Thomas Bernhard was born in 1931 in Heerlen in the Netherlands, where his unmarried mother Herta Bernhard worked as a maid. From the autumn of 1931 he lived with his grandparents in Vienna until 1937 when his mother, who had married in the meantime, moved him to Traunstein, Bavaria, in Nazi Germany. There he was required to join the Deutsches Jungvolk, a branch of the Hitler Youth, which he hated. Bernhard's natural father Alois Zuckerstätter was a carpenter and petty criminal who refused to acknowledge his son. Zuckerstätter died in Berlin from gas poisoning in an assumed suicide in 1940; Bernhard never met him.