\n<\/p>\n
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\u2019s side was Eva Braun, his young wife of one day, and their beloved German shepherd Blondi\u2014both dead by cyanide. Their bodies were doused with gas and burned while Allied forces closed in on Germany\u2019s capital from both sides. The war was over, and the f\u00fchrer was dead.<\/p>\n
But what if he really wasn\u2019t? 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\u2019s romantic partners and possible progeny.<\/p>\n
More than 80 years later, writers, creators, and fabulists in dark corners of the internet are still imagining ways and worlds where Hitler\u2019s genes somehow survived. (See, as one example, Netflix\u2019s upcoming remake of The Boys From Brazil,<\/em> starring Jeremy Strong<\/strong> as a Nazi hunter who\u201450-year-old spoiler alert!\u2014discovers a village of Hitler clones.) Where and how did these stories start? And why are we still obsessed with the idea of Hitler\u2019s children?<\/p>\n In June 1917, Hitler had a secret and brief affair with French teenager Charlotte Lobjoie, according to Lobjoie. The Telegraph<\/em> reports that just before Lobjoie\u2019s death in the early 1950s, she told her son Jean-Marie Loret the alleged truth about his father: The \u201cunidentified German soldier\u201d on his birth certificate was none other than Adolf Hitler. Lobjoie claimed she\u2019d 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 \u201ctipsy\u201d night together, birthed an illegitimate son from whom she long hid her horrible secret. Per The Telegraph,<\/em> German army papers reveal that envelopes of cash arrived for Lobjoie from SS agents.<\/p>\n For anyone of his generation with uncertain paternity, Loret\u2019s story was a nightmare come true reflecting deep-rooted human fears. \u201cThe world was reeling after the war with questions about the source and nature of evil,\u201d says Anthony Del Col,<\/strong> whose graphic novel Son of Hitler<\/em> is very loosely inspired by Loret. For the record, Del Col\u2014who wrote the book with Geoff Moore<\/strong>\u2014believes Loret was \u201cpossibly, but very unlikely\u201d to be Hitler\u2019s child. \u201cIf Hitler had a son and knew about him, he\u2019d have proudly paraded him around in a uniform,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Del Col\u2019s imagined protagonist is Pierre, a French bakery assistant who learns Hitler is his biological father. \u201cI\u2026I\u2019m nothing like him,\u201d says Pierre, who struggles to control his innate anger, rage, and violence\u2014qualities that perfectly reflect his father. \u201c[The book] explores old questions of nature versus nurture,\u201d says Del Col. \u201cHow much is he like his father? Is evil genetic? Can it be passed on?\u201d Post\u2013World War II, the existence and spread of evil across the globe was a real and serious concern.<\/p>\n While Son of Hitler<\/em> 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\u2019t so gallant. He went public with his sensational claims in 1977, penned the 1981 memoir Your Father\u2019s Name Was Hitler,<\/em> and considered claiming royalty rights to Mein Kampf<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> Loret died four years later, before DNA profiling may have proven (or disproven) his claims by comparing his genetic code to that of Hitler\u2019s supposed remains\u2014remnants of a skull and jaw bone said to be held in Moscow. In 2018, Loret\u2019s son Philippe<\/strong> took a DNA test<\/a>; however, there is currently no definitive proof that he is Hitler\u2019s grandson.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nThe propagation of an \u201cevil\u201d gene<\/strong><\/h2>\n