Commentary
Vladimir Putin apologized to Israel last week for claims by his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, that Adolf Hitler may have had Jewish heritage. But why?
Lavrov was defending one of Putin’s central rationales for Russia’s invasion—the denazification of Ukraine—by pushing back against the mainstream narrative that Ukraine couldn’t be Nazi-friendly because Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a Jew.
Lavrov’s comment—“When they say that Nazification cannot exist if there are Jews [in charge]: In my opinion even Hitler had Jewish origins so it means absolutely nothing”—was nothing new.
A widely reported 2010 Belgian study of the DNA of 39 of Hitler’s relatives found that they had the Haplogroup E1b1b1 chromosome, which is rare in Western Europe, except among Jews. E1b1b1, in fact, is considered one of the major founding lineages of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. Scholars have also debated the credibility of the posthumous memoirs of Hans Frank, a top-level Nazi executed in 1946 for war crimes, who claimed to have discovered letters linking Hitler’s father to his presumed Jewish grandfather.
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