Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's long-term lover who married the Nazi leader hours before their joint suicide in his Berlin bunker, may have had Jewish ancestry, ground-breaking DNA testing has found.
DNA analysis of hair samples from a hairbrush claimed to belong to Braun suggests that the fascist dictator responsible for the murder of millions of Jews may have unwittingly married a woman of semitic descent, in one of his final acts as the Third Reich crumbled.
The revelation appears in a Channel 4 documentary, Dead Famous DNA, broadcast next week, in which leading scientists attempt to extract DNA from relics and analyse their genome to solve mysteries associated with them.
Forensic scientists sequenced the hypervariable region of the mitochondrial DNA from a sample of hairs extracted from a monogrammed hairbrush found at the end of the Second World War in Braun's apartment at Hitler's Alpine residence, the Berghof in Bavaria, by an American army intelligence officer.
They found a specific sequence within the mitochondrial DNA, a small genome within the mitochondria of the cell that is passed down the maternal line from mother to daughter unchanged over the generations, which is associated with Ashkenazi Jews.
A haplogroup is a particular sequence of mitochondrial DNA which is passed down the maternal line and according to traditional Jewish law, Judaism is passed down through matrilineal descent.