Was Hitler Jewish?
To the disappointment of the conspiracy theorists out there, the short answer is no. Absolutely NO.
Several waves of this accusation cropped up over the years, none of them truthful. The first was in the 1920s, early in Hitler’s career. As one can imagine, Hitler’s detractors and enemies at the time couldn’t resist taking such potshots at him. Considering his extreme anti-Semitism, little to no proof was needed to set tongues wagging and the people making the accusations had absolutely none of it. Nevertheless, so many people wanted to believe it that the myth was established.
Hitler didn’t help his case any by being uncharacteristically silent regarding his family’s background. In an obvious hit piece on the day before the election for Reich President (12 March 1932) that saw Hitler running against the incumbent Hindenburg, the newspaper Bayerischer Kurier ran an article that included the following statement: ‘the talkative Adolf Hitler is so silent about his ancestors and about how far back his family name goes.’ [1] As one can imagine, such silence was bound to encourage speculation.
In the 1930s, the foreign press resurrected the accusation. It suggested that ‘the name ‘Hüttler’ was Jewish, ‘revealed’ that he could be traced to a Jewish family called Hitler in Bucharest, and even claimed that his father had been sired by Baron Rothschild, in whose house in Vienna his grandmother had allegedly spent some time as a servant.’ [2] None of these ‘scoops’ proved to have any merit whatsoever.
Hitler didn’t seem to be concerned about the allegations, but later during the war something, we are not sure what, prompted an investigation to be carried out by the Gestapo in August 1942 on the orders of Heinrich Himmler. It resulted in no factual, useable findings. [3]
Shortly after WW II ended, another more serious accusation arose. Hans Frank, at one point Hitler’s personal legal advisor and later the Governor-General of Occupied Poland, while awaiting his trial and subsequent execution in Nuremburg in 1946, wrote a most remarkable memoir, at least at first glance. In it, he claimed that the paternal grandfather of Adolf Hitler had actually been a Jewish merchant who went by the name of Frankenberger. Frank claimed that Hitler’s paternal grandmother, Marie Anna Schicklgruber, had worked for the Frankenberger family in Graz. The insinuation was, and still is, obviously intriguing, especially right after the end of the war when there was an insatiable appetite for anything that would disparage the Nazis and, particularly, Hitler himself. However, to bring the conspiracy theory-types back to Earth, it has to be noted that research into the matter has revealed that a Jewish family with that name did not exist in either Graz or the entire region of Steiermark. [4] In fact, not only were there no Jews at all in the area as they were forbidden to live there by the Austrian authorities until decades later, there is no evidence that Marie Anna had ever been there! [5]
Furthermore, Frank claimed that Marie Anna was receiving child support money from Frankenberger and that Hitler had told him that his grandmother had related that the Jew was not his real grandfather but that because of their poverty, she and her husband convinced Frankenberger he was to secure the funds. There are two huge problems with this element of Frank’s mythological tale. The first is that no correspondence has ever been found that corroborates this story of payments in any way. [6] The second is more interesting. Adolf Hitler would have had to have been a necromancer to speak with his grandmother as she had died forty-one years before he was born! Hitler did many terrible things during his life but practicing black magic to communicate with the dead was not one of them.
The conclusion by historians is that there is no truth whatsoever that Hitler had any Jews in his family history. Decades of research have turned up nothing, so the issue can confidently be considered settled.
The only remaining question is why did Frank do it? Hans Frank was a devoted Nazi and a close associate of Hitler’s. Why did he turn so strongly against his former leader? The only answer that makes sense is that Frank almost certainly underwent a long stretch of torture as part of his interrogations leading up to his trial and execution. The torture and his impending death likely led to a breakdown of some sort. He may have also thought he could gain some sympathy from his captors for providing such juicy ‘information.’ Unfortunately, we will never know the truth about his motives because he took those with him to the grave.
Sources
- Fest, Joachim C. Hitler. New York City, USA: Harcourt, Inc., 1974.
- Kershaw, Ian. Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris. London, England: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1998.
- Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: A Biography Volume I. Ascent. London, UK: Penguin Random House UK, 2016.
