ANT KATZ

Compelling evidence?

The Daily Telegraph reports that Hitler may have “unwittingly married a Jew” hours before his suicide, a television documentary has claimed, after analysis of Eva Braun’s DNA found she might have had Jewish ancestry.

A study of hair samples found in Braun’s hairbrush at Hitler’s Alpine retreat is said to have identified a genetic sequence strongly associated with the Ashkenazi Jews, of which she is unlikely to have been aware.

The discovery, by scientists working for Channel 4’s Dead Famous DNA, suggests the Nazi dictator could have “married a Jew” without realising it, before he killed himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945.

PIC RIGHT: Hitler
with Eve Braun

The claim is the latest in a series of “discoveries” by the programme, which has also drawn conclusions about the cause of Elvis’s death and claimed Charles Dickens had Crohn’s disease.

The latest investigation used a sample of hair from Braun’s monogrammed brush, which was found by an American army intelligence officer at the end of the Second World War. Paul Baer, a German-born Jew whose mother and sisters were sent to concentration camps, kept several items from Braun’s apartment, including ceremonial daggers, a human skull and a cosmetics case with the initials E.B.

His son, Alan, donated the hair for investigation.

Hitler committed suicide hours after he and Braun were married.

A spokesman for the programme said the hair came from “someone who could have had Jewish ancestry.” He said the “unexpected and extraordinary discovery” showed a specific sequence within mitochondrial DNA that is strongly associated with Ashkenazi Jews.

Hitler researched Braun’s background but it is unlikely that any link with Judaism would have been found, not least because many Ashkenazi Jews in Germany converted to Catholicism.