Hitler's secret family: How researchers tracked down 39 living relatives of Nazi dictator







Thirty-nine living relatives of Adolf Hitler have been discovered by Belgian researchers after they claim to have decoded the Nazi dictator's DNA.



Analysing forgotten cigarette butts in a small village in Lower Austria, a used paper napkin in a New York fast food restaurant and the seals of letters sent over 30 years ago from northern France, Marc Vermeeren and Jean-Paul Mulders say they have traced all known living relatives of the Fuehrer for the first time.



As well as three living in America, whose existence has been reported on before, they also claim to have tracked down 36 others who still live in the wooded area of Austria where Hitler was born.

Childless: Adolf Hitler with his mistress Eva Braun who he married less than 40 hours before they both committed suicide

Although the researchers claim to have carried out an extensive investigation, their information has not been independently verified.

They have also been somewhat sketchy on the details of their methods.

However, Vermeeren, a Belgian customs official, and Mulders a journalist, say three great-grandchildren of Hitler’s father Alois live on Long Island, outside New York, under the false name Stuart-Houston.



They are descendants who left Germany to escape the Nazis.



Louis and Brian Stuart-Houston share a little wooden house in East Patchogue, where they work as gardeners, while Alexander is a retired psychologist who helps veterans of another war - Vietnam.



The Belgians said they watched them for seven days and night, following 60-year-old Alexander to a fast-food restaurant where he disposed of a paper napkin after eating fried chicken which they retrieved and later matched up with 'DNA of Hitler that we keep in a sealed, armoured chest,' according to Mulders.



The cigarette butts came from Hitler relatives in Austria, they said, but did not elaborate on the alleged DNA found on the stamps from France nor how they came into their possession.



'The American relatives have agreed not to have children to extinguish the saga of Hitler and stop living in fear, but have promised to publish a book before they die,' said Mulders, who works for Belgian newspaper Het Laaste Nieuws.



Marc Vermeeren, 51, said the Hitler relatives living in lower Austria try to hide their lineage by changing their names to Hüttler, Hietler, Hiedler or Hütler - regular names that 'litter the Austrian telephone directory'.



'All Hüttler living in the Waldviertel region are distant descendants of Hitler, although many of them do not even know, as it was their parents or grandparents who changed the name and never told them,' said Vermeeren.



'None of the descendants has a resemblance to Adolf.'

Home: Thirty-six of Hitler's relatives have been tracked down to the Waldviertel area if Austria where the dictator was born

Hitler died childless.



He married his mistress Eva Braun in the Berlin Bunker in April 1945 as the Red Army closed in on the city; less than 40 hours later the pair of them committed suicide together.



The Hitler relatives who still inhabit the small villages and hillsides of the Waldviertel in Austria have kept the secret of their lineage for years.



The Belgian researchers have not released details of who they are or exactly where they live - out of shame, but possibly also out health fears.



One author who has researched the family tree is German author Ralf Jahn who claims mental illness was rife among the Hitler tribe.



The Führer was terrified when he lived that this dark secret would emerge and went to great lengths to keep it hidden.



His cousin was exterminated in a death camp because she suffered from schizophrenia.



Jahn, who is German, says: 'It is not surprising that Hitler went to such lengths to hide his past.



'The man who dreamt of a new master race was himself descended from a family of peasants.



'With the exception of his father, none of them had travelled outside of a 30-mile area in the Austrian Waldviertel – and their genealogies are littered with inmarriages and hereditary disease.'

