The study entitled “Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather,” which was published in the current issue of the Journal of European Studies, examines claims by Hitler’s lawyer Hans Frank, who allegedly discovered the truth.
Hitler asked Frank to look into the claim in 1930 after his nephew William Patrick Hitler threatened to expose that the Nazi leader’s grandfather was Jewish.
In his 1946 memoir, which was published seven years after he was executed during the Nuremberg trials, “Frank claimed to have uncovered evidence in 1930 that Hitler’s paternal grandfather was a Jewish man living in Graz, Austria, in the household where Hitler’s grandmother was employed” and it was in 1836 that Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna Schicklgruber fell pregnant, Sax explained.
“Frank wrote in his memoir that he conducted an investigation as Hitler had requested, and that he discovered the existence of correspondence between Maria Anna Schicklgruber – Hitler’s grandmother – and a Jew named Frankenberger living in Graz.
According to Frank, the letters hinted that Frankenberger’s 19-year-old son had impregnated Maria Anna while she worked in the Frankenberger household: ...that the illegitimate child of the Schickelgruber [sic] had been conceived under conditions which required Frankenberger to pay alimony.”
Sax writes in the study that according to the letters in Frank’s memoir, “Frankenberger Sr. sent money for the support of the child from infancy until its 14th birthday.
“The motivation for the payment, according to Frank, was not charity, but primarily a concern about the authorities becoming involved: ‘The Jew paid without a court order, because he was concerned about the result of a court hearing and the connected publicity,’” the letters state.
However, Sax noted that the accuracy of Frank’s claims and his memoir “have been questioned.”
He added that “contemporary scholarship has largely discounted Frank’s allegations regarding a possible Jewish grandfather for Adolf Hitler.”
In the 1950s, German author Nikolaus von Preradovich said that he had proved that “there were no Jews in Graz, [Austria] before 1856,” rejecting Frank’s account.
However, Sax explained in the study that he found evidence to the contrary in Austrian archives that there was a Jewish community in the Austrian town before 1850 and highlighted that Preradovich was a Nazi sympathizer, “who was offended by the suggestion that Adolf Hitler was a “Vierteljude (a one-quarter Jew).”
According to Sax’s paper, “Evidence is presented [shows] that there was in fact eine kleine, nun angesiedelte Gemeinde – ‘a small, now settled community’ – of Jews living in Graz before 1850.”
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