Eerie images of Adolf Hitler's ancestral home have emerged more than 80 years after it was bombed to ruins.
The property in the Austrian village of Döllersheim was destroyed amid swirling rumours about the German dictator's ancestry.
Hitler's grandmother was born in the neighbouring hamlet of Strone and in 1837 she gave birth to the dictator's father, Alois, in Döllersheim.
Hitler was baptised in Döllersheim church, where records listed him as "illegitimate" instead of giving his father's name.
This detail gave space to rumours about the true identity of Hitler's grandfather, with some even suggesting he had Jewish ancestry.
Image:
Credit: Bundesarchiv via Pen News)Image:
Credit: Normann Steidl/Pen News)But Hitler left investigators with nowhere to snoop after annexing Austria in 1938, when he had the area evacuated, destroyed and sealed off by the military.
Sjoerd J. de Boer, author of The Hitler Myths, said: "There was, when Hitler became a celebrity, a lot of scrutiny and he wasn't too keen on that.
"There has been talk of family members like an aunt or a sister who were not quite right mentally, but that seems a bit far-fetched.
"Adolf Hitler did not particularly like researching his ancestry and he also pretended not to know much about his ancestry.
Image:
Credit: Pen News)"Above all, he was not keen on tarnishing the picture he had painted of himself in Mein Kampf. As he considered racial purity more important, it was more important to disguise the deviations prevalent in very many families."
Döllersheim is today owned by Austrian Armed Forces and access is restricted, but public visits to the main square, graveyard and the reconsecrated church of Saints Peter and Paul are allowed.
Images from the village show the ruins of its hospital, the schoolhouse where Alois was educated, the church where he was baptised, and the churchyard where his mother was buried.
In this same church in 1842, Maria Schicklgruber would marry the man Hitler considered to be his grandfather, a miller called Johann Georg Hiedler.
Image:
Credit: Normann Steidl/Pen News)Alois would also return to the church in 1876 to convince the priest that Hiedler was his true father, adopting his name but spelling it "Hitler".
Yet Alois was never acknowledged as Hiedler's son by his mother, who died in 1847, nor by the miller himself, who died in 1857. Also, Alois did not stay with Hiedler, but was sent to live with Hiedler's brother instead.
Even though the Nazis acknowledged Hiedler as Hitler's true grandfather, the self-proclaimed Führer seems to have remained uncomfortable with his ancestry.
He apparently lectured loose-lipped relatives in 1930, warning them: "People must not know who I am. They must not know where I'm from and who my family is."
Image:
Credit: Normann Steidl/Pen News)Rumours of Jewish roots exploded after the war thanks to Hitler's lawyer, Hans Frank. He told the Nuremberg trials that Schicklgruber had worked as a cook in the house of a Jewish man, Leopold Frankenberger, who could be Hitler's real grandfather.
He said that Schicklgruber had written to Frankenberger informing him he was a father, and had received a stipend for Alois after she left his service.
According to Frank, Hitler said his grandmother only fabricated this claim against Frankenberger in order to extort money from him.
In any case, historians are sceptical about the legend - no evidence for it has been found beyond Frank's testimony.
Some have suggested that Frank, who remained anti-Semitic, fabricated the notion in a bid to blame Hitler's crimes on the Jewish people.
"There is no evidence that Adolf Hitler had a Jewish grandfather," said De Boer.
"The theories about the Jewish grandfather only surfaced when Hitler started making anti-Semitic remarks. The story did not play out at all before that."
Image:
Credit: Pen News)Almost 80 years after Hitler's death, many of the details of D llersheim's destruction are now lost to history.
Author Franz Jetzinger wrote that the village and surrounding hamlets were "blasted and withered by German artillery and weapons" soon after Austria was annexed. Likewise, historian Brigitte Hamann says the settlements were destroyed as early as 1938.
But De Boer contends that the area, though depopulated under Hitler, wasn't actually demolished until the Soviets arrived.
In any case, whatever secrets Döllersheim held were lost when it was wiped off the map.
Mr De Boer's book, The Hitler Myths: Exposing the Truth Behind the Stories About the Führer, is available to buy via Amazon.