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Frankenberger thesis
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Frankenberger thesis
The Frankenberger thesis, also Frankenreiter thesis, is a thesis which has been contested by historians that claims Adolf Hitler's paternal grandfather was Jewish.
Referring to the parentage of Hitler's father Alois Hitler—who was born in 1837 as the illegitimate son of the housemaid Maria Anna Schicklgruber, which has not been clarified with absolute certainty—the Frankenberger thesis asserts that the unknown father of Hitler's father was a Jewish merchant from Graz named Leopold Frankenberger (or Frankenreiter) or his son and that Adolf Hitler was therefore a "quarter Jew" in the sense of the Nuremberg Race Laws later imposed by his own regime.
The Frankenberger thesis in its final form goes back to Hans Frank's memoirs published under the title In the Face of the Gallows. Frank, who had acted as Hitler's lawyer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, states that he was commissioned by Hitler in 1930 to discreetly investigate the various rumors circulating in the press and public at the time alleging Hitler's Jewish descent.
According to Frank, during detailed research he was able to unearth some circumstantial evidence that made these rumors appear not entirely unreasonable: Hitler's grandmother Maria Anna Schicklgruber worked as a housemaid or cook in the house of a Jew from Graz named Frankenberger in the 1830s. In 1837, when she was very pregnant, she returned to her home village, where her son Alois was born. The column for the child's father was left blank in the baptismal register, but Maria Anna Schicklgruber received financial support from Frankenberger for the next 14 years.
It is disputed whether any Jews lived in Graz at the time of Alois Hitler's birth in 1837. The same is true for the similarly named Bohemian town Gratzen (now Nové Hrady, Czech Republic) which is closer to Schicklgruber's native region.
Some suggest that Frank (who turned against Nazism after 1945 but remained an anti-Semitic fanatic until his execution) made the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry as a way of proving that Hitler was really a "Jew" and not an "Aryan", and in this way "proved" that the Third Reich's crimes were the work of the "Jewish" Hitler. The full anti-Semitic implications of Frank's story were borne out in a letter entitled "Was Hitler a Jew?", written to the editor of a Saudi newspaper in 1982 by a German man living in Saudi Arabia. The writer accepted Frank's story as the truth, and added since Hitler was a Jew, "the Jews should pay Germans reparations for the War, because one of theirs caused the destruction of Germany".
But Jewish-American author Ron Rosenbaum suggested another reason for Frank's story:
On the other hand, a different version of Frank emerges in the brilliantly vicious, utterly unforgiving portrait of him by his son, Niklas Frank, who (in a memoir called In the Shadow of the Reich) depicts his father as a craven coward and weakling, but one not without a kind of animal cunning, an instinct for lying, insinuation, self-aggrandizement. For this Hans Frank, disgraced and facing death on the gallows for following Hitler, fabricating such a story might be a cunning way of ensuring his place in history as the one man who gave the world the hidden key to the mystery of Hitler's psyche. While at the same time, revenging himself on his former master for having led him to this end by foisting a sordid and humiliating explanation of Hitler on him for all posterity. In any case, it was one Frank knew the victors would find seductive.
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Frankenberger thesis
The Frankenberger thesis, also Frankenreiter thesis, is a thesis which has been contested by historians that claims Adolf Hitler's paternal grandfather was Jewish.
Referring to the parentage of Hitler's father Alois Hitler—who was born in 1837 as the illegitimate son of the housemaid Maria Anna Schicklgruber, which has not been clarified with absolute certainty—the Frankenberger thesis asserts that the unknown father of Hitler's father was a Jewish merchant from Graz named Leopold Frankenberger (or Frankenreiter) or his son and that Adolf Hitler was therefore a "quarter Jew" in the sense of the Nuremberg Race Laws later imposed by his own regime.
The Frankenberger thesis in its final form goes back to Hans Frank's memoirs published under the title In the Face of the Gallows. Frank, who had acted as Hitler's lawyer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, states that he was commissioned by Hitler in 1930 to discreetly investigate the various rumors circulating in the press and public at the time alleging Hitler's Jewish descent.
According to Frank, during detailed research he was able to unearth some circumstantial evidence that made these rumors appear not entirely unreasonable: Hitler's grandmother Maria Anna Schicklgruber worked as a housemaid or cook in the house of a Jew from Graz named Frankenberger in the 1830s. In 1837, when she was very pregnant, she returned to her home village, where her son Alois was born. The column for the child's father was left blank in the baptismal register, but Maria Anna Schicklgruber received financial support from Frankenberger for the next 14 years.
It is disputed whether any Jews lived in Graz at the time of Alois Hitler's birth in 1837. The same is true for the similarly named Bohemian town Gratzen (now Nové Hrady, Czech Republic) which is closer to Schicklgruber's native region.
Some suggest that Frank (who turned against Nazism after 1945 but remained an anti-Semitic fanatic until his execution) made the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry as a way of proving that Hitler was really a "Jew" and not an "Aryan", and in this way "proved" that the Third Reich's crimes were the work of the "Jewish" Hitler. The full anti-Semitic implications of Frank's story were borne out in a letter entitled "Was Hitler a Jew?", written to the editor of a Saudi newspaper in 1982 by a German man living in Saudi Arabia. The writer accepted Frank's story as the truth, and added since Hitler was a Jew, "the Jews should pay Germans reparations for the War, because one of theirs caused the destruction of Germany".
But Jewish-American author Ron Rosenbaum suggested another reason for Frank's story:
On the other hand, a different version of Frank emerges in the brilliantly vicious, utterly unforgiving portrait of him by his son, Niklas Frank, who (in a memoir called In the Shadow of the Reich) depicts his father as a craven coward and weakling, but one not without a kind of animal cunning, an instinct for lying, insinuation, self-aggrandizement. For this Hans Frank, disgraced and facing death on the gallows for following Hitler, fabricating such a story might be a cunning way of ensuring his place in history as the one man who gave the world the hidden key to the mystery of Hitler's psyche. While at the same time, revenging himself on his former master for having led him to this end by foisting a sordid and humiliating explanation of Hitler on him for all posterity. In any case, it was one Frank knew the victors would find seductive.