But Hitler had no children, and we need not spend any more time on him—except that a man claimed to be Hitler’s son. Actually, it was his mother who claimed that he was Hitler’s son, and he came to believe it, strongly. So have others. His name is—was—Jean-Marie Loret. (He died in 1985.) His mother’s name was Charlotte Lobjoie. The story goes like this:
In the summer of 1917, she was a French girl cutting hay with her friends. Hitler was a soldier, fighting the world war in France. Charlotte and her friends noticed him across the way as he sketched in his artist’s pad. She was appointed to go over and talk to him. They struck up a romance of sorts. She was 16, he 28. They would take long walks in the countryside, which didn’t work out very well: He would give haranguing speeches on the histories of Prussia, Austria, and Bavaria. This was Charlotte’s impression, anyway—she spoke no German, and he no French. One “tipsy evening,” a son was conceived. Jean-Marie was born in March 1918.
He did not have an easy time of it growing up, taunted as a “fils de boche.” (This was a rude way of describing the son of a German soldier.) In 1948, when he was 30, his mother told him that the late German chancellor had fathered him. She died in 1951. For about 20 years, he denied, in himself, what his mother had told him. But then he became obsessed with the question and devoted himself to investigating it. In 1981, he came out with a book, Ton père s’appelait Hitler. The title came from the words his mother had spoken to him: “Your father’s name was Hitler.”
The proffered evidence for Loret’s sonship has to do with blood, handwriting, and other things. Charlotte is said to have kept paintings signed by Hitler. He is said to have painted a woman who looked just like her, after he was back in Germany. Envelopes of cash are said to have been ferried to Charlotte by German officers during World War II. There are other morsels and claims as well.
In 2012, a diary came to light—the diary of a British soldier, Leonard Wilkes, who had been with the Royal Engineers. On September 30, 1944, he wrote the following: “An interesting day today. Visited the house where Hitler stayed as a corporal in the last war, saw the woman who had a baby by him and she told us that the baby, a son, was now fighting in the French army against the Germans.” This story caused some excitement around the world. Could Adolf Hitler, probably the most reviled man in history, have fathered a child?
Jean-Marie Loret
Forgetting the handwriting, paintings, etc., it is a curious fact that Jean-Marie Loret looked like Hitler—a lot like him. So does his son Philippe (about whom more in a moment). Any number of mothers could have told their son that Hitler was his father. Why did Charlotte Lobjoie’s have to look so much like him?
The consensus of historians is that Loret was not the son of Hitler, or that it is extremely unlikely that he was. That was the judgment of Ian Kershaw, in a footnote to Volume 1 of his acclaimed Hitler biography, published in 1998. In 2014, he confirmed to me that nothing has happened in the intervening years to alter his judgment. It may be a little odd to say, but, for purposes of my own book, the truth about Loret’s parentage is almost irrelevant. What matters is that he thought himself Hitler’s son. What effect did that have on him?
It was Loret’s choice to grow a mustache—to have a Hitler mustache, specifically. This does not suggest distancing from the alleged father, to put it mildly. The man could easily have gone clean-shaven. Philippe Loret, too, has a mustache, or had one when London’s Daily Mail came to call on him in April 2012. It was not a Hitler mustache, however; it was a longer one. Philippe’s home was adorned with two portraits of Hitler. That does not suggest distancing, either. “Hitler is my family,” he explained. “It’s not my fault that I ended up as his grandson or that all the things happened during the war. What he did has nothing to do with me. He will always be family for me.”
After his father died, Philippe Loret traveled to Munich, where he met a daughter of Himmler—who told him that insider Nazis always believed that Hitler had a secret son in France.
Philippe further told the Daily Mail, “I don’t think evil passes on. Of course, qualities from your parents pass on to you, but you build your own life, and you make it what it is.” About his father, he said, unequivocally, “He was proud of being Hitler’s son.”
That statement is hard to take, as is the mustache that Jean-Marie wore, as are the portraits that Philippe hung on the wall, as is the rendezvous with the Himmler child. But we might consider this: What if your mother, one fine day, told you that the father you had always wondered about was actually Adolf Hitler—a genocidal dictator whose name is a synonym for evil? That is a card dealt to virtually no one.
Mussolini had five children, officially. How many unofficial children he had, no one can know: Mussolini was not the conjugal or monogamous type. He had a great many lovers or mistresses, including the one he died with, Claretta Petacci. They were shot, then hung upside down at the gas station in Milan.
There was definitely one unofficial child—a son named after him, Benito Albino Mussolini. His mother was Ida Dalser, with whom Mussolini began an affair in 1909 or so. Both were in their twenties. At some point, they may have married, but this is unclear. What is clear is that Benito was born in 1915. About a month later, Mussolini married someone else, Rachele Guidi.
The two women met once, stormily. It was in 1917, when Mussolini was in the hospital, recovering from a war injury. Many years later, Rachele told a son of hers, Romano, what happened: “She [Ida] threw herself at me in your father’s room, insulting me and screaming, ‘I am Mussolini’s wife! Only I have the right to be at his side!’ The soldiers there started to laugh. Wild with anger, I lunged at her and grabbed her by the neck. From his bed, looking like a mummy with bandages restraining his movement, Benito attempted to intervene. He got up from his bed to stop us while a doctor and two nurses also tried their best to separate us. Dalser fell back, and I burst into tears.”
For a while, Mussolini accepted Benito Jr. as his son and made payments for his support. But when he rose to power in 1922, Ida and Benito became a nuisance to him. Ida kept showing up, demanding her rights, and especially those of her son. Mussolini had her confined to an insane asylum; he had Benito confined to a separate asylum. They were not crazy when they went in, but they were certainly tormented as “patients,” or victims. Both died horribly: mother in 1937, when she was in her late fifties, and son in 1942, when he was in his mid-twenties.
These events came to light in the decade of the 2000s, when there were books and films. Mussolini did many cruel things in his life; almost never was he crueler than in his treatment of Ida Dalser and their son, Benito.
It was the presence of Ida that spurred Rachele to marry Mussolini. Ida, with her newborn, was calling herself “Signora Mussolini”; Rachele thought there could be only one of those, and it wasn’t Ida. So, Rachele married Mussolini in a civil ceremony in December 1915. The groom himself was not present. He was laid up in bed—as he would be later, when Ida and Rachele met and fought. He sent a proxy. Also in attendance was a little girl, Edda. She was the five-year-old daughter of Mussolini and Rachele.
Edda had come along in September 1910. For many years, there was some question of her maternity—not paternity, but maternity, the questioning of which is rare. It was whispered that Edda was really the daughter of Angelica Balabanoff, a “Russian Jewess” with whom Mussolini had an affair. They were comrades in revolutionary circles. But the ultimate answer to this rumor is that Rachele Guidi Mussolini would never have accepted or raised Edda if she had not been her own. The Mussolinis’