A team of Belgian researchers found that Adolf Hitler was of mixed race, with DNA samples indicating Jewish and African ancestry.
Research by journalists and historians suggests that the Fuhrer was closely associated with the ethnic groups he tried to exterminate during his reign, yournewswire.com writes.
History.com reports: “In the decades following the death of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader's lineage was the subject of rampant speculation and intense debate. Some have suggested that his father, Alois, born to an unmarried woman named Maria Schickelgruber, was the illegitimate child of Leopold Frankenberger, a young Jewish man whose family hired her as a maid. (She subsequently married Johann Georg Hiedler, later wrote "Hitler", whose last name was adopted by her son.). Others have argued that Alois's biological father was also the grandfather of Hitler's mother Clara Pözl, making Adolf the victim of an incestuous marriage.
To unravel the mystery of the Fuhrer's roots, Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders teamed up with Mark Vermeren, a historian who wrote extensively about Hitler and his ancestors. The duo collected saliva samples from 39 relatives of the notorious dictator, including the nephew of Alexander Stuart-Houston, who lives in New York, his Austrian cousin identified only as "Norbert X". When the tests were carried out, samples of the main haplogroups were identified, which are sets of chromosomes used by geneticists to identify specific populations.
Writing in the Flemish-language magazine Knack, Mulders reported that the most dominant haplogroup of relatives, known as E1b1b, is rare in Western European countries, but is common among North Africans, and especially the Berber tribes of Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia. It is also one of the main fundamental lines of the Jewish population - present in 18-20 percent of Ashkenazi Jews and from 8.6 to 30 percent in Sephardic Jews. In other words, Hitler's family tree may have included Jewish and African ancestors.
The tragic irony of the discovery, of course, is that Hitler's Nazi regime systematically exterminated roughly two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population between 1933 and 1945. People of African descent were also considered enemies of the Aryans, whose alleged racial purity and superiority were central to the death rhetoric of the author of Mein Kampf. As Mulders put it in an article in Knack: "From this postulate, one can assume that Hitler was associated with people whom he despised."
As part of an ongoing quest to capture the Fuehrer's legacy, Knack hopes to conduct DNA tests on a piece of the jaw and a piece of bloody tissue recovered from the Berlin bunker where Hitler allegedly committed suicide. The Russian government has kept these artifacts in its archives since 1948 and continues to vouch for their authenticity, despite controversial US research in 2009.
Since the Knack article was published on August 18, 2010, scientists have pointed out right away that this does not necessarily mean that the person who inspired the Holocaust was either Jewish or African, or a combination of the two. For example, haplogroup E1b1b is found in other ethnic communities, and DNA analysis remains an imprecise science. But one thing about the results of this study is certain, as Ronnie Dekort, a geneticist interviewed by Knack, remarked: "Hitler would not be happy with that."
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