Adolf Hitler’s wife Eva Braun ‘had Jewish ancestry’

ADOLF HITLER married a woman of Jewish descent as the Third Reich crumbled around him, according to a new documentary. It is well known that the Fuhrer and his lover, Eva Braun, married in their Berlin bunker just hours before committing suicide. But according to ground-breaking new research, it seems the man who ordered the systemic slaughter of millions of Jews unwittingly married one as his final act.

The research is explored in a new Channel 4 documentary, Dead Famous DNA, which seeks to answer mysteries surrounding famous figures by studying their genetic material.

Forensic scientists managed to extract Eva Braun’s DNA from hair left on her hairbrush, which was taken from Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof, by a US Army captain in 1945, the Independent reports.

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The scientists found a sequence within Braun’s mitochondrial DNA that corresponds to Ashkenazi Jews. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from generation to generation down the mother’s line – and Jewish tradition dictates that anyone born of a Jewish mother is themselves Jewish.

Hitler is known to have gone to some trouble to satisfy himself that Braun was not Jewish before continuing his affair with her – and it is unlikely that his lover would have known of her ancestry herself.

A Channel 4 spokesman said: “In the nineteenth century, many Ashkenazi Jews in Germany converted to Catholicism, so Eva Braun is highly unlikely to have known her ancestry and - despite research he instigated into Braun’s race - neither would Hitler.”

Unfortunately it has not been proven definitively that the hair on the hairbrush is Braun’s. That would require a DNA swab from Braun’s two surviving female descendants, but both refused.