By all legitimate accounts, Adolf Hitler died on April 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker after swallowing a cyanide pill and shooting himself in his right temple. At the chancellor’s side was Eva Braun, his young wife of one day, and their beloved German shepherd Blondi—both dead by cyanide. Their bodies were doused with gas and burned while Allied forces closed in on Germany’s capital from both sides. The war was over, and the führer was dead.
But what if he really wasn’t? Conspiracists have long speculated about if and how Hitler might live on: using a pseudonym in Argentina, huddling in a bunker under the Antarctic ice, or secretly siring offspring. Throughout his rise to power and reign, actually, rumors constantly swirled about Hitler’s romantic partners and possible progeny.
More than 80 years later, writers, creators, and fabulists in dark corners of the internet are still imagining ways and worlds where Hitler’s genes somehow survived. (See, as one example, Netflix’s upcoming remake of The Boys From Brazil, starring Jeremy Strong as a Nazi hunter who—50-year-old spoiler alert!—discovers a village of Hitler clones.) Where and how did these stories start? And why are we still obsessed with the idea of Hitler’s children?
The propagation of an “evil” gene
In June 1917, Hitler had a secret and brief affair with French teenager Charlotte Lobjoie, according to Lobjoie. The Telegraph reports that just before Lobjoie’s death in the early 1950s, she told her son Jean-Marie Loret the alleged truth about his father: The “unidentified German soldier” on his birth certificate was none other than Adolf Hitler. Lobjoie claimed she’d met a young Hitler as he sketched in a field in German-occupied France, had a brief relationship with him, and then, nine months after one “tipsy” night together, birthed an illegitimate son from whom she long hid her horrible secret. Per The Telegraph, German army papers reveal that envelopes of cash arrived for Lobjoie from SS agents.
For anyone of his generation with uncertain paternity, Loret’s story was a nightmare come true reflecting deep-rooted human fears. “The world was reeling after the war with questions about the source and nature of evil,” says Anthony Del Col, whose graphic novel Son of Hitler is very loosely inspired by Loret. For the record, Del Col—who wrote the book with Geoff Moore—believes Loret was “possibly, but very unlikely” to be Hitler’s child. “If Hitler had a son and knew about him, he’d have proudly paraded him around in a uniform,” he says.
Del Col’s imagined protagonist is Pierre, a French bakery assistant who learns Hitler is his biological father. “I…I’m nothing like him,” says Pierre, who struggles to control his innate anger, rage, and violence—qualities that perfectly reflect his father. “[The book] explores old questions of nature versus nurture,” says Del Col. “How much is he like his father? Is evil genetic? Can it be passed on?” Post–World War II, the existence and spread of evil across the globe was a real and serious concern.
While Son of Hitler takes plenty of creative liberty when the titular character is recruited to assassinate his famous father for the Allies, the fate of the real-life Loret isn’t so gallant. He went public with his sensational claims in 1977, penned the 1981 memoir Your Father’s Name Was Hitler, and considered claiming royalty rights to Mein Kampf. Loret died four years later, before DNA profiling may have proven (or disproven) his claims by comparing his genetic code to that of Hitler’s supposed remains—remnants of a skull and jaw bone said to be held in Moscow. In 2018, Loret’s son Philippe took a DNA test; however, there is currently no definitive proof that he is Hitler’s grandson.
