Was Eva Braun Jewish?

To be honest this is one article I never thought I would ever have to write: examining claims made in the last few days that Eva Braun - the wife of Adolf Hitler - was of jewish origin. This claim has been aired by several news agencies: the probable origin of the print story however is the British rag the ‘Daily Mail', (1) which has a rather nasty obsession with printing lurid and outright stupid articles (which are quite literally fantasies for the most part) about the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler in particular.

In this article I am not going to recount the details of Eva's life, but rather focus on the claims made by the partisans of the claim that they have 'DNA evidence' of Eva's jewishness.

Now the first point to state is that biographers of Eva - of which there are several - as well as those many individuals - both scholars and amateurs - who have done the same for Adolf Hitler: do not agree that there is any evidence of Eva's jewishness.

The most obvious reason for this is that Eva's ancestry was subject to checks by SS genealogists who used the numerous baptismal and death records (which were systematized across Germany from about the 1700s onward but we also tend to have good records before then). Had there been any hint of Eva's jewishness then it would have been in the SS files on Eva and her family: since this was of particular interest to Himmler (in other words her ancestry had been traced according to the records and found to be completely non-jewish).

This already makes the claim unlikely, but when we combine this with the fact that mapping ancestry based on genetic material is notoriously difficult in the absence of unique markers or combinations of markers to a particular group of people. The best known of these identifying marks among jews is the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH), which is common to nearly all members of the priestly class (the Kohanim) and is unique to jews.

The presence of the CMH would be definitive as there is no other way it could have gotten there than by Eva having had a jewish ancestor. Without any of these unique markers however identifying someone's marginal ancestry is notoriously difficult: precisely because you have to factor for genetic drift and mutation within a population over a significant period of time.

Now since this apparently hasn't been done (other than to claim rather absurdly that N1B1 is 'unique' to jewish populations (2) when it isn't) (3) or more precisely we aren't told what the identifiers used to identify Eva as having some jewish ancestry are (other than making an incorrect claim about N1B1 being 'unique') then it is difficult to give credence to this claim, because it is very easy to say that someone has some similarities in their genetic make-up to a broad group such as Semites (i.e., North Africans/Arabs/jews etc). It is far more difficult without a unique identifier or preferably several such to say that someone actually has any ancestry from this broad group: let alone a specific people from this group.

What also makes me think this claim is absolute tosh from a genetic perspective is that the claim isn't specific. It doesn't say what kind of 'jewish people' - or put more precisely which jewish genetic cluster (probably one of the main three: Ashkenazi, Sephardi or Mizrahi) - Eva is alleged to have had ancestry from (other than to suggest correctly that N1B1 is common among the Ashkenazim, but - crucially and not stated - is also found in non-jewish European populations [and is unrelated to jewishness] to a small extent).

Saying Eva had 'jewish DNA' is just stupid, because it firstly tells us what anyone with the ability to read already knows (that jews are a biologically related group [the recognition of which is borderline anti-Semitic by definition]) and secondly it treats 'the jews' as one biological group (as before stated) that are distinctly different to all those around them, but nearly identical within the group itself (which as anyone who reads books on the genetics of jews knows isn't actually true [rather jews are series of related genetic clusters more distant from other non-jewish groups than each other and which roughly correspond to the main three jewish groups mentioned earlier]).

A genetic argument made without these unique identifying markers however has to be discarded, because there is no evidence the person's relevant genetic material is from a Semitic - let alone jewish - source as the issue of probability hasn't been addressed.

As in order to make the claim you have match alleles and then cross-reference the allele frequency across all of the genetic material under consideration in order to match to known population groups at various percentages of genome (which then allows you to work out the probability of certain origins at various levels of confidence).

For a simple example: say a genetic origin test said you had 95 percent Scandinavian, 2 percent Spanish and 3 percent Russian alleles. This would not equate to someone being '2 percent Spanish', but rather that 2 percent of their alleles match those common to - but are not necessarily from - Spanish people. They are two very different statements to make, because when you say you are '2 percent Spanish' it turns a possible percentage of your genetic make-up into being a known percentage of your genetic make-up.

In other words: you don't have any proof that said genetic material is from Spain unless some of those alleles (or certain combinations of them) are unique - or nearly unique - to Spanish people, which allows you to say with a high level of confidence that you had a Spanish ancestor.

Thus with a little knowledge of genetics: it is easy to see that the 'Eva Braun was jewish' argument begins to come apart at the seams, because it is basing the claim on finding one haplogroup in several strands of hair, which they haven't matched to any known living relatives of Eva.

This last bit is of central importance in terms of the genetics, because they haven't demonstrated the hair is actually genetically-related to Eva's family. It is a nice 'theory' and makes for a nice 'lets smear the Nazis' story for increasingly desperate third-rate hacks, but there is no evidence that the hair is actually Eva's and quite a lot to suggest this claim is (probably) a hoax.

We can demonstrate this rather simply by relating the story of how this hair came to be tested.

The monogramed hair brush was stolen (or more correctly looted) by one Captain Paul Baer - who worked for US intelligence - from Eva Braun's private residence and was apparently kept in the Baer's family until 1970 when it was 're-discovered' by his son Alan Baer and sold to a specialist antiques dealer called Paul Reznikoff. Reznikoff then sold eight strands of hair from this hair brush to Mark Evans: the presenter of Channel's 4 program 'Dead Famous DNA' for £1,200. (4)

Now in spite of the (stupid) claim by Evans that the 'providence is strong': it is actually almost non-existent (as is usually the case when people start harping on about 'how good the providence is'), because while it is reasonable to state that the hairbrush belonged to Eva.

There is no evidence that:

A) Eva ever actually used the hairbrush.

B) Nobody else other than Eva used it (which is the necessary and non-evidenced - therefore unjustifiable - assumption behind the whole claim).

C) Those eight hairs come from the period concerned.

As well as perhaps most importantly: there is absolutely no evidence that those hairs come from Eva.

I will presume the lab checked the sex of the hairs being tested (as a way of validating the sample) as I don't doubt their competence (if they didn't however that is another problem with the claim). However the 'providence' of these hairs is quite another matter given that there is absolutely nothing to tie them to Eva and every reason to think they probably aren't hers.

After all how many women let their friends use their hairbrushes?

Most I should think: certainly I have never heard of women who wouldn't (and nor has my wife).

So why could the hairs not come say from a friend of Eva's (or even one of her maids)?

Or consider that both Baer and Reznikoff are both surnames that are often taken by families of jewish origins (for example Yitzhak Baer and Charles Reznikoff) and that this hairbrush has been in their keeping for a total of some sixty-nine years (and we have no evidence on the use or 'providence' of the hair on the hairbrush during this time). That is rather along time for someone not to touch up their hair even once with such a fancy hairbrush.

That Reznikoff only gave Evans eight hairs to test (whether or not Evans selected or someone a bit more responsible selected them I haven't been able to gather) and that they were all the same is actually suggestive that this is a hoax.

This is for the simple reason that we know Eva had a lot of close girlfriends and it is unreasonable to assume that they do not somewhat occasionally share such common items of female life as hairbrushes. Thus had the hairs been genuine we would have expected several of the hairs to be different from each other: due to having picked up some other hair from other users of the hairbrush.

In other words: the fact that there is no apparent variability in the (very small) sample and that the supposition without that evidence that only one woman - and that woman was Eva Braun - ever used this hairbrush up till 1945 and then it was never used again till Reznikoff plucked those hairs out to sell to Evans is suggestive that this claim is a hoax.

As it simply doesn't tell us anything other than there were eight hairs with a potentially part-jewish origin on a hairbrush that was once owned by Eva Braun and which has been in the possession of potentially jewish individuals for sixty-nine years.

Is that 'evidence' that Eva Braun was jewish?

Nope.

Is it evidence of the gullibility of modern journalists?

Yep.

References

(1) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2597411/Was-Adolf-Hitlers-lover-Eva-Braun-Jewish-family.html

(2) Ibid.

(3) https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0007_0_07174.html

(4) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2597411/Was-Adolf-Hitlers-lover-Eva-Braun-Jewish-family.html; http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11232926