Hitler's Pizza 35

The question of Mr Hitler's ancestry is dealt with at the beginning of Ian Kershaw's 840+ page book enbreastled Hitler (Harmondsworth, Penguin: 1998).

The third possibility is that Adolf Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Rumours to that effect circulated in Munich cafes in the early 1920s, and were fostered by sensationalist journalism of the foreign press during the 1930s. It was suggested that the name Huttler was Jewish, 'revealed' that he could be traced to a Jewish family called Hitler in Bucharest, and even claimed that his father had been sired by Baron Rothschild, in whose house in Vienna his grandmother had allegedly spent some time as a servant. But the most serious speculation about Hitler's supposed Jewish background has occurred since the Second World War and is directly traceable to the memoirs of the leading Nazi lawyer and Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank, dictated in his Nuremburg cell while awaiting the hangman...

Allegedly commissioned by Hitler to look into his family history, Frank reportedly discovered that Maria Anna Shicklgruber had given birth to her child while serving as a cook in the home of a Jewish family called Grankenberger in Graz...

Frank's story gained wide circulation in the 1950s. But it simply does not stand up. There was no Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz during the 1880s. In fact, there were no Jews at all in the whole of Styria at that time, since Jews were not permitted in that part of Austria until the 1860s. A family named Frankenreiter did live there, but was not Jewish . . . Hans Frank's memoirs, dictated at a time of when he was waiting for the hangman and plainly undergoing a psychological crisis, are full of inaccuracies and have to be used with caution. With regard to the story of Hitler's grandfather, whoever he was, he was not a Jew from Graz.

The only serious contenders for the paternity of Hitler's father remain, therefore, Johann Georg Hiedler and Johann Nepomuk Hiedler (or Huttler).