Was Adolf Hitler of Jewish or Rothschild Origin?
I have long encountered claims made by a wide variety of individuals that Adolf Hitler - the leader of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 - was of jewish and more specifically of Rothschild origin. These claims - usually to do with Hitler's life before he joined the DAP - are almost entirely based on hearsay and gossip combined with the need to invent reasons why Hitler was so good an orator (he 'must' have been a black magician: hence the 'Occult Reich' literature), why Hitler was keen to clamp down on some sexual and reproductive activity (he 'must' have been a homosexual or sexually aroused by scat: hence the psychoanalytic interpretations of Hitler), why Hitler invaded Poland (he 'must' have been bent on world conquest: hence the 'Hitler as a warmonger' literature) and why Hitler hated the jews and supposedly killed six million of them in the 'Holocaust' (he 'must' have been of jewish origin: hence the 'Hitler was a jew' literature).
All of the above claims are quite false, but yet people often believe at least one of them - if not several at once - in part because they feel the intellectual need to 'explain' Hitler as some sort of deviant who they couldn't possibly be like, because they are 'normal' and he wasn't. The sensible position that Hitler was a normal human being - although in fairness that is underselling Hitler quite substantially given that he was obviously rather intelligent, a gifted artist and one of the best orators the world has ever known - is in sense revolutionary because it asks the question of many people in terms of their own perceptions as to whether they could commit acts regarded by current social norms as the very summit of evil.
This is much the same reason that other highly-talented National Socialists - like Dr. Joseph Goebbels - have been frequently been subject to the same process: although in Goebbels' case it is alleged that he was a cynic, didn't believe in a word he said, a closet communist, an accomplished liar and generally manipulated all and sundry persons to his advantage. To believe that Hitler and Goebbels were normal people like you or me is heresy in a very real sense for a lot of people in much the same way that communists were not often viewed as people during the 'Red Scare' epochs of the 1920s and 1950s but rather as a subversive 'other'.
Let us move beyond the claims of those who wish to simply vilify Hitler or proclaim that he was an agent of the Rothschilds in a gigantic Zionist conspiracy to look at whether this thesis is in any way justifiable.
There are two elements to the claim that Hitler was of jewish or Rothschild origin.
The first is the historic claim that his paternal grandmother (Maria Anne Schicklgruber) was actually impregnated while in service (i.e., employed as a live-in maid) to a jewish man of Rothschild descent surnamed Frankenberger in Graz. There are non-specific claims in relation to Hitler having a jewish father that were made during and after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933: however as these have no names or detail behind them we can safely dismiss them as being smears by opponents. (1)
The second is of far more recent vintage and originates from a Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and a customs official Marc Vermeeren (2) (the latter has incorrectly been labelled a 'historian' by a later article in an apparent attempt to give him some semblance of authority) (3) claim to have 'genetic proof' that Hitler was of partial jewish/North African origin.
The first of these positions that Hitler's father Alois Schicklgruber (4) was the product of a sexual indiscretion between a maid and her jewish master Frankenberger, while the former was in his employ in Graz derives almost singly from the memoirs of Hans Frank. (5)
In his memoirs Frank firstly claims that Hitler had no jewish ancestors, (6) but then changes his mind later reciting the Frankenberger story. (7) Further Frank claims - and we are not usually told this by proponents of the Frankenberger hypothesis - that Hitler told him that he knew about this story and that his grandfather and grandmother were actually conning the jew involved out of money. (8) Frank however - as Kershaw informs us - was in a psychologically troubled state when he wrote these lines (as he was facing execution) and his memoirs are filled with made-up information and inaccuracies. (9)
That Frank was simply inventing the Frankenberger claim can be shown easily enough by pointing out there is no confirmatory evidence for it and some significant problems with it.
In the first instance of course there is the fact that Frank contradicts himself on the subject of Hitler's alleged jewish ancestry, in the second because Patrick Hitler in his 1938-1939 'revelations' about alleged jewish ancestry did not locate that ancestry in Graz let alone the supposed fact that the ancestry was specifically of Rothschild origin, (10) in the third there is no evidence that Maria ever went to Graz, (11) and fourthly there is no record in the Graz archives of any family named Frankenberger being resident there in the 1830s when Alois was born. (12)
The possibility of it being a mistaken spelling has also been investigated as Kershaw relates; there is only one family (the Frankreiters) and one individual (Leopold Frankreiter) in that family that Maria could have had a relationship with. However there are two qualifiers on that Leopold Frankreiter was an ordinary butcher (as opposed to the wealthy jewish financier depicted by the Frankenberger legend), employed no maid we know of and the Frankreiter family wasn't of jewish origin. (13)
The coup de grace to the whole charade of the 'jewish Hitler' claims is delivered when we understand the Gestapo themselves undertook a series of different secret investigations into Hitler's ancestry and found nothing to contradict the official NSDAP position (that Hitler's paternal grandfather was Johann Georg Hiedler) on the matter. (14)
Clearly Frank isn't the best source of information in relation to Hitler's origins then is he?
The reason the story has gained so much currency is in part that one of the major sources for biographical information about Hitler - a jewish anti-Nazi journalist named Konrad Heiden - mentioned the claims in his 1944 biography of Hitler 'Der Fuhrer', but didn't supply any actual information to back them up. (15)
We need to remember that one of the major angles for propagandistic attack on the racial doctrines of National Socialism was accusing National Socialist race theory of being the product of intellectual cranks and that Nationalist Socialist leaders weren't themselves of pure Aryan ancestry even under their own standards.
Good examples of just this kind of vicious attack can be found in wartime propaganda works such as the wartime best-seller 'People under Hitler' where it is claimed that Japanese and Sioux Indians were officially proclaimed to be members of the Aryan race (16).
If we understand that the 'jewish Hitler' claim is born from anti-Nazi gossip in the 1920s (the reader should ask themselves which of the major leaders of the NSDAP wasn't called a jew in an attempt to discredit them) (17) and then picked up to be used as wartime 'black propaganda' by the Allies and Soviets (then being carried over into the peacetime conceptions of the subject) - much as the rumours about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's alleged jewish origins were picked by Goebbels and his propagandists (most notably Johann von Leers) - then it is not hard to see that the 'jewish Hitler' claims are an unfortunate historical by-product of political invective which have been picked up by pro-jewish authors in an attempt both to discredit Hitler on the far right and also provide a Freudian type explanation of his dislike of jews (i.e., it wasn't due to jewish behaviour but was ipso facto irrational).
The second argument - as advanced by Mulders and Vermeeren - is also dubious in the extreme. Our intrepid duo - who remind me more of Thompson and Thompson than Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson - claim that they tracked down 39 of Hitler's living relatives using genetics. (18) The only actual relative they actually name is Alexander Stuart-Houston - Hitler's grand-nephew - who they admit to having taken DNA from for testing without knowledge or consent. (19) That we don't know who the rest of the 'Hitler relatives' they have allegedly taken genetic material from are throws a problematic light on their conclusions such as they are.
We simply don't have any idea who these people are or what - or even if - they have any indirect familial relationship to Hitler. Ironically we also only have Mulders' word for it is Stuart-Houston's DNA that he took from a discarded serviette. After all one wonders how Mulders specifically acquired said serviette and how on earth we can be sure that the genetic material is actually Stuart-Houston's? Since we don't know who the other donors are either it makes the whole 'study' a somewhat hilarious farce from the get-go because the genetic material has not been kept free of potential - and even probable - contamination (thus is completely inadmissible). (20)
This is in spite of all the usual weasel words from our two budding forensics boffins that they had 'taken all possible care' to keep the samples 'free of contamination'. This is, of course, clearly nonsense given what we are told about the only identified contributor (and an unknowing one at that) of genetic material to their 'study'.
What does this mean?
In effect the likely contamination of the sample means that anything Mulders and Vermeeren claim is de facto unreliable because they have no actual proof (i.e., anything linking it to Stuart-Houston) of who the genetic material comes from.
This is before we even note that their methodology is clearly faulty given that they could and should - had been they been reputable historians as opposed to a publicity-seeking hack and a customs official - have requested genetic material be extracted from one of Hitler's teeth that are still in his skull (which has been identified primarily through its fairly unique dentistry) as opposed to trying to claim an ancestor's genetic origins based on the genetics of his descendants.
You might ask why this is such a stupid thing to do and this is really because in order to establish Hitler's genetic make-up we need his own genetic material if it is available (which it is) and if not then we would need reliable genetic material from all of Hitler's direct descendants and relatives up to him. The reason we would need this is really very simple: we simply do not know if the claimed father of a person is actually the father historically speaking.
Hitler himself is a good case in point in that the two most probable candidates for being his biological grandfather are either his official grandfather (Johann Georg Hiedler) or his grandfather's brother (Johann von Nepomuk Huetler). There is simply no other serious candidate in the field and of the two Nepomuk seems the most likely given Hiedler's general rejection of Alois and Nepomuk's general acceptance of him. (21)
We cannot absolutely prove this either way of course, but we can narrow the field by using the historical documentation and thought experiment to eliminate all the other candidates.
Simply put: you cannot claim that an ancestor is proven to be something because their descendants are something because you do not know what has happened in terms of sexual activity in-between unless you can establish the genetic line up to the individual concerned (i.e., you need direct not indirect descent), which Mulders and Vermeeren cannot do without Hitler's actual genetic material because Hitler fathered no children.
This means in effect that Mulders and Vermeeren have no genetic case whatsoever to make the claims they do about Hitler's genetic origins: although they don't let genetics stand in the way of their broad claims.
Thus having rendered both the historical and the genetic argument invalid we can categorically state that there is no actual evidence that Hitler was jewish or Rothschild origin: indeed everything points to him being of Austrian peasant stock much as he himself asserted.
References
(1) Cf. Ron Rosenbaum, 1998, 'Explaining Hitler: A Search for the Origins of His Evil', 1st Edition, Random House: New York, pp. 167-178
(2) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213589/Hitlers-secret-family-How-researchers-tracked-39-living-descendants-dictator.html
(3) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305414/Hitler-descended-Jews-Africans-DNA-tests-reveal.html
(4) For a particularly useful genealogical chart of Hitler's ancestors see Alan Bullock, 1954, 'Hitler: A Study in Tyranny', 1st Edition, Companion Book Club: London, pp. 22-23
(5) Ian Kershaw, 1998, 'Hitler', Vol. 1, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 9; Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 27; 31
(6) Kershaw, Op. Cit, p. 8
(7) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 11-15
(8) Kershaw, Op. Cit., p. 8
(9) Ibid., p. 9
(10) Ibid., pp. 8-9
(11) Ibid., p. 8
(12) Ibid.
(13) Ibid., pp. 8-9
(14) Ibid., p. 9
(15) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 130-134
(16) Wallace Deuel, 1942, 'People under Hitler', 1st Edition, Lindsay Drummond: London, pp. 129-130
(17) The most notable examples aside from Hitler were Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg and Reinhard Heydrich. All of which I might add have been categorically declared false by modern historians.
(18) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305414/Hitler-descended-Jews-Africans-DNA-tests-reveal.html
(19) Ibid.
(20) Reading between the lines of the article (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213589/Hitlers-secret-family-How-researchers-tracked-39-living-descendants-dictator.html) we should not that Stuart-Houston 'disposed' of the napkin in a bin and we haven't even got a clue as to whether it was his or not let alone what other genetic material would have been added to the mix in said bin.
(21) Kershaw, Op. Cit., pp. 6-7; also Charles Bracelen Flood, 1989, 'Hitler: The Path to Power', 1st Edition, Houghton Mifflin: Boston, p. 6