Sometimes I hear people claim that some of the Nazis had Jewish ancestry. I think Hermann Goering is the one that comes up most frequently (I could be wrong) and I recall hearing about some others.
I once saw a book entitled (I think) “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers” which was about various members of the Nazi military who were actually of Jewish origin, but that was about the military, and the Nazi military was so huge and conscripted so many people that it seems inevitable that a FEW Jews would have been inadvertently picked up. But I’m talking about the actual Nazi Party leadership. The commanding guys.
Were any of those men of Jewish extraction? Sometimes I hear it said that Hitler himself was part Jewish but I doubt it…there’s no proof, and it’s pure speculation.
Hitler was, I’ve read, very wary of rumors that he had Jewish blood himself. I’ve never read any proof that he did, however. Reinhard Heydrich, one of his top SS officers, also was very worried that he had Jewish blood of his own. This might be of interest: Mischling - Wikipedia
As was already said, I have also heard that Hitler had Jewish blood. I think it was his father who was Jewish. But again, I do not have a cite for it, and have no idea if it is true.
It was certainly not that close a relationship. It’s also dubious that Hitler had any significant Jewish ancestry himself. (And what "Jewish would even mean, given that they were etyhnically German anyway, I don’t know. The Nazis polluted so many idea that’s hard to even think straight about them.)
However, some sources imply that Hitler may well have feared it himself, and was unsure about the possibility.
Goering had distant Jewish ancestors. He was descended from the Eberlin family, which had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the 15th century. His godfather, however, was a man named Hermann Eppenstein (later Hermann von Eppenstein), who was the son of a Jewish convert. Eppenstein was a mentor to Goering, and Goering lived with him when his parents were in Africa (Goering’s father was a colonial official in German South-West Africa, now Namibia), and the entire Goering family moved in with Eppenstein when they suffered financial reverses. It was around this time that Goering’s younger brother Albert was born, and some have speculated that Albert Goering was the illegitimate son of Eppenstein and Mrs. Goering.
Albert Goering is a fairly interesting person in his own right. Largely a playboy and dillettante, during the Holocaust, he used his influence as Hermann Goering’s brother to help shelter Jews and to try to free Jews being used as slave labor. However, after the war was over, because of who he was and who his brother was, his contributions really didn’t get recognized to the extent they should.
In Hitler’s case, if he had had any Jewish ancestors, it would have been his paternal grandfather. Hitler’s grandmother was a housemaid named Maria Schickelgruber. And in 1837, she had an illegitimate son named Alois. Five years later, she married a Czech man named Johann Georg Heidler. After Heidler’s death, Alois swore under oath that his father was Johann George Heidler and took the last name Hitler (Hitler is a variant spelling of Heidler). Alois’s father was probably Johan Georg.
However, in the 1920s, there were rumors going around about Hitler’s family, and one of the rumors was that Maria had been a maid to this Jewish man in Graz named Leopold Frankenberger, and that Frankenberger’s teenage son had seduced and impregnated Maria. This is almost certainly false, because the Jews had been expelled from Graz in the 15th century, and we don’t have any records of Jews living in Graz until after Alois was born. However, Hitler possibly believed the rumors, going so far as to have both Hans Frank (Nazi lawyer and bucher of Poland) and Heinrich Himmler (Nazi chicken farmer and butcher of Europe) investigate the claims.