The man who claimed to be the last living relative of Adolf Hitler in Germany is officially dead, authorities have confirmed.
Records uncovered by Germany’s Bild newspaper that Romano Lukas Hitler, who claimed to be the nephew of the genocidal Nazi Führer, passed away on June 22, 2022 in the city of Duisburg.
Born September 6, 1950, in what is modern-day Poland, Romano Hitler spent the last decades living in the city of Görlitz, near the German-Polish border.
Hanging over his couch were portraits of Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Angela Merkel, and even Muhammad Ali, revealed in an interview he shared with German media in 2015.
An inverted German flag – a practice often carried out by far-right extremists – also dominated the wall.
Records uncovered by Germany’s Bild newspaper that Romano Lukas Hitler, who claimed to be the nephew of the genocidal Nazi Führer, passed away on June 22nd 2022 in the city of Duisburg
Romano’s ID card bears the surname Hitler
Despite the infamous name on his ID and driver’s license, however, his true connection to the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was never actually proven.
Romano Lukas Hitler claimed he was from the lineage of Adolf Hitler’s younger brother, and as a child, he was abandoned in a Slovakian orphanage while his parents fled to Austria.
He later grew up with foster parents in Poland until he turned 18, and in 2012, moved to Görlitz in eastern Germany from a small town in western Germany, lured by cheaper groceries across the Polish border.
He was in and out of work and spent many years living on the equivalent of around £540 per month in social welfare until retirement.
Romano Hitler wasn’t, however, just known for his name.
In 2018, he also made headlines when a court fined him €800 for the gross act of kissing a 13-year-old girl without consent.
After that, he disappeared from public view.
The cause of his death remains unclear.
Speaking in a 2015 interview, Romano Hitler said: ‘Adolf Hitler’s father Alois had a younger brother. His grandson was my father.’
He went on: ‘People are shocked or laugh at me when they hear my name. It was also often the reason why I found no work.
‘After me there will be no more Hitlers. That’s it, shame must have an end. The name is like a cross to bear and I wish that on nobody.
‘The Germans always think Hitler was a bad man. But I’m a very simple person.’
It was never proven whether Romano was in fact related to Hitler
His claim about Hitler’s father Alois having a brother doesn’t fit the accepted version of history.
In 1837, when she was 42 years old, and still single, Alois’s mother Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to him – her first and only child.
Maria refused to reveal who the child’s father was, so the priest baptized him Alois Schicklgruber and entered ‘illegitimate’ in place of the father’s name on the baptismal register.
Historians have discussed two candidates for the father of Alois.
They are Johann Georg Hiedler, whose name was added to Alois’s birth certificate later in his life and who was officially accepted as the father of Alois by the Third Reich.
The other is Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, Georg’s brother and Alois’s step-uncle, who raised Alois through adolescence and later bequeathed him a considerable portion of his life savings.
