Hitler had an Irish nephew who turned against him

I don’t love the “I was today years old when” meme, but my Irish-American research finally gave me a good one: I was today years old when I found out that Adolf Hitler had an Irish nephew named William Patrick, sometimes called Patrick or Willy, who was actually kind of hot and definitely Irish. He was raised by an Irish Catholic woman named Bridget after his father, Hitler’s half-brother, abandoned the family. (Naturally, Hitler’s half-brother was a complete chump, squandering all the family’s money on a “gambling tour” in Europe when World War I broke out. Instead of finding some way to get home, he said “nah, fuck it,” stayed in the city where he was gambling, and illegally married another woman.) Still, Adolf Hitler offered his Irish nephew a job in Germany, where he had just become chancellor. When Hitler told him to renounce his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job, Willy smelled some bullshit and fled to the United States, apparently blackmailing Hitler with “embarrassing information about his family” on his way out. He published an article titled “Why I hate my Uncle,” joined the Navy, and fought for the U.S. in World War II. His family still lives here under a different name.

Of course, the big question is what the embarrassing information was. As we all know, Hitler was not even German; he was a foreigner promising to “make Germany great again.” His family and personal history is extremely murky. For starters, no one knows where this family came from: his father was (allegedly) the illegitimate child of an Austrian maid having an affair with her Jewish boss. The man named as the “Jewish boss” was never found in the historical record, and this theory has largely been dismissed as a myth. But we do know one thing about the Hitler family (which, by the way, is not even a real name; they kept changing it, allegedly from Hoedler to Heidler to Hitler): these people were on their freak shit. There’s all sorts of speculation that his mother was screwing around with Hitler’s grandfather…or something. I found it hard to keep track of who in this freaky family was having sex with whom, but I did find it weird no one had ever bothered to look into Hitler’s identity and paternity. Considering the enormous impact his racial pseudoscience had on the world, wouldn’t someone at least make a cursory check into his past? I, for one, found it strange that he praised “Aryans” as the master race, because Aryans are not European: they’re Iranian, which is where the country gets its name. He tried to persuade the Arab world to join his cause, ultimately unsuccessfully. To be clear, Hitler wanted nothing to do with Islam, but when it came to theocratic dictators in the Arab world, he admitted to liking their style. He even wrote, “It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

Reading all this, I started to think, “uh, did anyone check to see whether this guy was Iranian?”

Someone actually did obtain DNA from Hitler’s living relatives recently, and virtually nobody reported it. Turns out the fascists just wanted to reclaim the fatherland after all! Hitler’s paternal haplogroup was eb1b1b, making it absolutely certain his paternal ancestors came from…

Somalia, and neighboring countries like Ethiopia, which the Axis powers invaded during the war. Yes, Hitler was at least partly African, and since he kept trying to silence his nephew, he likely knew it.

However, Hitler’s haplogroup eventually moved north, and it is almost certain Hitler’s more recent ancestors were migrants from European colonies in North Africa, probably Libya or Tunisia. They might have been Jewish; Tunisia historically has a strong Jewish minority. They also might have been Muslims or Christians or had no religion. In other words, the leader of the “master race” and the German nation was just some skeezer with a fake name who stole his way in.

But he did have a pretty cool Irish nephew. People should know about this guy. Willy Patrick is one of my new Irish heroes.