Hitler’s father, Alois, was an illegitimate child whose own father was unknown, the Austrian historian said.
Vienna:
Russia’s foreign minister’s suggestion that Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood is just the latest version of a conspiracy theory exploiting a gap in the dictator’s ancestors.
Sergei Lavrov’s comments over the weekend, which sparked a diplomatic spat with Israel, have rekindled rumors of the identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather as early as the 1920s.
Hitler’s father, Alois, was an illegitimate child whose own father was unknown, Austrian historian Roman Sandgruber told AFP.
Sandgruber, who published the first biography of Alois Hitler last year, explained that the rumors first started circulating in the 1920s, when Adolf Hitler came to power.
The theory was encouraged by Hitler’s political rivals when the Nazi leader took control of Germany in 1933.
After World War II, the memoirs of Nazi war criminal Hans Frank, who ruled occupied Poland during the war, revived the story.
In his memoirs, published after his execution in 1946 for war crimes, Frank said he secretly researched Hitler’s ancestors at the request of the Nazi leader himself.
“This must have been towards the end of the 1930s,” Frank wrote in an excerpt published by the German magazine Der Spiegel at the time.
Hitler, he said, had told him that he was being blackmailed by a cousin on the matter.
– ‘No proof’ –
Hitler’s paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, gave birth to Alois in 1837.
Frank claimed to have discovered that at the time she was working as a cook for a Jewish family called Frankenberger, in the Austrian city of Graz.
Her employer had paid her alimony until Alois was 14 years old, Frank wrote, claiming a correspondence between her and the family proved this.
Frank said Hitler told him that his grandmother and her future husband had tricked the Jewish man into thinking he was the father in order to get the money from him.
But historians remain skeptical.
There’s no solid evidence to support Frank’s claims, Sandgruber says. One problem is that at the time, Jews had no right to live in Graz, he adds.
So who was Hitler’s grandfather? “This is a question without an answer,” historian Ofer Aderet wrote Monday in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Some Nazis still put out this theory “as an attempt to explain their defeat in World War II,” he argued.
“Other reports have claimed that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was the result of shame over his partial Jewish ancestry,” he added.
“The bottom line, though, is that there’s no historical evidence for this.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Monday condemned Lavrov’s comments as “an unforgivable and outrageous statement, as well as a terrible historical mistake.
“Jews did not kill themselves during the Holocaust,” Lapid added. These kinds of claims were the worst form of anti-Semitism, he said.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett denounced Lavrov’s comments as “lies”, and the foreign ministry has summoned the Russian ambassador for an explanation.
Russia has repeatedly justified what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine as a mission to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country.
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