The , also Frankenreiter thesis, is a thesis which has been disproven 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 Anna Maria Schicklgruber - which has not been clarified with absolute certainty - the Frankenberger thesis asserts that the unknown father of Hitler's father a Jewish merchant from Graz named Leopold Frankenberger (or Frankenreiter) - or his young 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 Anna Maria 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 Anna Maria Schicklgruber received financial support from Frankenberger for the next 14 years.[1]
The presence of the grandmother in Graz is unlikely, and Frankenreiter was a Catholic. It is more likely that she worked in Gratzen (today Nové Hrady), which is about a day's journey from her home village and where a Jewish merchant named Frankenberger allegedly lived at the time, which is also not verifiable.[2]
The validity of the Frankenberger thesis has been questioned in historical research since its inception. Consequently, it is rejected by most well-known researchers. Both Frankenberger's paternity and his status as a Jew are questioned.
As early as 1956, Franz Jetzinger pointed out that "the name Frankenberger [...] does not sound Jewish at all" and that it must therefore "first be proven" that Frankenberger - even if he was actually the father of Alois Hitler – actually was a Jew. Jetzinger also emphasized that "any evidence" was missing for alleged alimony payments. His conclusion is therefore: "Frank's report is at most sufficient to suspect Jewish descent, he does not guarantee a certainty."[3]
In the 1960s, the archives of the city of Graz came to the conclusion that the alleged Frankenberger was probably identical to Leopold Frankenreiter: On the one hand, not a single Frankenberger could be found in the lists of residents of the city of Graz for the period in question and, on the other hand, this name corresponded to that Name attributed by Hitler's nephew William Patrick Hitler to Hitler's grandmother's employer. However, Frankenreiter was not of Jewish descent, but had been baptized Catholic with his entire family.[4] However, even after this correction, the name Frankenberger remained the one to be found much more frequently in the literature.
Joachim Fest judged that "the lack of verifiable evidence [...] makes the thesis appear extremely questionable". Although Frank had little reason to knowingly falsely ascribe Hitler Jewish ancestors, "the thesis can hardly stand up to serious discussion".[5] The "actual meaning" of the thesis lies "less in its objective validity". "Far more decisive and psychologically significant" was "that Hitler had to see his origins cast into doubt by Frank's results. […] Adolf Hitler did not know who his grandfather was.” Brigitte Hamann, on the other hand, wrote that "here the angry anti-Semite Frank wanted to blame the hated Jews for an allegedly Jewish Hitler and unsettle them with rumours".[6]
Notable historians who dismiss the thesis are Ian Kershaw,[7] Robert Payne,[8] Walter Görlitz,[9] Anton Joachimsthaler,[10] Christian Graf von Krockow,[11] John Toland,[12] Brigitte Hamann and Ernst Deuerlein.[13]
Apart from serious historical research, the "revelation" of Hitler's "Jewish descent" has been taken up again and again by publications with a popular scientific, conspiracy theory or sensationalist impact. It is characteristic of this literature, which is almost unmanageable in its breadth, that it attempts to present source material that has been known for decades, in particular Frank's rumours, as new knowledge and in doing so fails to mention the continuous and almost unanimously skeptical and negative reception by the leading Hitler biographers.
In May 2019, American psychologist Leonard Sax wrote an article titled “Aus den Gemeinden von Burgenland: Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather” which attempts to provide evidence for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Hitler had Jewish ancestry and that was the basis for his anti-Semitism. Sax points out that many Jews lived in places without official sanction and demonstrated the existence of a settled Jewish community in Graz before the law formally permitted their residence, saying that "Contemporary historians have largely dismissed Frank’s claim, primarily on the grounds that there were purportedly no Jews living in Graz in 1836, when Hitler’s father Alois Schicklgruber was conceived. This consensus can be traced to a single historian, Nikolaus von Preradovich," a Nazi sympathizer, "who claimed that “not a single Jew” (kein einziger Jude) was living in Graz prior to 1856. No independent scholarship has confirmed Preradovich’s conjecture. In this paper, evidence is presented that there was in fact “a small, now settled community” (eine kleine, nun angesiedelte Gemeinde) – of Jews living in Graz before 1850." And that "The hypothesis that Hitler’s paternal grandfather was Jewish, as claimed by Hans Frank, may fit the facts better than the alternative hypothesis that Hitler’s paternal grandfather was Johann Georg Hiedler or Johann Nepomuk Hiedler.”[14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
However, historian Richard J. Evans has questioned Sax’s findings. Evans wrote, “even if there were Jews living in Graz in the 1830s, at the time when Adolf Hitler’s father Alois was born, this does not prove anything at all about the identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather.” And, that, “There is no contemporary evidence that Hitler’s mother was ever in Graz, or that there was a Jewish family called Frankenberger living there. There was a family in Graz called Frankenreiter but it was not Jewish. No correspondence between Hitler’s father or paternal grandmother has ever been found. Nor is there any evidence for Frank’s claim that Hitler’s half-nephew knew about it and was blackmailing Hitler, as Frank claimed.”[19] Also, Evans noted that Sax is not a historian, but a psychiatrist, and that Sax seems to be motivated by attempting to prove Hitler had Jewish ancestry as a way to explain his anti-Semitism.