LONDON: Adolf Hitler had a son with a French teenager while serving as a soldier during the First World War, The Telegraph reported Friday.
Jean-Marie Loret, who died in 1985 aged 67, never met his father, but went on to fight Nazi forces during the Second World War.
His extraordinary story has now been backed up by a range of compelling evidence, both in France and in Germany, which is published in the latest edition of Paris's Le Point magazine.
Hitler is said to have had an affair with Loret's mother, Charlotte Lobjoie, 16, as he took a break from the trenches in June 1917.
Although he was fighting the French near Seboncourt, in the northern Picardy region, Hitler made his way to Fournes-in-Weppe, a small town west of Lille, for regular leave, where he met Lobjoie.
The pair started a brief relationship, which resulted in the birth of Jean-Marie, who was born in March 1918 after being conceived during a "tipsy" evening in June 1917.
Jean-Marie was, like thousands of other French children with German soldier fathers, badly treated by his peers at school.
He was referred to as "the son of the Bosh", and often had fights as he tried to defend his father, who had by now disappeared over the border to Germany.
Lobjoie, meanwhile, refused to discuss Jean-Marie's father, and ended up giving her only son away for adoption in the 1930s to a family called Loret.
Just before her death in the early 1950s, Lobjoie finally told Jean-Marie that his father was arguably the most infamous dictator in human history.
Loret said: "In order not to get depressed, I worked non-stop, never took a holiday, and had no hobbies. For twenty years I didn't even go to the cinema."
Hitler, who was born in an Austrian village, frequently spoke of his love for France, and especially for Paris.
Although he never officially had any sons or daughters of his own, Hitler often spoke of his love of children and animals.
He married his mistress, Eva Braun, as the Red Army shelled his bunker in Berlin, in 1945, and committed suicide shortly afterwards.