Was Jean-Marie Loret the Illegitimate Son of Adolf Hitler?
I have been asked on multiple occasions about the post-war claims of Frenchman Jean-Marie Loret that he has Adolf Hitler’s illegitimate son from the Hitler’s time on the Western front as an infantryman during the First World War from 1914 to 1918.
As this occasionally gets pushed by jews in an attempt to delegitimize Adolf Hitler I thought it appropriate to discuss the claims Loret makes here.
The claimed narrative – as enunciated being both Loret and German historian Werner Maser – (1) is this: that Corporal Adolf Hitler met Jean-Marie Loret’s mother Charlotte Lobjoie in the French city of Lille in 1916 when Hitler was 29 and Lobjoie 19 while the latter was cutting hay.
They then proceeded to have a sexual relationship with Lobjoie acting as a camp follower for Hitler and following him around the German front line from Seboncourt, Forunes, Wavrin to Noyelles-les-Seclin in France as well as Ardooie in Belgium during 1917 with Loret being conceived by the young couple in Ardooie.
However, the problems with this narrative appear early on as Lobjoie never spoke German and Hitler never spoke French (2) so one immediately wonders how on earth they communicated with one another which is never really answered nor sufficiently explained by either Loret or Maser.
Also, there is the problem – as Joachimsthaller points out – (3) that it is extremely unlikely that any soldier in the First World War would be permitted a permanent camp follower let alone a lowly corporal as Hitler was at the time. We simply do not have any significant examples of this occurring with German forces during the First World War.
Further Loret and Maser’s narrative is directly contradicted by Hitler’s friend and fellow dispatch runner Balthasar Brandmayer who wrote in his 1933 autobiography that Hitler violently opposed German soldiers having relationships with French women as it meant they had ‘no German sense of honour’. (4)
Additionally, Alice Lobjoie - Loret’s aunt and Charlotte’s sister – later confirmed that while Charlotte did have an affair with a German soldier and Loret was the result: that soldier was not – and looked nothing like - Hitler and that Jean-Marie Loret was simply ‘nuts’. (5)
The testimony of Hitler’s long-time valet Heinz Linge in support of Loret’s story is also worth quoting since Linge states in his memoirs published in 1980 that:
‘Hitler did not mention to Otto Wagener that ‘by having a son’ in this case he meant ‘in wedlock’, since he had already admitted to others beforehand his belief that he had a son born in 1918 as the result of a relationship with a French girl as soldier in 1916-17 in northern France and Belgium.’ (6)
‘As Hitler wanted to speak to Himmler alone, and army ADC Gerhard Engel and I quickly left the room, I did not know what detailed instructions Himmler received. Whoever the subject was I did not discover, but there was some talk of a woman and son. Because Hitler wanted there to be no witness to this conversation with Himmler, I concluded that it really had to be something out of the ordinary. Thirty-seven years later I found out for whom he had been searching: Charlotte Lobjoie, a woman who had born him a son, Jean Marie, in March 1918.’ (7)
Now it is important to point out here that Linge in the first quote is talking about an actual incident where Hitler admitted to others that he believed he had had a son born in 1918 as the result of a relationship with a French girl during the First World War.
While the second quote is simply Linge reacting to Loret’s claims that were published three years earlier by Werner Maser in 1977 which he believed validated what he had heard from Hitler or as proverbial ‘court gossip’ in Germany in the 1930s or 1940s; hence his endorsement of Loret’s claim while having previously said he wasn’t aware who the French girl and her son were.
Therefore, we can see that while Linge’s testimony seems superficially solid all it actually says is that Hitler may have believed – rightly or wrongly – that he had had a son by a French woman conceived during his service in the German army in the First World War. Thus, it isn’t actually confirmation of Loret’s status as Hitler’s illegitimate son at all despite Linge reading it that way in after Maser’s article was published in 1977.
Additionally genetic ‘evidence’ is in two minds about Loret’s father being Hitler with the DNA – which almost certainly isn’t actually from Hitler’s family as I’ve explained elsewhere – (8) allegedly collected by Jean-Paul Mulders and Marc Vermeeren from Alexander Stuart-Houston suggesting Loret wasn’t Hitler’s son. (9) While a blood group comparison between Loret and Hitler by the University of Heidelberg only concluded that they had the same blood group so thus Hitler’s paternity couldn’t be ruled out. (10)
Given that Mulders and Vermeeren’s ‘genetic evidence’ is almost certainly nonsense to begin with then that rules out their findings as evidence against Hitler having fathered Loret, while the University of Heidelberg blood group comparison certainly rules Hitler in.
This is – along with Linge’s comment in his memoirs – is the best evidence for Hitler’s paternity, but the problem is simply the sheer improbability of Loret’s story as well as the fact that our only source for it is Loret himself, while his maternal aunt completely disagrees with Loret’s narrative that he was the son of Adolf Hitler but does agree that he was the son of a German soldier from the First World War (as does Loret’s birth certificate).
So why would Loret claim to be Hitler’s son after the Second World War?
Well, that is simple enough: he appears to have wanted to get rich by claiming – as Hitler’s only surviving heir - all the book royalties from Hitler’s best-selling book ‘Mein Kampf’. (11)
This then explains Loret’s motive in using his evidencable but unknown German soldier father from the First World War to extend the claim that unknown German soldier was in fact Adolf Hitler.
Yet the simple fact remains that – as Kershaw notes – (12) Loret’s entire story is not only extremely improbable but near enough impossible to credit, but yet despite this Maser continued to claim it was ‘proven’ till the end of his life. (13)
Such is the hubris of many historians.
References
(1) Werner Maser, ‘Adolf Hitler: Vater eines Sohnes’, Zeit Geschichte, February 1978, pp. 173–202
(2) https://allthatsinteresting.com/hitlers-children
(3) Anton Joachimsthaller, 1989, ‘Korrektur einer Biographie: Adolf Hitler, 1908–1920’, 1st Edition, Herbig: Munich, pp. 162–64
(4) Balthasar Brandmayer, 1933, ‘Zwei Meldeganger’, 1st Edition, Buchverlag Franz Walter: Munich, p. 103
(5) Joachimsthaller, Op. Cit., p. 162
(6) Heinz Linge, 2009, ‘With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Valet’, 1st Edition, Frontline: London, pp. 48-49
(7) Ibid., pp. 138-139
(8) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-of-jewish-or-rothschild
(9) https://www.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf24042008_130
(10) https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/exclusif-le-point-fr-le-fils-francais-cache-d-adolf-hitler-17-02-2012-1432303_23.php
(11) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9088865/Hitler-had-son-with-French-teen.html
(12) Ian Kershaw, 2001, ‘Hitler’, Vol. 1, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 635, n. 116
(13) https://web.archive.org/web/20080924140917/http://www.national-zeitung.de/Artikel_04/NZ30_2.html