In 2010, the British paper The Daily Telegraph reported that a study had been conducted in which saliva samples were collected from 39 of Hitler’s known relatives to test their DNA origins and found, though inconclusively, that Hitler may have Jewish origins. On October 14, 1933, the London Daily Mirror published a picture of a gravestone in a Jewish cemetery in Bucharest inscribed with some Hebrew characters and the name Adolf Hitler, but this Bucharest Hitler could not have been the Nazi leader’s grandfather. They were expelled in the 15th century and didn't return until decades after Hitler’s father was born. In fact, no Jews lived in Graz at the time. There is no evidence that Maria Anna was ever in Graz, let alone employed by the butcher Leopold Frankenreiter.” Ian Kershaw, for example, wrote in his biography of Hitler Hubris, “A family named Frankenreiter did live there, but was not Jewish. Austria, was impregnated by a member of the family – possibly their 19-year-old son – when she was 42. Frank said Hitler showed him a letter from a nephew who threatened to reveal he had Jewish blood. Frank wrote that he found evidence that Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish and that Alois’ mother, Maria Schicklgruber, worked as a cook in the home of a wealthy Jewish family named Frankenreiter in Graz.

In his 1953 memoir In the Face of the Gallows (published after his execution in 1946), Hitler’s lawyer Hans Frank claimed that Hitler had told him to investigate rumors of him having Jewish ancestry. Alois was brought up in the family of Hiedler’s brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. In 1876, when Alois was 39, he was made legitimate and his baptismal record annotated by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Alois’s father (recorded as Georg Hitler). Alois then assumed the surname Hitler.

Hitler’s father, Alois, was registered as an illegitimate child with no father when born in 1837 and to this day Hitler’s paternal grandfather is unknown. In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Alois’s mother. Though the idea may seem preposterous to some, the question seems to stem from the remote possibility that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. The question received new media attention in May 2022 when Russia’s foreign minister claimed Hitler had Jewish blood. One of the most frequently asked questions about the Holocaust and the Nazi party is whether Adolf Hitler was Jewish or had Jewish ancestors. Adolf Hitler: Table of Contents| Biography| Photographs

Adolf Hitler by John Toland