But he recalls it “destroying” elder brother Meinhard, who died in a drink-drive accident in 1971.
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Born in the Austrian mountain village of Thal two years after World War Two, Arnie says his upbringing was tough because his dad had been scarred by his wartime experiences.
“My father spent three days under the rubble of a bombed building,” he explains.
“Then they lost the war. They went home so depressed.
“Austria was a country of broken men. My father really struggled.”
Police chief Gustav was a “tyrant” who terrorised Arnold and Meinhard, a year Arnie’s senior, smacking them and beating them with a belt.
He also made them “earn breakfast” by working and pitted them against each other, forcing them to compete in races and sport, and even seeing which of them could pick the best Mother’s Day flowers for mum Aurelia.
Arnie says in his new Netflix documentary: “There is a kind of schizophrenic behaviour that my brother and I witnessed at home.
“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’d wake up with our hearts pounding and we knew at any time he could strike my mother or go crazy, so there was this kind of strange violence.”
He says his childhood strife made him determined to escape Austria at a young age and in 1968, aged 21 and a competitive bodybuilder, he moved to the US.
It was in 1971, while touring in bodybuilding shows, that he learned Meinhard had died aged just 25.
Arnie says: “I think he started drinking because our upbringing was tough.
“The brutality we got at home, the beatings . . . all of this he could not sustain. He was much more delicate.
“Nietzsche was right, ‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.
“The very thing that made me who I am today was the very thing that destroyed him.”
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