Hitler: Jewish and African?

Hitler may not have been quite as pure-bred as he would have liked us to think.

In research for the Flemish-language magazine Knack, journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren traced Hitler's living relatives in his native Austria, as well as the United States, with a very interesting outcome.

"The results of this study are surprising," said Ronny Decorte, a geneticist interviewed by Knack. "Hitler would not have been happy."

According to geneticists, there are groups of chromosomes called haplogroups that they refer to as genetic fingerprints these “fingerprints” are what help classify populations, Haaretz reported.

According to Mulders, Hitler's dominant haplogroup, E1b1b, is fairly rare in Western Europe. Interestingly, however, between 50 and 80 per cent of North Africans share Hitler's dominant group, which is especially prevalent among in the Berber tribes of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Somalia.

More surprising still, perhaps, is that Hitler's second most dominant haplogroup is the most common among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

The researchers reached these conclusions after examining saliva samples of 39 of Hitler's relatives. The two did not directly receive the saliva samples used for their DNA tests from all of Hitler's descendants, however. In one case, they picked up a napkin dropped by a distant Hitler relative currently living in the United States.

Other Hitler relatives were located in Austria and asked to hand over DNA samples, ynet reported.

"The findings are fascinating if you look at them in terms of the Nazi worldview, which ascribed such an extreme priority to notions of blood and race," said Decorte.

Mulders told Knack magazine that "[o]ne can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised," the Daily Mail reported.