War leads to all excesses and excesses. “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood,” Sergei Lavrov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, said on Sunday, explaining that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewishness does not clear him of Nazism. Historian Claude Quétel, who has just published Hitler, Truths and Legends (Perrin), returns to this conspiracy theory, brought out by Moscow in favor of the invasion of Ukraine.
L’Express: When did the fallacious rumors of the alleged “Jewish blood” of Adolf Hitler start?
Claude Quetel: They arose quite early, before 1933 and his seizure of power. They were the work of his opponents. They suggested that Hitler’s racialism, as expressed in Mein Kampf, was explained by the fact that he wanted to exorcise an alleged Jewish ancestry. Since then, this rumor, taken up by Sergei Lavrov, has returned sporadically. Historians have shown that there is nothing to support it and that it was false.
Precisely, where does this false theory come from?
She was born from the fact that Hitler’s father, Alois (1837-1903), whose mother was a servant from a very modest background, was born of an unknown father. It is marked in his birth certificate, as well as the fact that he is an “illegitimate child”. Historians have identified a biological father [Johann Georg Hiedler]another historian, Werner Maser, affirms that it is his brother [Johann Nepomuk Hiedler]. In fact, we don’t know. The theory of Hitler’s grandfather being a Jew is all the less valid since Alois Hitler belongs to a milieu of farmers and servants, where everyone is Catholic.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, June 14, 2021, in kyiv.
afp.com/Sergei SUPINSKY
Putin justifies his invasion by the need to “denazify” Ukraine. How does Lavrov’s exit fit into these lies?
Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. There is this anti-Semitic idea that there would be worse than the fact that Hitler was a Nazi: that he would also be a Jew. Lavrov uses a kind of conditional when talking about Zelensky, which is even more devious. It is an instrumentalization of history.
What other untruths circulate about Hitler?
There’s the idea that he was a workaholic, whereas he’s a dreadfully lazy person. That he would be an autodidact. Certainly he has a good memory, but he has no culture, does not read. And he didn’t have the soul of an artist, even if he considered himself one. His little stroke of pencil and brush allowed him to sell some watercolors, but he had no artistic culture – any more than scientific – hence his failure to enter the Academy of Fine Arts. Finally, he was not crazy, even if he was paranoid, and had a perfect clairvoyance of the war and the genocide he was waging.
Interview by Clément Daniez