A Jewish Hitler? April 7, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
One of the most interesting ‘urban legends’ about Hitler is that the fuhrer was himself part Jewish: a notion perhaps helped along by his particularly unaryan features. It would, as a matter of fact, be truer to say that Hitler may have had Jewish ancestry. The ambiguity comes about not from Hitler’s maternal side but from the bloodline of his stiff, martinet father Alois (pictured). First, let’s stick to four facts and then work up to some speculation. (i) Alois was born illegitimately in 1837 to Maria Schicklgruber. (ii) Alois changed his surname to Hitler only at 39: which invites a series of alternative histories where Adolf Schicklgruber invades Poland, Adolf Schicklgruber commits suicide in the bunker etc etc. (iii) the name Hitler came from one Johann Hiedler who married Maria when Alois was five. (iv) No one knows with certainty who Maria’s lover and who Alois’ father was. This is as far as the facts get us: they open a little gate around the back of the castle of historical orthodoxy. But storming said castle is another question. Let’s try an assault, just for the hell of it, and see whether we can capture the keep or at least inconvenience the guards.
The first point to make is that both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany had large Jewish populations (far more than in France, Spain, Britain, Scandinavia or Italy) and many people with mixed ‘blood’. The possibility that Maria in her forty first or forty second year had had an affair with someone of Jewish descent is, in purely demographic terms, possible: certainly much more likely say than a modern American having a child with an Inuit. There were millions of Jewish people living in central Europe: something that Hitler himself would change with his murderous Final Solution. A second point: Maria apparently (beware there is no nineteenth-century evidence!!) sometimes worked as a housekeeper and servant with families. Nineteenth-century servants often had ‘affairs’ (perhaps not the best word) with their masters or with sons. Even in rather starchy Victorian England these ‘affairs’ took place and became the terror of the matriarchs of Victorian households and a rite of passage for boys. Is it possible that Maria worked for a Jewish family and was then made pregnant by one of the men of that family?
Well, of course, anything is possible. However, the odds seem to be against this. Maria was living when Alois was born with a rural family, the Trummelschlager at Strones (who became Alois’ godparents) and she probably rented from them rather than worked for them: the male Trummelschlager is, incidentally, not the worst candidate for the office of Hitler’s grandfather; another possibility is Hitler’s official grandfather, Johann Hiedler. It should also be said that illegitimacy was fairly common among red-neck Austrians at this date – perhaps a quarter of women were not married when they had kids. The village may have chosen to look down on Maria after Alois’ birth, but they will not have tarred and feathered a middle-aged woman for having a child out of wedlock.
This information about Maria has been given to prepare the reader for two phantom affairs. First, Hans Frank (obit 1946) claimed, in his reflections, written before a much deserved appointment with the gallows, that Maria had had an affair with one Leopold Frankenberger (aka Frankenthaler), the nineteen-year old son of her Jewish employer in Graz: the problem with this theory is that there is no proof that Maria worked in Graz at this date and there is no proof for the existence of this particular Jewish family; there is a family with a similar name but they were not Jewish and the dates are wrong. There is also the allegation that Maria worked for the Rothschilds in Vienna with many sources claiming as a simple fact that Maria had been in this city and on the pay roll of one of the richest families in the world. There is NO pre-Great-War evidence, though, and it is just too good a story to take on trust.
One final reflection. The talk of the Rothschilds and the Frankenbergers seems to have been the stuff of Nazi knitting group gossip, but the gossip was real for all that even if the facts behind it were not. We know, too, that the Austrian police had looked into Hitler’s ancestry as he became a rising star/threat in Germany: Hitler’s genealogist warned Hitler that others had already been into the same archives that he had worked through in the early 1930s. Hitler’s enemies spread stories about his background too, of course, in Germany and among the press in the Western democracies (particularly Britain and France). Then there is the fact that Hitler destroyed the community where his family had grown up after Anschluss with inhabitants being relocated. And when allegations about a Jewish branch of the Hitler family existing in Romania surfaced Hitler was furious (and perhaps also disconcerted): note that this would have concerned not his grandmother’s lover but the bloodline of his (step-)grandfather. All this underlines that there was talk about the possibility of the Jewish ancestry and in Germany a quarter Jewish blood was enough to put you in an extermination camp. Of course, in a sense the talk is what matters most: not the blood in Hitler’s veins, but rather the perception out on the street. Hitler feared such rumours (scurrilous as they probably were) and so acted to eliminate them. It would be interesting to know when Hitler first learnt about his grandmother’s indiscretions and the dangers that they opened him to.
The great Lukacs in the Hitler of History pushes this further in an interesting passage:
Of course, no one can fix the fact of [Alois’] fatherhood with absolute certainty; but the researches of some historians are sufficient in establishing that the Frankenthaler-Schicklgruber relationship was insubstantial speculation, nothing else. Yet we may consider the mere possibility – and I emphasie ‘mere possibility’ – that Hitler may have thought that his father was half Jewish (perhaps also that during this childhood and adolescence there were people, young or old, who made taunting remarks about his father, true or not).
Lukacs goes onto write that Hitler associated his father in Meine Kampf with liberalism and cosmopolitanism, frankly ridiculous adjectives for Alois, but ‘Jewish’ adjectives in Hitler’s work. We may have here an interesting insight, but is just too flimsy, as Lukacs admits, to build anything upon.
Two related DNA stories: in the last couple of days we’ve had arguments about whether Eva Braun was part Jewish and a couple of years ago whether Hitler’s DNA is Jewish (this last article has no consequences for the argument above, it just points to the utter futility of race politics as understood by Hitler, his supporters and, sigh, his successors).
28 April 2014: Nathaniel sends in this hilarious piece from Alternate History and from a talented writer Geekhis Khan!: Local Berlin fixture and self-proclaimed “Fuhrer of the German Volk” Adolf Hitler was found dead on a park bench on Unter den Linden yesterday morning. A Great War veteran whose voice was garbled to non-comprehensibility from gas inhalation, Hitler was often spotted wandering Berlin’s streets, calling upon the great “rise of the Aryan volk” and going on barely understandable tirades against “Jews and other untermenschen”. His eccentric ways and humorous claims made him a popular topic of conversation among locals, whom often played along with his claims to sovereignty. Hitler is survived by his two dogs, a shepherd named Blondi and a Dachshund named Blitzer, both of whom were adopted by local shopkeep Mosel Goldfarb. “Adolf used to badger me about my jewishness all the time,” said Goldfarb with a laugh, “even as I gave him bread and dog food. It was endearing, really. Blondi and Blitzer always seemed to appreciate me so I’m happy to take them in.” Thanks Nathaniel and well done to the author Geekhis Khan!
