Hitler The Jew?

Recently, DNA samples were gathered from some of Hitler's relatives, only to give some credibility to what many had suspected about Hitler for quite some time, that he was part Jewish, and that he certainly was not pure "Aryan." Understand, this is not conclusive, but some of the family genetic matter traces back to Berber people from North Africa. Berbers are a people historically, and to this day, mainly located in Morocco, Algeria, Libya or Tunisia. This genetic material also is fairly common in European Jews, and many Jews went to Europe via North Africa centuries ago.

Hitler's father was illegitimate, being born to an unwed mother whose family name was Schicklgruber.* Hitler's father, Alois, went by "Alois Schicklgruber" well into adulthood, as his mother supposedly never revealed to anyone who her son's father was. She later married a "Hitler," also spelled "Hiedler," and I believe I've even seen the spelling "Hüttler." Many people in those times did not have much education, so it is my understanding that spelling variations were quite common, and don't forget those German dialects with different pronunciations I mention so often here. A word can be pronounced a particular way in one town, and somewhat, to very, differently just a village or two away. Many German dialects never had, and still do not have, "standardized" spellings, either. Anyway, I guess it is safe to say that we still don't know for sure who Hitler's grandfather was. Many stories surfaced over the years, even before Hitler gained power, but whether any of these stories is true, or whether they were just done to discredit him is another matter. While we now see Hitler as having been a powerful, ruthless dictator, we have to remember he started out in that often less than honest profession of "politics." Lots of potentially damaging stories circulate about virtually all politicians, but how much of the information is true or false is the question, not that I'm expecting a roaring tide to come forth seeking "fairness" to Hitler.

I haven't kept up on all of the stories about Hitler and other Nazi leaders for quite some time, so you might want to double check my information, and it is extremely difficult to sort out fact from fiction on such a nefarious figure as Hitler, but I recall that it was said a while back, that Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking officer in the SS, especially in the department dealing with "intelligence" matters; that is, elements that initially gathered information on German citizens, including German Jews, and then later on citizens in occupied areas of Europe; the best known being the Gestapo,** allegedly found out information about Hitler's ancestry, which he kept in a highly secret file available only to him. The rumor was that the info showed Hitler to be part Jewish, otherwise, why would Heydrich have kept it so secret, or so the rumor went. Whether any such info was uncovered in captured SS records, I don't know for certain, but I doubt it, as it certainly would have been major news, especially now with this DNA testing of Hitler's relatives.*** Rumors had surfaced that Hitler's actual grandfather had been Jewish, and that his grandmother had worked for a Jewish family named Frankenberg, whose (then) teenage son was "supposedly" the father of her child. "Supposedly" the rumors about Hitler's ancestry troubled him so much, that he asked one of his close Nazi advisers, Hans Frank, to delve into his ancestry and report the findings to him. "Supposedly" Frank gave an "all clear," thus easing Hitler's mind.****

Of course, if the Jewish ancestry can be proven to be true, this would be the most tragic of ironies; Hitler the hate-filled murderer of so many Jews, a part Jew himself. Traudl Junge, one of his personal secretaries, said in an interview not long before she died (she was in her 80s), that if she could have still asked Hitler one question, it would have been if he would have gassed himself, if he had found out he was part Jewish.

* If I remember correctly, William L. Shirer, a correspondent for CBS in Germany during much of the time of Hitler's rise and prewar rule, speculated humorously in his book "The Rise and Fall Of The Third Reich," that he doubted Adolf Hitler could have become ruler of Germany if his father had not changed the family name from Schicklgruber, because he couldn't imagine Germans screaming "Heil Schicklgruber!!!" In one of those short "Three Stooges' " films from during the war, a picture of Hitler is shown, and I believe it is Moe who screams, "Yikes, it's Schicklgruber!"

** The word "Gestapo" was created by lumping abbreviations together to form the word; in this case, Geheime Staats Polizei, or "Secret State Police." The organization became so well known for its terror tactics, that I imagine any survivors from those times still shudder at the mere mention of the word.

*** During the course of the war, especially in its waning days, and thereafter, literally tons and tons of Nazi military and government documents were captured by the Allies and the Soviet Union. Those records captured by the Western Allies were microfilmed and are available in the U.S. Archives in Washington, D.C. I believe the original records were eventually returned to the then "West" German government. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the records they captured from the Nazis have become available, and historians are still "mining" information from those records. It is my understanding, however, that there are still records and artifacts (including some of Hitler's blood, for a possible DNA sample) in Russian possession that are highly classified and unavailable to the public. Since the Russians were the ones who captured Berlin, they must have made a major haul on German documents; after all, Berlin was the capital.

**** I don't recall everything on this, but "supposedly" there were no Jews living in the town where Hitler's grandmother resided at that time, thus "supposedly" debunking the rumor. Of course, there were no DNA tests back then, and so "evidence" had to be circumstantial, just as genealogists have done to this day, unless, more recently, DNA samples are available and the person/people are willing to pay for such testing. If all of the recent tests prove to be true about Hitler himself, it makes me wonder how many other Nazi leaders may have had Jewish ancestry or other ancestry so incompatible with Nazi "nonsense"...I mean, ideology; then again, I believe I'll stand by my original word.

WORD HISTORY:
Blood-This word seems to go back to the Indo European root "bhel" (with the concept of "bloom, come forth") and the derived form "bhlo," which meant "gush, spurt, burst out" (again, the base notion of "come forth" is present). The Old Germanic offshoot was "blodam," which then gave Old English/Anglo-Saxon "blod," which seems to have had a long "o" sound before later softening and the eventual "oo" was used in spelling. It is very common in the other Germanic languages: German has "Blut," Low Saxon German has "bloot," Letzeburgisch (a German dialect spoken primarily in Luxembourg) has "blutt," Kölsch (the dialect of Cologne) has "bloohdt," Dutch and Frisian have "bloed," Danish, Swedish and Norwegian all have "blod," and Icelandic has "blóð."