Adolf Hitler’s wife Eva Braun had Jewish ancestors, according to ground-breaking DNA tests on hair from a brush found in her apartment.
The Nazi dictator wed his long-term mistress shortly before they killed themselves in his Berlin bunker in 1945.
And today’s revelation about Braun’s family background has emerged 70 years after Hitler ordered the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust in the Second World War.
TV presenter Mark Evans, who made the discovery for Channel 4’s Dead Famous DNA, said: “This is a thought-provoking outcome.
“I never dreamt that I would find such a potentially extraordinary and profound result.
"Racism and fascism, ideas that one racial group is superior to another, made a mockery of by studying dead famous DNA.”
Researchers bought locks found on Braun’s brush for £1,200 from a hair dealer.
Scientific analysis found a sequence in the DNA, passed down from mother to daughter, which is strongly associated with the Ashkenazi Jews ethnic division.
An estimated 80% of the world’s Jewish population is Ashkenazi, descended from medieval Jews who lived in central Europe having first settled in the Rhineland.
In the 19th century, many German Ashkenazi people converted to Catholicism. As Braun was brought up a Catholic, it is highly unlikely she knew about her ancestry.
And despite ordering research to check up on Braun’s race, neither would Hitler.
Braun fell madly in love with the Fuhrer when she was just 17 years old, although he was 23 years her senior.
Fearing the affair would affect his image , Hitler kept her a secret from the public and hid her at his mountain-top residence, the Berghof, in the Bavarian Alps.
At the end of the war in 1945, Paul Baer, a US 7th Army captain, was posted to the Berghof.
Working for the precursor of the CIA, he had privileged access to Hitler’s retreat and took personal items – including the monogrammed hairbrush – from Braun’s private apartment.
There are photographs of Baer at the Berghof in 1945 and the hairbrush has been authenticated by experts.
After the war, Baer returned to the US with the souvenir, as well as other items.
Baer’s son Alan said: “In our basement I remember there was a duffel bag and in the duffel bag there were several Nazi ceremonial daggers , a human skull and this case with the initials in gold E.B.
"We opened it up and there was a mirror and a hairbrush. It was just a cosmetic box in a duffel bag brought from Hitler’s home.”
On his father’s death in the 1970s, Alan sold Braun’s brush to a relic merchant, who separated the hair and sold it on to specialist dealer John Reznikoff.
While the hair was almost certainly Braun’s, presenter Mark attempted to prove it for definite by asking for a DNA swab from one of her two surviving female descendants.
Both refused his request, so an element of mystery still remains.
Braun was 33 when she committed suicide in 1945 by biting into a capsule of cyanide. Hitler, who was 56, shot himself.
Their bodies were burned.
Dead Famous DNA will be shown on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday