Why would Adolf Hitler ever be photographed with a Jewish girl? In today's video, we delve into the surprising story behind the rare photograph and why this girl was special to the Nazi leader.
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00:00Back in 2018, a photograph of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler posing with a six-year-old girl
00:04with bright blue eyes and blonde hair sold at auction for a little over $11,000.
00:09Granted, that may not be the most remarkable of occurrences.
00:13Long after Hitler's end at his Berlin bunker toward the end of the Second World War,
00:17demand for Nazi memorabilia has always been high. In a macabre series of events,
00:21even part of his lower jawbone eventually found its way to Moscow via some grisly
00:27and well-connected trophy hunters. But there was something about this particular
00:30photo that's truly significant, casting a revealing light on one of the most
00:34brutal extermination policies ever enacted in human history, the Final Solution. Why?
00:41Because the girl posing with Hitler was, in fact, Jewish.
00:45Now, the Nazi regime's racial purity laws, Hitler's plan to create a race of Aryan Übermensch,
00:50have been well-documented, and we all know the horrors that took place in his network
00:54of concentration camps across Central and Eastern Europe during the latter stages of the war.
00:59From Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen to Dachau, over six million Jewish men,
01:04women, and children were executed because of their ethnic heritage.
01:07That's what makes the photograph so fascinating and poignant. After all,
01:11every picture has a backstory and a context, never more so than the photograph of Hitler
01:16and the girl who would later become known as his Jewish daughter. But what do we know about
01:21this six-year-old girl, and why did her true identity cause so much controversy?
01:26Not just at the time the picture was taken, but to this very day.
01:30First things first, her name, Rosa Bernila Nienau. Coincidentally,
01:34she shared the same birthday as the Führer, April 20th. If the many stories about their
01:39unlikely relationship are to be believed, she referred to him as Uncle Hitler,
01:43and was known herself as the Führer's child. For purely propagandistic purposes,
01:48and note that the picture was taken back in 1933, many years before the outbreak of war,
01:53the Nazis wanted to present their leader to the world as a kindly, caring figure,
01:57a man of the people. Or as James Wilson put it in his book, Hitler's Alpine Headquarters,
02:02which is a more intimate portrait of the Führer, a man truly in touch with the young.
02:06For that reason, his personal photographer often took pictures of Hitler and Bernila
02:10holding hands, exchanging kisses on the cheek, or just smiling at each other.
02:14And what about the aforementioned backstory in the context of the picture?
02:18The black and white photograph, measuring eleven and three quarters inches by nine and a half
02:22inches, was sold by Alexander Historical Auctions, based in Chesapeake City, Maryland.
02:27Taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, it shows a smiling Hitler embracing the young blonde girl at his
02:32mountainside retreat, the Berghof, in the Bavarian region of Germany. In the picture,
02:36Hitler's face is angled to the right, close to the top of the girl's head, while she's looking
02:41straight at the camera, her mouth slightly agape, her eyes lit up and grinning wildly.
02:46Most notably, perhaps, the photograph is inscribed by Hitler himself in dark blue ink,
02:50The Dear and Considerate Rosa Nienau, Adolf Hitler, Munich, the 16th June, 1933.
02:57Hitler added his signature below the inscription along with nine edelweiss flowers and a four-leaf
03:02clover, applied so it is rumored by Bernila herself. In an interview in the Washington
03:07Post Vice President of Sales at Alexander Historical Auctions, Andreas Kornfeld was
03:12intrigued by the photograph's backstory. It's probably one of the most unique items I've seen
03:16in my time with the auction house. Being German, I've never heard the story, and I've seen the
03:21picture many times, but it would never have occurred to me the story behind the picture,
03:25which is mind-blowing. However, the journey the picture took before it arrived at the
03:29Maryland auction house is incredibly circuitous, and shrouded in secrecy,
03:34as is the identity of the eventual buyer. And crucially, Kornfeld and his colleagues
03:38spent a lot of time verifying its authenticity before putting it up for sale.
03:42Their findings? According to their sources, Bernila and her widowed mother traveled from
03:47their Munich home in the spring of 1933 to Hitler's retreat. They were there to celebrate
03:52the Fuhrer's birthday, and Bernila was somehow chosen to meet him, likely because of their
03:57identical birthdays. She and Uncle Hitler bonded, he was very much taken with the girl,
04:02and she subsequently became known as his favorite. They met several times and wrote
04:07each other letters, as many as 17, right up until 1938. That's when it would appear that
04:12Hitler was alerted to the girl's Jewish heritage. However, knowledge of her ethnic origins only
04:17touches the surface and significance of the story. Before we go any further, we need to answer some
04:22fundamental questions about Hitler and the Nazi regime. Most pertinently, why did Hitler and the
04:26Nazi party target Jewish people? To find out, let's travel back to a time before Hitler had
04:31any inkling that he would one day be the leader of one of the most powerful countries on the
04:35planet and a man who would hold the fate of so many millions of people in his hands.
04:40While it may be surprising to many, Hitler wasn't actually born in Germany. Rather,
04:44he was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary, and was raised near the city of Linz. In the 1910s,
04:50he lived in Vienna before eventually moving to Germany in 1913. As has been well documented,
04:56the young Hitler didn't enjoy a very happy or prosperous time in the Austrian capital.
05:00Drawn to the world of arts and painting in particular, he never possessed the sufficient
05:05talent to ever make a living from his mainly watercolor creations. By all accounts, he entered
05:10a dull and directionless period of life where he may have even been reduced to begging in the
05:14streets. The origins of Hitler's anti-Semitic views are therefore not altogether clear.
05:19Not that the lack of clarity has stopped some colorful theories from circulating over the years.
05:24According to some of those theories, Hitler was ashamed of his partly Jewish roots.
05:28More on that later in the video. Another theory put his hatred of the
05:31Jews down to trauma suffered by a poison gas attack in the First World War.
05:35Hitler had one of the most dangerous roles in the German army,
05:38transferring messages on the front line through a network of trenches. Most fancifully,
05:42it's been posited that Hitler had contracted a venereal disease from a Jewish prostitute,
05:47a serviceable but probably the most unlikely theory of the three.
05:50What is clear is that Hitler was greatly influenced by two revered thinkers of the era.
05:55The first was Georg Ritter von Schroeder, a German nationalist who believed that the
05:59German-speaking regions of Austria-Hungary should be added to the German empire.
06:03In addition, it was his view that the Jews could never be fully-fledged German citizens.
06:07The second was Viennese mayor Karl Luger, from whom Hitler learned how anti-Semitism
06:12and social reforms could be successful campaigning tactics. In Mein Kampf,
06:16Hitler's notorious autobiography, which he penned before he rose to prominence,
06:20he praised Luger as the greatest German mayor of all times.
06:24When he came to power, Hitler used the theories of these two great thinkers as the cornerstone of
06:28his social and military policies. In fact, the whole justification for the invasion of the then
06:33Czechoslovakia was to protect ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland region bordering Germany and Austria.
06:39To fully grasp the significance of the Sudetenland crisis, we need to look back to the end of World
06:44War I and the Treaty of Versailles. Signed in 1919, the treaty effectively redrew the map of
06:49Europe, systematically carving up the Austro-Hungarian empire and creating new nation-states,
06:54including Czechoslovakia. At the time, this combined the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia
06:59with Slovakia and Ruthenia, and was home to a diverse population including a significant
07:05number of ethnic Germans. Like many of his countrymen, especially those who served in the war,
07:09Hitler wanted to right what he saw as the many great wrongs contained in the Treaty of Versailles.
07:14And at this point in history, many, not just those of German origins or sympathetic to the
07:18German cause, may well have agreed with him. Only Hitler wasn't satisfied with merely reclaiming
07:24these lands and protecting the rights and freedoms of his countrymen. He wasn't satisfied with taking
07:29over Austria, invading Poland, occupying France, encircling the United Kingdom, and then directing
07:34the full force of his mighty Wehrmacht with his destructive blitzkrieg tactics toward the huge
07:39open spaces of Soviet Russia. No, Hitler had a plan for world domination. He knew the German
07:44nation needed more living space, or Lebensraum in German, a fundamental part of the master
07:49plan for the East and a concept of expansionism, philosophy, and policies that were popular in
07:55German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. However, acquiring more land for his glorious
08:00Reich to prosper was only part of a bigger and far more destructive plan. As mentioned earlier
08:05in the video, Hitler's grand vision for the world was influenced by many diverse sources.
08:09He and the party drew deeply from ancient Teutonic order, Norse mythology, and Wagnerian
08:15theories on racial purity to all-out occultism. In fact, the swastika, the hated emblem of the
08:21Nazi party, is an ancient symbol that originated from the Sanskrit word for well-being, something
08:26which couldn't be more diametrically opposed to a Nazi ideology. Used by many cultures,
08:31especially in Asia, to represent life, sun, power, strength, and good luck, the swastika
08:36is mentioned in the Vedas, the sacred texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
08:41Even more tellingly, before Hitler came to power, he absorbed the works of many more 19th and early
08:4620th century thinkers and proponents of philosophical, onto-epistemic, and theoretical
08:51perspectives on ecological anthropology. This included areas such as scientific racism,
08:56holistic science, and organicism regarding the constitution of complex systems and the
09:01theorization of organic racial societies. One of the most significant ideological
09:06influences was German nationalist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. His ideas were
09:12implemented and became the philosophical and ideological foundations of Nazi-oriented
09:16nationalism. Based on pseudo-scientific and racist doctrines, these theories asserted the
09:21superiority of the Aryan race referenced at the top of the video. In practice, this took the form
09:26of many vile and immoral acts of barbarism against other human beings, using them as guinea
09:31pigs for cruel and excruciating scientific tests. These included experiments on blood coagulation,
09:37bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation, experiments on twins, early forays into
09:42the effects of freezing and high altitudes on individuals, sterilization and fertility,
09:47and tests on the effects of drinking seawater to excess. Between 1942 and 1945, there were 15,754
09:55documented victims of their experiments. The racial policy of the Nazi party in the German
10:00state was eventually organized through the Office of Racial Policy, which published circulars and
10:04directives to relevant administrative organizations, newspapers, and educational institutes.
10:10As the new legislation came into force and practice, Nazi policies branded centuries-long
10:15residents of German territories who were not ethnic Germans as inferior non-Aryan sub-humans
10:20in a racial hierarchy that placed the master race at the top. If you were Jewish of Levantine
10:26origins, Romani or Gypsies, an Indo-Aryan people originating from the Indian subcontinent,
10:31part of the vast majority of Slavs, ethnic Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, etc.,
10:37or any non-European, your life had little to no worth under Nazi rule.
10:41Terrifyingly, this was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for racial hygiene
10:46by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as sub-humans.
10:50At this point in the video, let's pause for a moment and consider the terminology the Nazi
10:54party used to justify their actions. It's a warning from history that we as a collective
10:59of people have failed to heed. With sweeping social reforms such as the Nazi's racial purity laws,
11:05there could be no exemptions or compromises. As early as August 1920, Hitler compared the
11:10Jews to germs. In many of his most incendiary and hate-filled speeches,
11:14he asserted that diseases can't be controlled unless you destroy their causes.
11:18The influence of the Jews would never disappear without removing its cause,
11:22the Jew, from our midst, he said. And it was these racial ideas that paved the way for the
11:27mass murder of Jews in the 1940s, hence the confounding nature of the photograph and the
11:32subject matter of this video. To highlight that point, we'll let the Auction House take up the
11:36story. On their website, they made the following statement. Research shows that even early on,
11:41Hitler became aware of the girl's Jewish heritage but chose to ignore it,
11:45either for personal or propaganda reasons. But what was the girl's Jewish heritage exactly?
11:50Well, according to official records and accounts, Bernila was one-quarter Jewish.
11:55This was classed as a mixed race of the second degree according to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
12:01All of which meant that although she would undoubtedly have been subjected to some form
12:05of discrimination, she would have maintained her Reich citizenship, for how long is up for debate.
12:10Once Hitler launched one invasion and wave of blitzkrieg attacks after another,
12:14hatred for the Jewish race was rampant in the towns and cities all over the country.
12:18If you couldn't prove your racial purity, you could find yourself subject to beatings,
12:22pogroms, or much, much worse. When Hitler's henchmen discovered her roots,
12:26they knew how potentially embarrassing this could be for the Führer and the party as a whole.
12:30In response, they forbade Bernila and her mother from visiting Hitler's Bavarian retreat ever again,
12:35and thus severed ties between one of the most powerful and feared men on the planet
12:39and the angelic little girl who shared the same birthday as him.
12:42But there is a slight twist at the end of this story. Knowing full well the fondness
12:47Hitler genuinely harbored for the child, a so-called party busybody- it's not clear if
12:52the title refers to a mere functionary or Hitler's personal secretary, Martin Bormann-
12:56didn't actually tell Hitler the news. Why? We can only speculate, but history suggests that
13:02functionaries don't much like telling dictators news they might not like to hear. When the Führer
13:07was eventually informed, he was far from impressed. According to Heinrich Hofmann's book,
13:12Hitler Was My Friend, once Hitler learned that she'd been blacklisted from the property,
13:16he exploded with rage. Hitler was furious with those who had denounced his little friend.
13:21The leader's aide, Wilhelm Druckner, told Hofmann,
13:24The Nazi leader went so far as to say,
13:26There are some people who have a positive genius for spoiling all my little pleasures.
13:30If all the statements we've discussed in this video are true, what does it really say about
13:34Hitler's hatred for the Jewish race? Over the centuries, certain regimes have always needed,
13:39for want of a better expression, a whipping boy to justify some of their more unpalatable policies.
13:44You can look back to Stalin's infamous show trials, all the way to the present-day immigration
13:49crisis in many western nations. If a government or a regime can heap all the blame for their
13:54own failings or incompetencies on an easy target- Jews, Trotskyists, immigrants- then
13:59it deflects attention away from the real nature and depth of the problems they're facing.
14:03Unfortunately, history's most important lessons are often roundly ignored by the
14:07preceding generations. Some governments seem almost hell-bent on repeating the same mistakes
14:12as their predecessors, enacting the same policies no matter how brutal, misguided, or heavy-handed,
14:17and spinning a perpetual cycle of war and recovery. Undoubtedly,
14:20Hitler is one of the most complex figures of the 20th century.
14:24Although rightly reviled, some scholars believe that had he reigned in his megalomaniac tendencies
14:29and not been determined to secure world domination, history may have viewed him differently.
14:34They also suggest that if he had stopped at reclaiming German territories that had
14:37been appropriated following the First World War, he might have been seen as a hero,
14:41maybe even the greatest ever German statesman. He might have righted the harsh excesses included
14:46in the Treaty of Versailles, and solved the painful sense of humiliation the German nation
14:50felt following the somewhat abject and inexplicable surrender. Many writers,
14:54academics, and historians have tried to get a better understanding of the man
14:58and what ultimately led to a world war and unspeakable acts of violence and terror
15:02against the Jewish people. Hitler and the Nazi regime will always be the darkest of all enigmas,
15:07a stain on the human conscience that can never be removed, no matter how hard we try.
15:12The story of Hitler and Rosa Bernie Leninau is one of savage contrast,
15:16the realm that separates Hitler's genocidal policies with the image of a middle-aged man
15:21posing with an innocent six-year-old girl who just happens to be the target of his racial hatred.
15:26While it may be too easy to apply the proverbial expression to the victor of the spoils,
15:30it's undeniable that some of the most despicable regimes in history have resorted to the most
15:34heinous and barbaric acts to further their own political aims. Hitler blamed many of the world's
15:40problems on the Jews. That Germany was weak and in decline due to Jewish influence, they were
15:44after world dominance and they would not hesitate to use all possible means, including capitalism,
15:49to achieve their goals. In this way, Hitler took advantage of the existing prejudice that linked
15:54the Jews to financial power and gain. Not once did he stop to consider the glaring contradictions
15:59in his thinking. He even stated that communism was a Jewish conspiracy even though only a small
16:04proportion of the Jews were communists. But of course, none of this was true. But what of the
16:09ultimate fate for Bernie Leninau, the angelic little girl who captured the heart of a man who
16:14would be responsible for the deaths of so many innocent people? Five years after she was banished
16:19from both the Fuhrer's life and his opulent Bavarian residence, she died of polio at the
16:23age of 17 in a Munich hospital on October 5th, 1943. A tragic end to a tragically short life.
16:30By then, millions of Jews had perished in the Holocaust, among them some one and a half million
16:35children. Boys and girls just like Rosa Bernie Leninau, with her bright eyes, smiling face,
16:40and an exciting future to look forward to, murdered in the most unspeakable ways based
16:45solely on their racial heritage.