Alois Hitler - DNA

DNA

In 2010 Jean-Paul Mulders's and historian Marc Vermeeren used samples from Hitler's distant relatives to try and trace his family's haplogroup. By their own conclusions it is allegedly believed to belong to the Y-DNA Haplogroup E1b1b1 (E-M35), an haplogroup which originated in East Africa about 22,400 years ago. According to Ronny Decorte, genetics expert at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven who sampled Hitler's current living relatives, "the results of this study are surprising" and "Hitler would not have been happy". Despite what journalists have used as a headline regarding Hitler's alleged DNA, it is not conclusive enough to say that Hitler had any Jewish or recent African ancestry and the tests have not yet been scientifically verified.

Family Tree DNA, the largest Y-chromosome testing organization for genealogy and ancestry purposes later announced that the interpretation of Hitler’s ancestry given by certain media outlets, based on information released by Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren, is highly questionable. With a Y-chromosome database containing close to 200,000 samples from different populations, Family Tree DNA’s Chief Y-DNA Scientist, Professor Michael Hammer said that “scientific studies as well as records from our own database make it clear that one cannot reach the kind of conclusion featured in the published articles.” Based on Family Tree DNA records, no more than 9% of the populations of Germany and Austria belong to the haplogroup E1b1b, and among those, the vast majority - about 80% -are not associated with Jewish ancestry. "This data clearly show that just because one person belongs to the branch of the Y-chromosome referred to as haplogroup E1b1b, that does not mean the person is likely to be of Jewish ancestry," said Professor Hammer.

Mulders confirmed the misinterpretation of his account with the following statement to Family Tree DNA: "I never wrote that Hitler was a Jew, or that he had a Jewish grandfather. I only wrote that Hitler's haplogroup is E1b1b, being more common among Berbers, Somalian people and Jews than among overall Germans. This, in order to convey that he was not exactly what during the Third Reich would have been called 'Aryan.' All the rest are speculations of journalists who didn't even take the trouble to read my article, although I had it translated into English especially for this purpose."

The alleged conclusion from these DNA results that Hitler possibly had Jewish ancestry also contradicts the conclusion that Jean-Paul Mulders came to when he was determining whether or not Hitler had a son via DNA. He came to the conclusion that "Hitler had no Jewish blood or a French son."