Son of Hitler?

A respected historian says yes

For the umpteenth time since the end of World War II, Europe was set abuzz last week by the claimed discovery of a living child of Adolf Hitler. While most such previous assertions have been quickly discredited, the source of the latest report was Werner Maser, 55, a respected West German historian and Hitler biographer (Hitler: Legend, Myth and Reality). Maser, who plans to include the full story of his discovery in a new edition of his book later this year, has so far declined to provide full documentation for his claim. But he gave TIME some fascinating details about the man he claims is Hitler's illegitimate son and how he was located.

According to Maser, the son, Jean Marie Loret, is an unemployed Frenchman born in 1918 after an 18-month liaison between Hitler and a French peasant girl named Charlotte. At the time, Hitler was a corporal in a World War I Bavarian infantry regiment stationed in the small French village of Wavrin. Hitler did not learn of the birth until after he was taken to a military hospital in Germany suffering from the effects of having been gassed on the front lines; apparently, Hitler made no attempt then to establish contact with mother or son.

At the age of four, young Loret was placed in an orphanage; eventually he was adopted by a well-to-do French family. Eighteen years later, when Hitler overran France in 1940, he ordered the Gestapo to find mother and son, who had independently made their ways to Paris.

Charlotte by then had become an alcoholic, and Hitler ordered her placed in a French sanitarium. The son was taken to Gestapo headquarters at Paris' Hotel Lutetia, where he was questioned extensively as to what he knew of his father.

Unaware of his parentage, Loret suspected only that his father was an important German, probably a general. On Hitler's personal orders, Loret became a high-ranking French police official who worked closely with the Gestapo; even so, he was not prosecuted as a collaborator after the war. Only in 1948, three years before her death, did Charlotte tell her son that his father was Hitler. By that time Loret was married, and the news caused his wife to leave him. Of the couple's nine children, three live with Loret in St. Quentin, a French town north of Paris.

Maser relates that he first came across Loret's path twelve years ago, when his research took him to Wavrin. There elderly residents still recalled Charlotte, her German soldier and later her infant son.

After locating Loret, says Maser, a long search into the Frenchman's past convinced him that Loret was indeed Hitler's son. "The resemblance between Loret and Hitler is striking," says Maser.

"Particularly when Loret takes his glasses off, though of course he has no mustache. Still, he is his father's son."

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