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For Adolf Hitler the key to understanding history was not economics or morality, it was biology. A person's race determined how they fit into the Nazi scheme of things. That's why Hitler was petrified that someone would find out his family secret.

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Transcript

Lead: For Adolf Hitler the key to understanding history was not economics or morality, it was biology. A person's race determined how they fit into the Nazi scheme of things. That's why Hitler was petrified that someone would find out his family secret.

Tag: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: After WWII a file was discovered in the Nazi Archives, a file maintained by no less important a person than Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's second in command. The file contained the results of three major Gestapo investigations during the 1930s and 40s into Adolf Hitler's family and background. Considering the great emphasis the Nazi's placed on racial superiority and hereditary traits, the secrets the files revealed would have been very embarrassing to the party and the Fuehrer himself.

The major concern to the Nazis was that their leader might be part Jewish. Hitler's father, Alois, was the illegitimate son of Marie Anna Schicklgruber and a man whose identity could not be determined. There was some evidence that before her marriage she had been impregnated by the nineteen-year-old son of a Jewish family for whom she worked in the Austrian town of Graz-St. Peter. This story was discounted by both Nazi and Jewish historians because there was no record of a Jewish family in the town until 20 years after Alois' birth. Later he adopted the name of his stepfather, Johann Georg Heidler. A priest or notary misunderstood the name, changed it to Hitler, and the name stuck.

Perhaps a more devastating claim was that Hitler had several mentally ill cousins. One of his mother's cousins, Josef Veit, had children with serious mental problems: a son committed suicide, a daughter was held in an insane asylum, another daughter was semi-retarded and a third was mentioned in the file as being "feeble-minded." A closely-guarded state secret was that Hitler's own sister, Paula, was retarded.

Under other circumstances, Hitler's paranoia about his heritage might be seen as sort of a twisted form of vanity, but he had the nasty habit of turning his fears into bloodletting. Some of the first victims of the Holocaust were 70,000 German mental patients sent to the gas chambers, quite possibly among whom was his own cousin, Aloisia Veit.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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