Hitler unwittingly married a Jew?

LONDON: A monogrammed hair brush belonging to Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s long-term lover, has thrown up a startling finding — she may have been of Jewish ancestry.
DNA analysis of hair samples from the brush suggests that Hitler, the anti-Semitic Nazi German leader responsible for the massacre of millions of Jews, may have unwittingly married a Jew. Hours later, the couple committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in 1945.
Scientists found a specific sequence within the mitochondrial DNA — a small genome within the mitochondria of the cell that is passed down the maternal line from mother to daughter unchanged over generations — belonging to haplogroup N1b1, which is strongly associated with Ashkenazi Jews.
Around 80% of the world's Jewish population is Ashkenazi, having descended from medieval Jews who lived in central Europe after first settling in the Rhineland.
In the 19th century, many Ashkenazi Jews in Germany converted to Catholicism, so Eva Braun is highly unlikely to have known her ancestry. Apparently, Hitler didn't find out either despite the research he instigated into Braun's race.
Braun fell madly in love with Hitler as a 17-year-old though he was 23 years her senior. Conscious of his image, Hitler refused to marry Eva and kept her hidden away at his mountain-top residence, the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps.
Braun married the Nazi dictator shortly before the couple killed themselves at the end of World War II.
In the summer of 1945, Paul Baer, a US 7th Army captain, was posted at Hitler's Alpine residence.
Working for the precursor of the CIA, Baer had privileged access to Hitler’s former retreat and took personal items, including the hair brush from Eva Braun's private apartment.
There are photographs of Baer at the Berghof in 1945 and the hair brush has been authenticated by experts.
The revelation appears in a new Channel 4 documentary series — Dead Famous DNA — in which Mark Evans sets out to track down the remains of some of history’s most famous figures, including Elvis Presley, John F Kennedy and Napoleon. Leading scientists then attempt to extract DNA from the relics and analyse their genome to solve mysteries associated with them.
After the war, Baer returned to the US with the hair brush as well as other items. The DNA tests confirmed that it belonged to someone who could have had Jewish ancestry.
"In our basement, I remember, there was a duffel bag and in the duffel bag there were several Nazi ceremonial daggers, a human skull and this case with the initials in gold ‘E.B.’,"says Baer’s son Alan. "We opened it up and there was a mirror and a hair brush. It was just a cosmetic box in a duffel bag brought from Hitler’s home."
Paul Baer’s own family background makes the story all the more poignant.
"My father was a German-born Jew who came to America in 1929," says Alan Baer. "Because of his background he was in the CIC, which was a forerunner of the CIA, and he was allowed to go to these places. When the concentration camps were liberated, he was allowed to go into them. His mother and two sisters were taken to the camps. He never found them.”
Channel 4 will air the findings on April 9. The provenance of the hair is strong, but to definitively prove that it came from Braun’s head, Mark Evans attempted to get a DNA swab from one of her two surviving female descendants, but both refused. So an element of mystery still remains.
"This is a thought-provoking outcome — I never dreamed that I would find such a potentially extraordinary and profound result,” says Mark Evans.
After his father’s death, Alan sold Braun’s hair brush to a relic dealer who separated the hair and sold it to hair dealer John Reznikoff. Mark Evans purchased eight strands of the hair from Reznikoff for $2000. The hair was then sent to an international team of forensic scientists for analysis.