Hitler once lived in a homeless shelter

Hitler's failure to make it as an artist had serious financial ramifications. After having little luck selling his paintings, postcards, and ads, his financial resources were so depleted that he spent December 1909 at a homeless shelter in Vienna. He then stayed in a public men's dormitory until 1913, when he acquired his father's money and relocated to Munich.

According to police registration papers, Adolf Hitler was jobless and supported himself via the sale of his paintings at the time, and he resided in the dormitory for three years, from 9 February 1910 to 24 May 1913. He'd moved in from a homeless shelter in Meidling, where he'd been since December 1909, and had come to Munich in 1913 after inheriting his father's estate. Hitler appears to have given no information about his everyday life in Vienna, although some of his fellow inmates eventually published their memories of Hitler's stay in the hostel. They said he read the newspapers every morning in the reading room's non-smoking section, where he also painted, spoke politics with other inmates, and delivered speeches.

Reinhold Hanisch, a vagrant and part-time laborer who died in jail in 1937 under mysterious circumstances and whose recollections were published in The New Republic in 1939, was among those who wrote about Hitler's stay in the dormitory. Karl Honisch wrote a report for the Nazi party archives in 1938; Josef Greiner, a laborer who released brief memoirs in 1938 and 1947, and an unidentified guy who submitted reports for Czech newspapers in the 1930s also wrote about Hitler. Hitler's Jewish pals Eduard Löffner and Josef Neumann, the Viennese druggist Rudolf Häusler, who traveled to Munich with Hitler in 1913, and a competitor painter, Karl Leidenroth, were also dormitory inmates.