One of the Weirdest Myths About The Third Reich Has Been Disproved

One of the strangest myths about the Third Reich continues to circulate in online chat rooms. You may have heard versions of it at one time or another.

It’s this: Hitler was actually partially Jewish. The claim appeals to antisemites as it allows them to suggest that the Holocaust may have been in some measure the fault of the Jews. A Jew ordered the death of six million Jews.

The source for the old story is that the ancestry of Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, is obscure. Hitler’s father was born with the name Alois Schicklgruber. Hitler and his father derived their eventual surname from Hitler’s father’s stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler. (The name seems to have been misprinted by a local official during the process in which Hitler’s father was adopted and took on his stepfather’s last name. Thus, Hiedler became Hitler.) Since Hitler’s father was illegitimate, there has always been uncertainty about who his father’s biological father — his paternal grandfather — was.