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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

On a chilly Saturday evening on April 20th, 1889, inside an apartment above a brewery in a tiny Austrian town near the German border,

a farmer's daughter married to her second cousin gave birth to her fourth child.

He was the first to survive infancy.

They named him Adolf.

That child grew up to be Adolf Hitler,

one of the worst monsters in history.

When he died in a bunker in 1945,

he had a picture of one person with him.

A picture he'd carried his whole life. It was of

his mother, Clara Hitler, the most important person in his deranged life, and, according to some

historians, the only person he truly loved. Clara grew up on a farm in Austria. She was tall and smart and strikingly beautiful.

But nothing in her life ever clicked.

As a teenager, she was sent off to work as a maid for her second cousin.

His name was Alois, a civil servant with a bad temper.

They fell in love, or at least something like it, and got married.

Their house, however, wasn't exactly peaceful.

At night, as young Adolf grew up, Clara would stand outside his bedroom door,

listening as Alois beat him.

Adolf was an ornery kid.

The beatings just made him worse, and that, of course, led to more beatings. Clara would beg her husband to stop, but he never did. Then, one day in 1903, Clara's husband went downstairs

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