- Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke about his Nazi Party-affiliated father in the new docuseries, “Arnold.”
- He said that his dad’s abuse made his brother turn to alcohol. His brother died in a drunk-driving accident.
- “The very thing that made me who I am today was the very thing that destroyed him,” he said.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has opened up about the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his “tyrant” Nazi father, which he believes was a driving factor behind his huge success — but also led his brother to an early grave.
“The Terminator” star is the subject of a new three-part Netflix docuseries titled “Arnold,” which chronicles the Austrian native’s journey from athlete to actor and American politician.
In the first episode, Schwarzenegger recalled the “tough” childhood he and his older sibling Meinhard experienced growing up in the Austrian village of Thal.
The actor was born just two years after the end of World War II and said that his father Gustav Schwarzenegger — who served as a member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and was involved in the invasion of Leningrad — came home from the war “suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
Speaking to the camera, the former bodybuilding champion said: “He was buried underneath buildings, rubble, for three days, and on top of that, they lost the war. They went home so depressed. Austria was a country of broken men. I think there were times where my father really struggled.”
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Describing his father as a “tyrant and a very tough police officer,” Schwarzenegger recalled how he would make him and his brother “earn breakfast” and made them “compete against each other.”
Schwarzenegger recalled how one Mother’s Day, his father even turned picking flowers for their mother, Aurelia Schwarzenegger, into a competition.
The “True Lies” star said his father would also smack and beat them with belts and described how his behavior became worse when he drank.
“There was a kind of schizophrenic behavior that my brother and I witnessed at home,” Schwarzenegger said. “There was the kind father, and other times when my father would come home drunk at three in the morning and he would be screaming.”
“We would wake up and, all of a sudden our hearts were pounding because we knew that meant that he could, at any given time, strike my mother or go crazy. So there was the kind of strange violence.”
