Epress.am News from Armenia
DNA harvested from Adolf Hitler’s relatives – albeit some distant ones – suggests he might have had some ancestry he wouldn’t have appreciated: African and Jewish, reports the Toronto Sun.
First reported in the Belgian news magazine Knack, a journalist and a historian teamed up to track down 39 relatives of the former Nazi leader.
They took saliva samples from each and analyzed the DNA for key markers that can help signify ancestry by knowing what other groups of people carry the same markers. According to the research, Hitler’s “genetic fingerprint” is extraordinarily rare in Western Europe, and is instead found in 25% of Greeks and Sicilians, and up to 80% of North Africans.
The second most common marker in Hitler’s DNA signifies a strong relationship with the Ashkenazi Jews, a subsect of Jews dating back to the middle ages who largely settled along the Rhine. The vast majority of Jews killed during the Holocaust were of Ashkenazi descent.
“The results of this study are surprising,” Ronny Decorte, a genetics expert, told the magazine. “Hitler would not have been happy.”