COMMENTARY | Not everyone has a close relationship with their father; some people grow up never knowing who theirs is. Being estranged from a parent can become something that consumes a person’s thoughts. It’s natural to want to know about one’s biological parents: who they were, what they were like, what their interests were. It’s not strange at all to want to embrace one’s heritage and find answers to certain existential questions — unless one of your parents was Adolf Hitler.
However, at least one person out there believed that Hitler was his dad, and instead of embracing denial, Jean-Marie Loret set out on a mission to find out the truth about his mother’s claim — that she slept with Adolf Hitler when she was 16 and conceived Loret during that encounter. Though the author died four years after going public with the story, his children are now the heirs to this claim to fame, or infamy, as it were.
I acknowledge that we don’t get to choose our parents. We don’t get to choose the traits that get passed on to us biologically, so Loret can’t be blamed for being the son of an evil dictator. He can be blamed for sporting a creepy, rectangular mustache and the accompanying natural frown, though, which makes the resemblance between the two even more striking. Surely, he hadn’t groomed himself that way unaware of the similarity. He actually joined the French Resistance during the German occupation of France, and it now appears that during that same time period, Hitler was sending Loret’s mother cash deliveries — in France.
If I learned that Hitler might have been my father, I would want to disprove the claim. I would insist that my mom never repeat that story again — to me or anyone else. I certainly wouldn’t have had the audacity to write a book detailing the story, out of fear for my family, if not shame itself. I definitely wouldn’t call myself his son, or in my case, daughter.
Of course, Loret wrote a book instead of hiding his secret, and despite the fact that his father is one of the most hated men who ever lived, his parentage was certainly a claim to fame. While I don’t envy Loret, I don’t exactly blame him for going public with his story. Though he died in 1985, his children will be getting the royalties from “Your Father’s Name Was Hitler“ which has been republished with new evidence that further supports his claim. According to Loret’s lawyer, they could probably also get royalties on “Mein Kampf,” but that would be embracing the family connection a little too wholeheartedly.