they have coped with their situation in various ways. While I was writing the book, I had lunch with my friend Tom Griesa, a judge in New York, and told him what my subject was. He had just one comment—simple yet oddly profound: “People are interesting.” Yes, they are. Sometimes more interesting than they want to be.
Anyway, this is enough of a prelude. On with the show. We will begin with the most infamous dictator of all. Who really doesn’t belong in this book, a book about children of dictators. Does he?
Hitler had no children. He did not have a wife either, unless you count Eva Braun—the mistress whom he married just before his suicide (and hers). It must have been one of the strangest weddings in history, occurring in the bunker just after midnight. The reception consisted of some champagne, sandwiches, and awkward small talk. Two afternoons later, the newlyweds finished themselves off.
It was Hitler’s conceit that he was really married to his cause, Germany (as he would have thought of it). He had relationships with women, and they were twisted relationships, unsurprisingly. These women had the habit of committing suicide, or attempting to do so. One of his women, in a sense, was his niece, Geli Raubal—daughter of his sister, or half-sister, Angela. Geli came to live with “Uncle Alf” in 1929, when she was 21, and the nature of their relationship has been the subject of much speculation. He enjoyed squiring her around, and he grew possessive of her, attached to her. In September 1931, she was found dead in his apartment, while he was away. Dead by his gun. Was it a straightforward suicide? Why did she do it? These questions, too, have been the subject of much speculation.
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.
