Taken from Talk to Action website:
Is it the hoax of the year ? Well, time will tell but so far an embarrassing number of mainstream media venues (see list at story end) have fallen for and are rebroadcasting a claim from two Belgians, Jean-Paul Mulders and Marc Vermeeren, that based on a lab analysis of the DNA of 39 of Hitler's living relatives which, say the two men, found that all 39 shared the Y-chromosome Haplogroup E1B1B1, Adolf Hitler may have had African and Jewish ancestors.
Let's start with the 'African ancestry' bit. All members of Homo Sapiens Sapiens can trace their ancestry back to Africa, where the human species originated. Next: Mulders and Vermeeren suggest that, because Jews have more of the E1B1B1 gene, Hitler may have had Jewish ancestors. But Hitler's family was Austrian and it turns out that 9% of Austrians currently carry the E1B1B1 gene. We can safely presume the gene was also common in 19th Century Austria among non-Jewish citizens. For that matter, E1B1B1 is also common in Europe, especially in Southern Europe. So Hitler's close ancestors might have been Northern Italian, Greek or Albanian too.
And the historical case for Hitler's alleged "Jewish ancestry" is vanishingly thin but that hasn't stopped several media outlets carrying this story from tacking on an anti-Jewish conspiracy yarn, discredited over a decade ago, which claims that Hitler's grandmother was impregnated by a Jewish man from Graz.
A few voices have already voiced studied disgust. For example the author of Dienekes' Anthropology blog, which "is dedicated to human population genetics, physical anthropology, archaeology, and history" scathingly comments,
"I'm not going to honor with the link all the stories circulating in a number of newspapers about Hitler being supposedly of "Jewish or African" origin because he belonged to haplogroup E1b1b1.
This comes from a study of men believed to share patrilineal origin with Hitler.
It is difficult to see how much of the hype is due to the original geneticists or to the "journalists" who report on the work.
These "Jewish and African" roots are supposedly due to the fact that Hitler belonged to haplogroup E1b1b1. But, without further information about the subclade in which Hitler belonged to, there is no reason to think that he was of Jewish or African ancestry. He could just as well be of Greek or Albanian patrilineal ancestry. But, I guess that "Hitler's Greek or Albanian roots" doesn't have the same zing that his "Jewish and African roots" does."
Meanwhile, as the UK Telegraph's breathless "Hitler 'had Jewish and African roots', DNA tests show" narrates,
"Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the "subhuman" races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.
Jean-Paul Mulders, a Belgian journalist, and Marc Vermeeren, a historian, tracked down the Fuhrer's relatives, including an Austrian farmer who was his cousin, earlier this year.
A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.
"One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised," Mr Mulders wrote in the Belgian magazine, Knack."
Yes, one can "postulate" that. One could also "postulate" the existence of a vast alien base on the dark side of the Moon.
But let's start here, with Hitler's "African roots" : all humans on Earth have African ancestry. So noting Hitler had "African roots" is about as meaningful as stating that he walked on two feet and lacked a tail: standard human features.
Now, Mulders and Vermeeren may have intended to convey the message that Hitler had relatively recent African genetic ancestry (E1B1B1 is from a Y-chromosome family that originated with a genetic mutation about 20,000 years ago) but then there's the claim that if Hitler possessed the E1B1B1 gene that it would somehow be reasonable or logical to conclude that he "might" have had Jewish ancestry.
Well, about 9% of the population of Austria carries the E1B1B1 gene (source) so Occam's Razor would suggest the simplest explanation - that Hitler got the E1B1B1 Y-chromosome from an ethnically non-Jewish Austrian ancestor: almost a 1/10 chance.
IN fact, the E1B1B1 gene is relatively common in Europe. Here's the incidence in major European countries:
France - 8%,
Germany 4%
Italy 11% (Northern Italy 24%)
Portugal 17%
Switzerland 9%
Spain 6%
Slovakia 11%
Greece 27%
[note: at the tip of Southern Greece E1B1B1 reaches up to 40%, incidence and there's a 40% pocket around Montenegro too.]
Unfortunately, the "Jewish ancestry" meme plays into a discredited (for a quick, pithy writeup see Cecil Adam's The Straight Dope) but widely cited claim that Hitler's alleged Jewish ancestor was a Jew from the city of Graz who impregnated Hitler's grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber.
Variants of the Schicklgruber/Jewish grandfather claim pop up in four stories covering the "Hitler's Jewish and African ancestry" hoax (The UK Telegraph, the Jewish Daily Forward, JTA News and New York Magazine) and that's rather unfortunate given that the story was on the way out by 1976, when Pulitzer Prize winning historian John Toland wrote, on page 4 of his landmark 1976 book Adolf Hitler,
"There is the slight possibility that Hitler's grandfather was a wealthy Jew named Frankenberger or Frankenreither; that Maria Anna [Hitler's grandmother] had been a domestic in the Jewish household at Graz and the young son had gotten her pregnant."
A few decades later, another prominent Hitler biographer and historian, Ian Kershaw, definitively debunked the claim in his 1998 book Hitler 1889-1936 Hubris. On page 8 Kershaw writes,
"There was no Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz during the 1830s. In fact, there were no Jews at all in the whole of Styria at the time, since Jews were not permitted in that part of Austria until the 1860s. A family named Frankenreiter did live there but was not Jewish. There is no evidence that Anna Maria was ever in Graz, let alone was employed by the butcher Leopold Frankereiter."
There are even sketchier versions of the yarn, I might add, that claim Maria Schicklgruber was impregnated by a scion of the famous Rothschild lineage and the Frankenberger/Rothschild Hitler-lineage class of conspiracy theory does rather nasty work, as Talk To Action contributor Rachel Tabacnick explains in The Jewish Daily Forward and JTA Publish a Discredited Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory,
"This is a conspiracy theory that has been rejected by serious historians and should not be repeated as fact in any reputable journal, certainly not Jewish publications. This same conspiracy narrative is currently rampant in right wing America and is used to claim that Hitler was an heir of a demonic bloodline of the same Jewish/Illuminati cabal which is now supposedly leading the nation into the clutches of a fascist and/or communist "New World Order."
[...]
This particular Hitler myth is a key component of the horrific narratives of Jewish culpability for evil in the world that is a part of growing "New World Order" conspiracy ideologies. As in the 1920s and 30s, this narrative of the world being manipulated by a Rothschild/Illuminati cabal has again been merged with end times prophecy and tales of the imminent anti-Christ. By blending the narratives, conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be openly marketed as religious literature by those who are careful to separate the "good Jews" from the demonic lineage of "evil Jews," currently defined as those in the liberal, secular humanist camp. In this way Jews can be made into the villains of history and the source of evil and rebellion against God, even in times when Jews were the victims.
John Hagee, for instance, tapped into this narrative of Hitler's Jewish pedigree in his 2006 book Jerusalem Countdown. He claimed that Esau's descendants "produced the half-breed Jews of history who have persecuted the Jews beyond human comprehension." In other sermons he has described Hitler, as well as the anti-Christ whose rule Hagee claims is imminent, as partially Jewish. As Bruce Wilson has written, the Holocaust can then be rewritten as a result of violent Jewish psychopathology."
Besides the UK Telegraph, here are a few other venues running the DNA Testing/"Hitler's Jewish and African Roots" hoax:
New York Daily News ("Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had Jewish and African relatives, DNA test suggests"
Time ("New Research Shows That Hitler Had Jewish Roots"
Bloomberg (Hitler DNA Tests Show He Likely Had Jewish, African Roots, Daily Mail Says)
Ha'aretz (DNA tests reveal Hitler's Jewish and African roots)
Jewish Telegraphic Agency ("Hitler likely had Jewish, African roots"
Cleveland Leader (DNA Tests Reveal Adolf Hitler Had Jewish & African Relatives
UK Sun ("Hitler's 'Black and Jewish' DNA' ")
Times of India ("Adolf Hitler had Jewish, African ancestors, show DNA tests"
UK Metro ("Hitler had `Jewish and black ancestors' "
New York Magazine (Hitler Fail)
