deprived her of four of her six children. These terrible ordeals must have broken her maternal heart.

She was a tall woman with long, thick, light brown hair, which she wore in a braid at the nape of her neck in the 19th-century Victorian style, as was customary for married women in Austria at the time. She wore high-necked dresses, mostly in gray, black, brown, blue, and green. Her blue eyes were invariably sad. She was very religious and hardworking. She went to church every Sunday, and her home was spotless. She devoted her entire life to pleasing her husband and children. She was meek and quiet.