Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Monday slammed his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, who claimed that Hitler “had Jewish blood” and summoned the Russian ambassador to obtain “clarifications“.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Jewish state has tried to maintain a delicate balance between kyiv and Moscow, but Mr. Lavrov’s comments on an Italian channel on Sunday sparked outrage.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr “Zelensky makes this argument: how can Nazism be present (in Ukraine) if he himself is Jewish“, declared Mr. Lavrov, whose remarks were transcribed on the site of his ministry. And to add: “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood“.
“Scandalous, unforgivable and a horrific historical error”
“Minister Lavrov’s remarks are both outrageous, unforgivable and a horrific historical error“, condemned in a brief press release Yaïr Lapid. He specified that the Russian ambassador in Israel had been summoned for “clarifications“.
These remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov refer to rumors born before the Second World War because of the mysterious identity of the grandfather of the Nazi dictator.
His father Alois was “an illegitimate child and his parent was unknown“, explains to AFP the Austrian historian Roman Sandgruber, author last year of the first biography of the patriarch, born in 1837 and died in 1903 when Hitler was 14 years old.
It was in the 1920s, at the time of the rise of the founder of the National Socialist Party, that “speculation that he may have Jewish origins has emerged”nurtured by his political adversaries and reinforced by his accession to power in 1933.
Memoirs of a Nazi criminal revive the theory
Then, after the war, a Nazi criminal revived the theory.
In his memoirs entitled “Facing the Gallows” published in 1953, several years after his execution, Hans Frank, Reichsleiter (governor) of the Nazi Party, nicknamed the “executioner of Poland”, claimed to have secretly investigated the origins of Adolf Hitler at his request.
“It must have been towards the end of 1930. I was summoned” by Hitler who claimed to be a victim of “the odious blackmail” from a nephew about the “sjewish ang flowing through his veins“, he wrote, according to excerpts broadcast at the time by the German magazine der Spiegel.