Adolf Hitler was found to be descended from the Jews and Africans he despised, after numerous DNA tests, according to reports on Tuesday.
Journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren took saliva samples from 39 of the former German dictator’s relatives, including a cousin who was an Austrian farmer named “Norbert H,” and a grand nephew named Alexander Stuart-Houston, who is an American, according to the UK newspaper the Daily Mail.
Mulders and Vermeeren got a sample of Hitler’s DNA by following Stuart-Houston for a week. He dropped a used napkin on the ground and they took samples from that. The DNA on the napkin led them to the rest of Hitler’s relatives.
The duo found a chromosome called “Haplopgroup E1b1b” (also Y-DNA), which during Hitler’s time, was a rare occurance among people living in Germany and in Western Europe.
Journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren took saliva samples from 39 of the former German dictator’s relatives, including a cousin who was an Austrian farmer named “Norbert H,” and a grand nephew named Alexander Stuart-Houston, who is an American, according to the UK newspaper the Daily Mail.
Mulders and Vermeeren got a sample of Hitler’s DNA by following Stuart-Houston for a week. He dropped a used napkin on the ground and they took samples from that. The DNA on the napkin led them to the rest of Hitler’s relatives.
The duo found a chromosome called “Haplopgroup E1b1b” (also Y-DNA), which during Hitler’s time, was a rare occurance among people living in Germany and in Western Europe.
“It is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, in Algeria, Libya and Tunisia as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews,” Vermeeren told the Daily Mail.
The DNA was observed under strict conditions in a laboratory, the two said.
Historians have speculated that Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish and the former dictator knew this, doing everything in his power to conceal the fact.
“Hitler’s concern over his descent was not unjustified. He was apparently not ‘pure’ or ‘Aryan’,” Ronny Decorte, a genetic specialist, told Daily Mail.
Mulders told the Belgian magazine Knack that with this finding, people “can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised.”