Scottish Daily Mail

Will a DNA test prove this plumber is Hitler’s grandson?

He says his grandmothe­r blurted out the terrible secret just before she died. Now he’s given a swab to be matched with a piece of the Fuhrer’s jaw

- By Guy Walters

YOU would think that if someone suspected they were related to Adolf Hitler, they might keep it quiet.

Not so Philippe Loret, a 62-yearold plumber who not only publicly claims the Nazi dictator was his grandfathe­r, but is very keen to prove it.

This week, it emerged that Mr Loret has provided a swab of his DNA, so it can be compared with genetic material on a fragment of Hitler’s jawbone held in a former KGB vault in Moscow.

According to Mr Loret, from Picardy in northern France, his grandmothe­r, Charlotte Lobjoie, started an affair with Hitler in the summer of 1917, when he was fighting in France. She gave birth to a son called Jean-Marie in 1918.

For many years, Charlotte — whose portrait Hitler apparently painted — kept her son’s paternity a secret, until she revealed it to him in 1951, shortly before she died.

In turn, Jean-Marie would also keep it a secret until he, too, blurted it out to his children in the mid-Seventies.

‘Suddenly, my father said: “Kids, I’ve got something to tell you. Your grandfathe­r is Adolf Hitler”,’ Philippe once recalled.

‘There was stunned silence, as no one knew what to say. We didn’t know how to react.’

Although historians scoff at the notion that Hitler, who was always believed to have been childless, fathered a baby when he was serving in France, the unearthing in 2012 of a diary kept by a British soldier called Leonard Wilkes during World War II has offered a scrap of evidence to suggest Mr Loret’s extraordin­ary claim might — just might — be true.

‘An interestin­g day today,’ wrote Wilkes on September 30, 1944. ‘Visited the house where Hitler stayed as a corporal in the last war, saw the woman who had a baby by him and she told us that the baby, a son, was now fighting in the French army against the Germans.’

UNTIL the DNA results emerge, there is no way that we can be sure of the truth — and, for the time being, it is more reasonable to suspect that either Charlotte Lobjoie or her son, or both, was a fantasist. Even Mr Loret accepts the possibilit­y that Hitler was not his grandfathe­r.

‘There are always some doubts. But if the DNA test is negative, well, there’s nothing to do then,’ he says. ‘If it is positive, my thoughts will be confirmed. If not, I need to find out who my real grandad was. All I want is to find the truth.’

The DNA test is being organised by the state-run Russian television channel NTV, using material from Hitler’s remains (the jawbone fragment) retrieved by Stalin’s forces, which stormed the Fuhrer’s Berlin bunker in 1945.

In fact, members of the Loret family are not the first to claim direct descent from Hitler. People have been declaring, often with twisted pride, that he was either their father or grandfathe­r ever since the end of the war.

Not surprising­ly, the vast majority of such claimants are more than a little unhinged and a few have been downright dangerous.

One of the first to claim Hitler was her father was an 18-year-old called Gotelind Tortensen, who was arrested by the British Army in January 1946 in Magdeburg, in northern Germany.

Described in one account as being ‘attractive’ and an ‘ardent Nazi’, she was held as a security suspect and, during questionin­g, insisted that her mother — a Swedish actress called Karin Holm — had an affair with Hitler in Vienna in the late Twenties.

Tortensen had the gall to claim that she worked as a secretary in the Reich Chanceller­y, where Hitler saw her ‘every day’ and treated her ‘affectiona­tely as his daughter’. She stated that when she was 14, the Fuhrer had told her, in the presence of Himmler and Goering, that he was her father. The interrogat­ors did not believe a word of this and concluded that Tortensen was insane. They were probably right.

The motivation of another — Maria Lorento, in 1958 — was more likely to have been rooted in greed than insanity.

In May that year, the blonde, who lived in Buenos Aires, stated that she was ‘certain’ she was Hitler’s daughter and placed a claim at the Argentine Foreign Office to a $20million fortune the Fuhrer had supposedly deposited in Argentina.

‘I feel that it rightly belongs to me,’ she said.

Lorento’s certainty puzzled many. Brought up in Spain during that country’s Civil War, she was sent to a convent near Bordeaux for safety, until the collapse of France to the Nazis, when she returned briefly to Spain, before departing for Buenos Aires.

It was in the Argentine capital that ‘several people’ told her she was Hitler’s daughter.

That, then, was the sum of Lorento’s evidence, although some lurid pulp publicatio­ns of the Fifties suggested her mother was Hitler’s mistress (and, briefly, wife) Eva Braun.

Inevitably, Lorento’s claim to her paternity and fortune fell on stony ground.

In mid-1965, another blonde claimed that she had been fathered by the Fuhrer.

Gisela Fleischer was the daughter of Tilly Fleischer, a javelin-thrower who won gold for Germany at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

According to Gisela, her mother’s athletic prowess had so impressed Hitler that he invited her to his Bavarian retreat and started an eight-month affair. The result was Gisela, who was born in a ‘special Nazi clinic’ in December 1937.

She claimed her mother only told her the truth when Gisela announced she was intending to marry the son of a rabbi and move to Israel.

Gisela — an underwear model — gave numerous interviews to countless magazines and even published a book called My Father Adolf Hitler.

‘I was born for love and not for hate,’ she observed, embracing the flower power of the time.

By the Seventies, Jean-Marie Loret’s claim had emerged — widely reported and taken seriously by some, as it was endorsed by Hitler expert Dr Werner Maser, who was later the first historian to assert that the purported diaries of the Fuhrer were forgeries.

FLYING in the face of most opinion, Waser boldly stated: ‘I am convinced I have found Hitler’s son. He looks just like Adolf Hitler shortly before his death, but without a moustache. At 1.75 metres, as tall as Hitler; about 70 kilos, like Hitler; and with the same blood type.’

If you look at a photo of JeanMarie Loret, there is indeed a slight similarity. But, then again, it is possible to ‘see’ Hitler in the appearance of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people around the world.

Maser’s ‘revelation’ was to spur

on a series of copycats, some clearly deranged.

Among them was Patrick O’Brien, a morbidly obese 36-year-old recluse from San Antonio, Texas.

He was convinced he was Hitler’s son and, in 1979, he stabbed his parents to death.

More recently, there was Te Rangi Trangmar, a sheep shearer from New Zealand, who, in 2013, went on a rampage with a shotgun that left several people injured. With huge swastikas emblazoned on his face, the delusional Trangmar claimed he was Hitler’s grandson.

Not to be outdone was Michael John O’Hara, a former teacher from Australia, who wrote a book in 2006 called The Personal Pistols Of Adolf Hitler, in which he reproduced a signed affidavit claiming he was Hitler’s son. This was a particular­ly extraordin­ary claim to make because, under the name ‘Zeev Gideon Korwan’, O’Hara had once led the militant Jewish Defence League, which the FBI had classified as a terrorist organisati­on.

This week, O’Hara made the news again when it was reported that he was terrorisin­g his neighbours in a series of petty disputes.

‘He certainly acts like the Gestapo,’ said one neighbour.

But some claims do need to be taken seriously.

In 2007, in a documentar­y for Channel 4, the political journalist Martin Bright investigat­ed a claim about Unity Mitford, a former debutante who was close to Hitler and spent some time in Germany.

It was alleged that she gave birth to Hitler’s child after she had been repatriate­d to Britain in 1940. This was after she had become so distraught that Britain had declared war on Germany, she became depressed and shot herself in the head.

The idea of Hitler’s secret love child growing up in Britain during the war is obviously seductive, but the theory proved fanciful.

There are, though, more distant blood relatives of Hitler alive today.

The dictator’s closest surviving family are three great-nephews living on Long Island, New York. They maintain anonymity and even their lawyer refuses to be named.

In 2015, though, they were tracked down for an article in The New Yorker magazine. The writer said of their home: ‘There were American flags hanging from the houses of neighbours and dogs barking. It was a quintessen­tially Middle American scene.’

The lack of swastikas would surely have made their great-uncle turn in his grave. If he had one.

 ??  ?? Family resemblanc­e? Adolf Hitler and Philippe Loret
Family resemblanc­e? Adolf Hitler and Philippe Loret

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