Alois Hitler - Biological Father

Biological Father

Historians have discussed three candidates as Alois' biological father: Johann Georg Hiedler, his brother Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, or Leopold Frankenberger (whose existence has never been documented).

Most historians are satisfied that Alois' father was Johann Georg Hiedler, who during his own lifetime was the stepfather and posthumously legally declared the birth father of Alois. According to historian Frank McDonough, the most plausible theory is that Johann Georg Hiedler was the real father of Alois. An explanation for Alois being sent to live on his uncle's farm as a child is that Hiedler and Maria were simply too poor to raise him, or could not raise him as well as his uncle, or perhaps Maria's health was in decline (she died when he was 10).

Werner Maser suggests that Alois' father was Johann Nepomuk, Georg's brother and Hitler's step-uncle, who raised Alois through adolescence and later willed him a considerable portion of his life savings, but never admitted publicly to be his real father. According to Maser, Nepomuk was a married farmer who had an affair and then arranged to have his single brother Hiedler marry Alois' mother Maria to provide a cover for Nepomuk's desire to assist and care for Alois without upsetting his wife. This assumes Hiedler was willing to marry Maria in this situation, and Adolf Hitler biographer Joachim Fest thinks this is too contrived and unlikely to be true.

Hitler, following the rumours that his paternal grandfather was a Jew, in 1931 ordered the SS (Schutzstaffel) to investigate the alleged rumours regarding his ancestry, they found no evidence of any Jewish ancestors. Hitler then ordered a genealogist by the name of Rudolf Koppensteiner to publish a large illustrated genealogical tree showing his ancestry, this was published in the book "Die Ahnentafel des Fuehrers" (The pedigree of the leader) in 1937, which concluded that Hitler's family were all German-Austrians with no Jewish ancestry and that Hitler had an unblemished "Aryan" pedigree. As Alois himself legitimised Johann Georg Hielder as his father and the priest changed this on his birth certificate in 1876 this was considered certified proof for Hitler's lineage, thus Hitler was considered an Aryan.

After the war Hitler's former lawyer, Hans Frank, claimed that Hitler told him in 1930 that one of his relatives was trying to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his alleged Jewish ancestry. Hitler asked Frank to find out the facts. Frank says he determined that at the time Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to Alois she was working as a household cook in the town of Graz, her employers were a Jewish family named Frankenberger, and that her child might have been conceived out of wedlock with the family's 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger.

Given that all Jews had been expelled from the province of Styria (which includes Graz) in the 15th century and were not allowed to return until the 1860s, there is no evidence of a Frankenberger family living in Graz at that time. Scholars such as Ian Kershaw and Brigitte Hamann dismiss the Frankenberger hypothesis (which had only Frank's speculation to support it) as baseless. (Kershaw cites several stories circulating in the 1920s about Hitler's Jewish ancestry including one about a "Baron Rothschild" in Vienna whose household Maria Schicklgruber had worked for some time as a servant). Frank's story contains several inaccuracies and contradictions, such as he said "The fact that Adolf Hitler had no Jewish blood in his veins, had, from what has been his whole manner so blatant that it needs no further word", also the statement Frank had said that Maria Schicklgruber came from "Leonding near Linz", when in fact she came from the hamlet of Strones, near the village of Döllersheim. Rosenbaum suggests that Frank, who though he had turned against Nazism after 1945 remained an anti-Semitic fanatic, made the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry as way of proving that Hitler was a Jew and not an Aryan.