National Post (National Edition)
The myth of Hitler's Jewish blood
On Monday, the prime minister of Israel reacted with indignation to remarks made over the weekend by the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov. An Italian TV interviewer had asked Lavrov a very natural question about his country's obscene military invasion of neighbouring Ukraine: how can you say that your war is about “denazification,” when the president of the country you are fighting is a Jew?
The reporter got an answer more damning than he could have hoped: “Well, I think that Hitler had Jewish origins, so that means nothing,” Lavrov said. “For a long time now, we've been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest antisemites are the Jews themselves.”
If you've studied the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, you know that the deniers are constantly slipping up in a similar way. In their half-concealed view, the Nazis may have killed a few thousand Jews instead of six million, but, hey, at least their hearts were in the right place. Perhaps Lavrov's claim that Adolf Hitler was a self-hating Jew is a postmodern alternative version of this.
The implication is that sometimes you have to kill Jews, possibly in large numbers, in order to save Jews. We all know that this is just a Putinist sales job, and that the branding of former Russian subjects as Nazis is a propaganda convenience for the Russian regime.
One reason comments like Lavrov's can be made for purposes of state is that everyone, even in the West, has heard some “Hitler was secretly Jewish” canards. The very age of this phenomenon is evidence that this is the kind of thing people will make up: tales of a Jewish Hitler go back to before Hitler was of any perceived historical importance.
In 1921, as just one of a constellation of promising nationalist orators, Hitler got involved in a long-running feud with the left-wing Muenchener Post newspaper; it would be one of his chief tormentors right up until his seizure of emergency power and destruction of the German free press.
The Post reprinted a pamphlet accusing Hitler, who had just consolidated power within the Nazi party, of “serving Jewish interests” and behaving “like a real Jew,” while pointing out that his family origins were extremely mysterious. The pamphlet had been written by anti-Hitler Nazis, and when Hitler obtained a libel judgment against the Post, the paper proudly promised to continue its journalistic surveillance of him.
Hitler's family origins really are an enduring mystery for historians. His father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate child of a 42-yearold domestic servant, Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Alois grew up with his mother's surname: she married a mill worker named Johann Georg Hiedler when the boy was five.
As an adult, Alois Schicklgruber pulled some witnesses and smalltown dignitaries together and had the church records of his birth and christening altered to make him Hiedler's legitimate son (with an updating, typical for the time, of the family name). His actual father may have been J.G. Hiedler, or his brother J.N. Hiedler (who actually raised Alois in his home), or almost any other adult male in the Austrian boondocks.
So there's a space there into which opportunists can squeeze a hypothetical Jew. The pretext was provided by Hans Frank, a top-ranking Nazi, who wrote a self-serving memoir while on trial at Nuremberg. Frank, the Nazi boss of occupied Poland, knew he was likely to be found guilty and hanged, as indeed he was in 1946. According to his testament, in 1930, Adolf Hitler's despised nephew Patrick was trying to blackmail the dictator with threats to reveal some ugly truth about the family.
Frank was (supposedly) ordered to investigate, and found that Alois was actually the son of a Jewish teenager in the city of Graz whose family employed Maria Schicklgruber. The doomed memoirist claimed that Hitler confirmed most of the story, but insisted that J.G. Hiedler was his real biological grandfather. The alleged Jews in Graz, whose existence nobody has been able to confirm in any way, had merely been victims of opportunistic extortion by his grandma.
You can see why antisemites might love this story: it turns the Holocaust itself into an internecine Jewish drama and lets the pure Aryan Germans off the hook. Even when Jews themselves are subject to industrialized mass murder, guess who's behind it?
The problem is that Freudian-influenced psychohistorians have also loved and perpetuated the story, even though corroboration is completely absent, Frank's memoir is otherwise teeming with lies, and Frank himself, while regretting his own involvement with Hitler, remained a venomous antisemite right up until he mounted the gallows. (Guess who destroyed Europe?)
This hasn't stopped tourist-historians with psychological credentials from “explaining” the Hitler phenomenon as the scaled-up rage of an ill-favoured boy against his womanizing, peripatetic half-Jewish father. Chapter 2 of shrink George Victor's book, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil, offers a good example of what an imaginative, irresponsible writer can spin from this flaccid thread. That the chapter itself is called The Phantom Jew may be regarded as a (Freudian?) half-confession of its preposterousness.
The people who write European history for a living, as opposed to a fun sideline, accept that Adolf Hitler probably was a Hiedler one way or another. It's easy to come up with two dozen reasons to account for Hitler's known nervousness about scrutiny of his background.
Alois's concealed illegitimacy is an obvious one, but Hitler's own parents, whose identity isn't in doubt, were also first cousins once removed and required special ecclesiastical permission for their marriage. Somehow, no one, not even Russian cabinet ministers, ever blames the Second World War on incest; only the Jews are eligible for this special attention.
THE DOOMED MEMOIRIST CLAIMED THAT HITLER CONFIRMED MOST OF THE STORY.