One of the most frequently asked questions about the Holocaust and the Nazi party is whether Adolf Hitler was Jewish or had Jewish ancestors. The question received new media attention in May 2022 when Russia’s foreign minister claimed Hitler had Jewish blood.
Though the idea may seem preposterous to some, the question seems to stem from the remote possibility that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Hitler’s father, Alois, was registered as an illegitimate child with no father when born in 1837 and to this day Hitler’s paternal grandfather is unknown. In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Alois’s mother. Alois was brought up in the family of Hiedler’s brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. In 1876, when Alois was 39, he was made legitimate and his baptismal record annotated by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Alois’s father (recorded as Georg Hitler). Alois then assumed the surname Hitler.
In his 1953 memoir In the Face of the Gallows (published after his execution in 1946), Hitler’s lawyer Hans Frank claimed that Hitler had told him to investigate rumors of him having Jewish ancestry. Frank said Hitler showed him a letter from a nephew who threatened to reveal he had Jewish blood. Frank wrote that he found evidence that Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish and that Alois’ mother, Maria Schicklgruber, worked as a cook in the home of a wealthy Jewish family named Frankenreiter in Graz. Austria, was impregnated by a member of the family – possibly their 19-year-old son – when she was 42.
Historians dispute his account. Ian Kershaw, for example, wrote in his biography of Hitler Hubris, “A family named Frankenreiter did live there, but was not Jewish. There is no evidence that Maria Anna was ever in Graz, let alone employed by the butcher Leopold Frankenreiter.”
In fact, no Jews lived in Graz at the time. They were expelled in the 15th century and didn't return until decades after Hitler’s father was born.
On October 14, 1933, the London Daily Mirror published a picture of a gravestone in a Jewish cemetery in Bucharest inscribed with some Hebrew characters and the name Adolf Hitler, but this Bucharest Hitler could not have been the Nazi leader’s grandfather.
In 2010, the British paper The Daily Telegraph reported that a study had been conducted in which saliva samples were collected from 39 of Hitler’s known relatives to test their DNA origins and found, though inconclusively, that Hitler may have Jewish origins. The paper reported: A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in [the Hitler] samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews ... Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 percent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population. This study, though scientific by nature, is inconclusive.
Despite the claims, Adolf Hitler was not Jewish.
I read in a 1970's Hitler biography (I forget the author and exact title) the part in the opening paragraph, about Hitler's grandfather Johan Georg Heidler being illegitimate and adopted into the Hitler family, his true father unknown and believed to be Jewish. I don't see how that part was disproven here. They determine here Hitler was not Jewish, but I think it is still possible Hitler may be of partial Jewish ancestry, just that it cannot be proven. Which if true, is one of the great ironies of history.
Not mentioned, it gets more confusing that Adof Hitler's father is Alois Hitler (an Austrian customs inspector), and had a son who was also named Alois Hitler (who mostly worked as a waiter, and unlike brother Adolf Hitler, was very friendly and personable). Hitler had many brothers and sisters and descendants who survived the war, so has a large surviving family 80 years after his death. Hitler's book Mein Kampf is estimated to have an estate value of $20 million, but no one in the family wants to claim it, and are very reluctant to do interviews about their genocidal relative. There's a 1-hour documentary that periodically runs on Newsmax titled "Uncle Hitler" that details who his surviving relatives are, and the unclaimed royalties of Mein Kamf. In any case, Adolf Hitler's alleged Jewish ancestry remains unconfirmed, but I think still not completely disproven, and still remotely possible.
George Soros is unquestionably Jewish, and yet has acted in an antisemitic way throughout his life. There's a famous 60 Minutes interview, where George Soros talks about when he was 14, and in his native Hungary, his father had split up all his children so that each was adopted into a different household to maximize the entire family's chances of surviving the Nazi Holocaust. Soros in 1944 was sent to live with and work for a man whose job in Hungary was to sell off the remaining homes and property of the Jews who were sent off to concentration camps. Soros describes this as "the happiest year of my life" in the videotaped interview. A videotaped interview the Soros/Left has been trying to suppress and erase for over 20 years.
