I and a number of my friends were raised Jewish. In different Sunday and Hebrew schools, we all heard myths that Hitler was Jewish, and some said that his heritage, not the impending Allied victory, caused him to commit suicide. One stubborn boy insists that Hitler’s father was at least half Jewish, and that young Adolf hated his father, causing him to translate his hatred into mass slaughter as an adult. Secular teachers, history books, and encyclopedias make no mention of Hitler having any Jewish blood. I hope you, Cecil the all-knowing, can set the record straight. –Anonymous, Dallas
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Wish I could oblige, bubeleh. But while Hitler probably didn’t have any Jewish blood, it can’t be completely ruled out. Hitler’s father was illegitimate and to this day there is some question about who his grandfather was. Throughout his career he was dogged by rumors about his pedigree, some of them circulated by his fellow Nazis. In 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. It’s now known the Bucharest Hitler could not have been grandfather to our Adolf, but Hitler was sufficiently worried about the whole business that, according to the historian John Toland, he had the Nazi law defining Jewishness written to exclude Jesus Christ and himself.
Now for the weird stuff. After the war Hitler’s former lawyer, Hans Frank, claimed that Adolf told him in 1930 that one of his relatives was trying to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his alleged Jewish ancestry. Hitler asked Frank to find out the facts. Frank says he determined that at the time Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to Alois, she was working as a household cook in the town of Graz. Her employers were a Jewish family named Frankenberger, who had a 19-year-old son. The son, according to Frank, was Alois’s father and Hitler’s grandfather–which would make the man who inspired the Holocaust one-quarter Jewish.
